Red Star Communist Organization

On the Gay Revolutionary Organization

The following is a summation of a sequence of work of communists initiating a revolutionary LGBT+ organization hereafter referred to as the Gay Revolutionary Organization, or GRO. We also advance some general positions on communist work in the gay movement via responses to articles put out in the past year by Circles Mag and Owen Oak in SALT801. We emphasize that we are putting forward these criticisms in good faith and with appreciation for the work being done in the gay and trans movement, and would encourage responses to these positions by Oak, Circles, and others!

Taking up the question of gay struggle seemed like a natural one for us given the recent history of mass anti-fascist struggle around defense of LGBT events in our city and our area, and secondarily given the composition of the RSCO as a heavily gay and trans organization. Given the broad trends in the mass movement of LGBT people, we believed that communist intervention is necessary and appropriate. An internal preparatory document from February of 2023 characterizes this intervention as an attempt to "struggle against the right-opportunist petit-bourgeois electoralist/reformist line and the adventurist left-opportunist anarchist line" in the spontaneous movement of LGBT people, which we understand to be the historically dominant trends in the movement.

Our analysis of the communist orientation towards the gay and trans movement is based on two primary theses:

  1. The oppression of gay and trans people arises from the ideological needs of the patriarchal and monogamous family-form that arose at the beginnings of class society. The requirements of father-right’s overthrow of mother-right (as outlined by Engels) demand that the boundaries between “male” and “female” be strictly delineated, and sexual behavior be legally and spiritually controlled to ensure a clearly legible line of inheritance. These ideological requirements are most clearly expressed in the sex-gender system, which we see as not a biological category but primarily a social relation corresponding to the social role one is assigned at birth that secondarily corresponds to certain biological characteristics.
  2. The oppression of gay and trans people is primarily an ideological/superstructural one, arising from these necessities of the family form. There is no real contradiction between heterosexuality and homosexuality as such, cisness and transness as such, etc, only between homosexuality, transness, gender non-conformity, etc and the continued exploitation of the workers and women by the bourgeoisie. Who we sleep with or what we do with our bodies could and should have very little to do with who anyone else sleeps with or what they do with their bodies – it is distinct from the antagonism between say, a worker and a boss, whose interests are directly and diametrically opposed by their very essence. What follows from this is the oppression of gay, trans, and gender non-conforming people is ideological – we are not oppressed because it is of direct economic benefit to the bourgeoisie (or the previous ruling classes), but rather because we pose an ideological threat to structures that facilitate their direct exploitation of women and the working class. The main contradiction for the gay movement are not the contradictions between gay and straight or cis and trans, but proletarian and bourgeoisie.

The historical development of class society, and the existence of those who have an active desire to live their lives outside of the sex-gender boundaries dictated by a given class society have culminated in our society over the past two centuries with development of a mass movement of gay and trans people to end our oppression. To begin, we offer a brief outline of the recent history of this movement in the u.s. This is obviously a broad and incomplete sketch of the lengthy and zigzagging path of development of the ideological trends in the gay movement, and a full description is outside the scope of this paper.

A Brief History of the Mass Movement of Gay and Trans People in the u.s.: 1969-Present

If we treat the Stonewall Uprising as initiating the modern gay mass movement in 1969, the left-adventurist line was initially dominant, and fell by the wayside in the late 70s. Those who led the first wave of the LGBT movement of the 60s understood themselves (however incompletely) as participating in a revolutionary movement and process: In broad strokes, the early “left” line groups of gay liberation located the center of gay oppression in the family form itself and were explicitly in solidarity with the women’s movement as in many ways the same as their own (ideologically if not always practically). The British Gay Liberation Front’s Manifesto reads

The oppression of gay people starts in the most basic unit of society, the family...At some point nearly all gay people have found it difficult to cope with having the restricting images of man or woman pushed on them by their parents...we are expected to prove ourselves socially to our parents as members of the right sex (to bring home a boy/girl friend) and to start being a 'real' (oppressive) young man or a 'real' (oppressed) young woman

The Boston Gay Men’s Liberation group argued in their manifesto for the collectivization of childcare and housework, saying

Rearing children should be the common responsibility of the whole community. Any legal rights parents have over ‘their’ children should be dissolved and each child should be free to choose its own destiny. Free twenty-four hour child care centers should be established where faggots and lesbians can share the responsibility of child rearing

Others explicitly aligned themselves with the national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles of the time –Third World Gay Revolution went so far as to explicitly call for armed struggle towards establishing socialism. The gay struggle, to these organizations, was necessarily part of the struggle for the end of capitalism and the liberation of all oppressed and exploited peoples.

Nevertheless, these groups primarily took the left-adventurist line, and the failure of these organizations to place politics in command and take up Marxism fully (despite its influence within the movement), and the failure of the leading Marxist organizations of the time to cast aside their chauvinism, place politics in command, and embrace the LGBT movement (most notably RU/RCP, which maintained that homosexuality was “perpetuated and fostered by the decay of capitalism” and to be eliminated under socialism until 2001 and engaged in conversion therapy-style practices on their gay cadre), allowed the bourgeoisie to co-opt the movement and suppress its revolutionary strains. By the end of the 1970s the main left-adventurist groups that emerged from the movement's popular initiation via the Stonewall Uprising (GLF, STAR, TWGR, etc) had collapsed, and were replaced by the newly dominant right-opportunist trend, represented in groups like Lambda Legal (founded 1__971), GLAD (1978), and the Human Rights Campaign (1980). Occasional left-adventurist ruptures emerged over the succeeding years, with ACT UP's break (rooted in part in gay and lesbian anti-imperialist solidarity work in the preceding years) from Gay Men's Health Crisis representing the most significant of these, but over the next three decades the bourgeois "marriage equality" became the central demand of the movement, with the implication that once these various reforms proposed by the right-opportunist trend were enacted, the gay movement would cease to be necessary.

In the first two decades of the 21st century these reforms were realized, and the idealist fantasies of the leading bourgeois gay organizations were not. These reforms were granted because they reaffirmed the bourgeois family form, successfully assimilating the leading upper strata of LGBT people as a method of defusing the movement as a whole. While in some ways the broad social acceptability of homosexuality, transness and gender nonconformity have increased, the reaction to these reforms has produced a vicious effort to oppress the lower strata, typically trans people.

Indeed, all empirical evidence points to the continuing existence of anti-gay and anti-trans oppression. In our younger years, parents, teachers, and other authority figures will attempt to suppress any expression of homosexuality, transness, or gender non-conformity. The passive and active social enforcement of your sex/gender role is a universal experience, but is felt particularly acutely by those most directly in contradiction with those roles. When this fails, authority figures sometimes resort to violence and sexual abuse – gay and trans children suffer higher rates of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse across the board as compared to their cis and straight peers. LGBT people as a whole make 10% less than the average worker. This is felt more acutely among trans people, particularly trans women (in line with their cis counterparts), who make just 60% of the average. What bourgeois sociological evidence does exist points to significant discrimination in housing, jobs, medical care, etc. Accessing medical care is a struggle of its own for trans people – getting the treatment needed for basic day-to-day existence is often humiliating and expensive.

For younger LGBT people, particularly trans people, this political sequence has produced significant "whiplash." We grew up in a period of a real increase in broad social "acceptance," and being told that these reforms would guarantee an end to our oppression. But the utter abdication of leadership by the rightists following the reforms (after all, "we won") and the reactionary backlash has left the movement with a vacuum of political and organizational leadership at a crucial conjuncture. In the absence of this leadership, small groups have begun to emerge, largely taking up the left-adventurist anarchist line, sometimes explicitly. In some ways, this is a positive situation for communists. The broad masses of LGBT people are crying out for leadership in their struggle against the reactionary offensive, and the failure of the bourgeois rightist line to provide its promised victory has revealed to many gay and trans people, particularly those of the lower strata, the bankruptcy of reformism.

The current assault on our self-determination by the reactionary wing of first-world politics presents us with an opportunity to smash that trend, to effect a final rupture. Gay and trans people, particularly trans people, are increasingly forced into direct confrontation with the bourgeois state (through its repressive laws) and its extra-legal shock troops (with trans events becoming one of the primary targets for street fascist attacks). Not since the AIDS crisis have we seen such direct confrontation – and with it, openness to revolutionary communist political projects.

The task before communists in the gay movement is therefore to rectify the line of the movement through theoretical and practical struggle, to offer leadership to the gay and trans masses, and transform this movement into a detachment of the world proletarian struggle for communism. To do this though, we must correctly analyze our tasks, and reject revisionist positions that unduly reify the role of gay and trans people in the revolutionary communist movement (as Circles does) or risk liquidating gay and trans politics into a crude workerism (as Oak does).

Circles claims that “queer people are the vanguard of the working class.” They mean this as provocation, a challenge to us to take up the struggle, to fight for a future not just for ourselves but for the liberation of all of us from exploitation and oppression. This call can, should, and must be heeded – the situation is dire. The revolutionary left must take up their demands, to lead and be led by these newly minted gay radicals in their struggle for self-determination of their bodies and lives.

But provocation or not, we must avoid such revisionist slippage. For gay and trans people to organize, and to take up our revolutionary tasks, we must assess our place in society from a historical and material basis. Anything less is a surrender to the past failures of our movement that have led us to the present moment – if we do not assess our role accurately, we are doomed to repeat the errors of our predecessors. It must be emphasized that there is nothing inherent whatsoever in transness or gayness that makes us revolutionary. Workers are the vanguard of the revolution because of capital’s direct exploitation of them. It is impossible to be both a worker and capitalist, while it is completely possible to be gay and capitalist (indeed, there are many!).

Circles is correct insofar as we are “disproportionately politicized” - the objective conditions described above produce a subject position that is in our experience intermediate on the question of political revolution against capitalism. This is, obviously, mediated primarily by their class position and secondarily by factors such as race, nationality, gender, sex assignment, etc., but it is true that gay and trans people are relatively more politically advanced than their cis or straight peers. Thus, as we have already outlined, we do believe that the gay and trans struggle represents a site where communist intervention could be a priority as our movement grows and develops towards the construction of a party – proletarian gays represent a group in which Marxism has in certain degrees and circles taken hold, particularly among those with more petty-bourgeois and bourgeois backgrounds forced downwards by their gay and trans status; and the material conditions of constant struggle against anti-gay and anti-trans chauvinism present a shorter leap for communist agitation.

But these objective conditions are not static. Since these are primarily ideologically motivated and do not represent a basic contradiction in capitalism, concessions can easily be granted that will undermine the objective basis for that intermediate subjectivity. The whole history of the LGBT mass movement concretely demonstrates this – the reformist dominance of the movement, the complete depoliticization of most gay and trans mass organizations, and the tentative acceptance of cis gays by even the right wing of the bourgeoisie at present are all manifestations of this. It’s not a new problem or phenomenon either – we would do well to remember that Ernst Röhm was the world’s first “out” politician, and that he and his ilk were produced by the significant proto-fascist “masculinist” trend of the German gay mass movement of the 1870s-1930s – reactionary gays know they can be brought “into the fold” too! There is no theoretical reason the capitalists and their state could not give us more or less everything we ask for (at least in the imperialist countries, as is true for all bourgeois democratic rights) – medical and social transition could be made free and easily accessible, discrimination laws could be passed and enforced, etc. We acknowledge that such a thing is extremely unlikely to ever happen in practice, but this point is very much secondary – what is at issue is that our demands are bourgeois-democratic in nature, not socialist or communist in and of themselves.

On the concrete conditions of gay and trans organizing, we believe some of our investigation directly contradicts the Circles’ position that “we have avoided a parasitic relationship with NGOs” and these organizations “do not have the pull that liberal ‘community organizing’ groups (who are largely funded by big capital) have in America’s internal colonies.” While this is perhaps closer to accurate in cities where there are significant concentrations of gay and trans people for there to be self-sustaining gay and trans social and cultural life, the gay NGOs do have significant money, influence, and connections. We will discuss our experience with a Democratic party official later, but for now it suffices to say that it is objectively true that the connections between the non-profits and the Democratic party remain significant obstacles to struggle – even where we are (a very gay urban center with significant gay and trans life outside of the NGOs) what political life there is for gay and trans people is significantly embedded in the Democratic Party’s NGO structure.

More significantly, our experiences outside of urban centers tell a very different story. In smaller suburbs and exurbs, what little gay and trans life that there is at all invariably centers on an NGO or non-profit, which are invariably backed by some form of the gay bourgeoisie or another, and are aligned with local Democratic party functionaries and/or the town government. To give a few examples of what our experience has shown, these groups have: collaborated with and sponsored health clinics with deeply backwards and humiliating practices towards their trans patients; imposed conciliation towards reactionaries on their left wings; lied about collaborating with police; and even put out public statements thanking the police who actively facilitated a Neo-Nazi attack on their drag story hour.

Our experiences are limited and this should not be taken as a fully understood or solved problem; and the attitudes of communists towards these groups will surely vary depending on local conditions and the particular elements involved in them (we have seen some successes in developing relationships with the left wings of these organizations). But even our limited experience shows the intensely reactionary and parasitic relationship these NGOs have with gay and trans populations – these organizations are ones that must be combatted tooth and nail if we are to achieve victory.

What we see here is the default motion towards the dominance of bourgeois politics in the gay and trans movement – since our demands are not inherently revolutionary, they will only in and of themselves generate bourgeois-democratic politics, akin to a gay version of “trade-union consciousness.” This is particularly true given the national dominance of Democrat-aligned NGOs in the gay movement – any local organization seeking grants or funding will surely have to tow the party line, and any gay person with the money to self fund will surely find their interests aligned with capital. This situation, again, is a result of the character of the gay and trans question as an ideological/superstructural one. That material conditions of life changed for the upper strata as a result of a process of concession and cooptation on the part of the bourgeoisie, and thus, it is necessary for communists to take leadership and to prevent this cooptation as the mass democratic struggles of gay and trans people intensify.

Organizational Initiation

Based on this analysis of the political situation in our area, our initial understanding is that the primary ideological dividing line in the gay movement is the question of revolution – do you stand for the overthrow of all existing conditions or not? The area we are organizing in is one of the gayest cities in the country and has many gay organizations, but none of them are specifically revolutionary. As we have noted, the gay movement is dominated by the NGOs and non-profits, allowing us to clearly demarcate our stances and positions as distinct from the left-liberal non-profits. RSCO cadres worked to draft the following Principles of Unity:

and set to work setting up a mass meeting.

As a brief aside, this basis for unity may imply that this organization is or is not truly a “mass organization.” The political-ideological requirements of joining an organization of agreeing to a basis of (granted, a vague and undefined) revolutionary politics may make it distinct – it is not a mass organization in the way say, a labor union is, where the criteria for membership is a more or less objective one (are you a worker? Or as applied to this case, are you gay or trans?) vs. the subjective criteria (are you a supporter of “revolutionary politics”?) within GRO. RSCO is currently struggling to develop a clearer articulation of these distinctions, but this political basis allows GRO to act as something of a “militant minority” organization within the gay movement – a place where the most advanced gay and trans people will flock and develop their capacity as organizers, and hopefully, through ideological and practical struggle, develop into communists as well.

The first meeting was held at the end of March and was attended by about 40 people. Initially RSCO had assigned a cell of five to the organization's setting up to act as the organization's leadership, but outside circumstances led to two cadres leaving the organization. The administrative work of setting up an entirely new organization meant bringing in three other leads, two contacts from antifascist circles (one explicitly anarchist) and another experienced movement organizer who attended the initial meeting. While there are potential political problems with bringing people with revisionist or anti-Marxist politics, the practical experience and skills of those brought in have proved a boon to GRO, with them taking on significant administrative and practical work and sharing their skills with RSCO cadres, thus allowing us to successfully set up the organization's work. With the initial work done, we moved to our first attempts at practical work: reading groups and drag defense work.

Getting Our Feet Wet – Drag Queen Story Hour Defensive Actions

While the goal was not to create an anti-fascist organization, the goals of advancing a revolutionary LGBT+ line naturally pushed GRO into combating the rising fascist attacks on LGBT life in society. We understood that anti-LGBT+ organization and right wing propaganda is part of a long standing fascist project to increase their influence on society, and consolidate reactionary supporters. A rising trend at the time of our inception in our area as well as nationally were fascist attacks on LGBT+ events, particularly all ages "Drag Queen Story Hour" (DQSH) hosted in local libraries and other public spaces. These attacks ranged from a small crowd of reactionaries spewing homophobic slogans, to masked fascists storming the actual events in order to intimidate the children and parents in attendance. These attacks had been ongoing for some time throughout the area. Local anti-fascists had already begun organizing ad-hoc defensive actions in response to this issue so it was clear that these attacks were a focal point of struggle. We envisioned a more organized approach to defending LGBT+ events, where LGBT+ people took the front lines in defending ourselves.

The topic of Drag Queen Story Hour defense was central at our first meeting, and was our largest working group from our initiation. We immediately set to work doing outreach to targeted drag queens, libraries and other related LGBT spaces. We soon created a fairly large list of potential contacts, and had teams of GRO members reaching out to them. Members of GRO were already involved in the earlier ad-hoc DQSH defense actions, and thus already had experience to share with the rest of membership. We created training courses in event security and soon had a decent list of members ready to stand in defense of LGBT+ events. DQSH defense had become a major area of our work during the initial months, if not our primary focus.

The fascist social media page “exposed” a scheduled DQSH event and a reactionary protest was announced. This, along with threats being levied at the organizers and venue led to concern of a fascist attack on the event. Contacts from another LGBT+ organization organized a counter-protest, and asked for assistance from GRO. For the majority of GRO members in attendance, this was their first action in any particular role. Ultimately, pro-LGBT+ counter-protesters came out in droves and vastly outnumbered the small number of reactionaries, who were kept at bay across the street from the library. Still, this served as one of the first moments we were able to see many of our members in action. From this experience we identified several members with potential for leadership within the organization. Through this action and other DQSH/LGBT+ event defenses we were able to get to know our members better, and put action to our intentions.

Unfortunately, the benefit of this approach more or less ended there. Pursuing DQSH defense as a primary activity required a great deal of organization with relatively little return. Firstly, DQSH events were relatively sporadic, and the only means we had of knowing about them was through personal contacts or public posts in media. Our efforts at outreach and research to compile a comprehensive schedule of events bore little fruit – largely because the events themselves were not organized by any particular entity. Moreover, not every DQSH event ended up on the radar of organized reactionaries, and only some of those ended up facing a direct threat from reactionary and fascist forces. Beyond that, many of the usual fascist perpetrators were wise to the anti-fascist activity in the area. They would attack events unannounced, “flash-mob” style, undoubtedly to avoid facing resistance. This meant that in order to maintain an effective defense of these events, GRO would need to be on the ground everywhere, or try to dispatch when word came out of fascist activity. One comrade aptly described this as a “whack-a-mole” strategy. We realized that we would get nowhere by staying on the defensive, and began to look into a change of overall strategy. We understood that we needed to go on the offensive.

The involvement of several RSCO cadre and other experienced GRO members in earlier anti-fascist DQSH defense actions had an obvious influence on our initial focus for the organization. We effectively took the model that had been developed in anti-fascist circles – flaws and all – and adopted it as a primary GRO activity. This did have its benefits: The initial GRO meeting was an explosion of gay energy, looking for a way to take action. We channeled that energy into a clear and present need. This gave RSCO cadre an opportunity to assess the ability and politics of many of our members, and through this process identified some who were ripe for leadership and development. These events allowed GRO to make an early name for itself. However, this approach quickly became an unnecessarily large area of our work, time that could have been spent politically consolidating, or otherwise growing, was spent on DQSH work. Furthermore, it was clear that there was no way to proactively use the strategy. We were effectively looking around for DQSH attacks to respond to, hoping that we hear about them in time, and can organize members to furnish an effective response. It is worth noting as well that there was a fairly sharp decline in fascist activity at DQSH events in mid-2023 compared to the previous winter. This approach was a reactive one, and would not help to “advance a revolutionary LGBT+ line”. Changing our strategy did mean that some people lost interest in GRO, but this change was a necessary one in order to actually advance our politics from stagnation.

The Struggle Against a Reactionary Church

Following our struggles to consolidate initially, and being met with the difficulties of drag organizing, we initiated a campaign against a reactionary church (hereafter referred to as “RC”), a recently established "church plant" of the larger and more established local church affiliated with a Baptist Church branch which advances anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-trans views, and has engaged in conversion therapy practices. "Planting" is a strategy used by certain Protestant denominations to establish and develop new churches, and they were attempting to do so in a very gay neighborhood. Their physical location was to double as a so-called “community center” in accordance with the Baptist Church's strategy of creating “third spaces” to bring in potential converts and integrate themselves more deeply into the area, and thus spread their ideology – essentially, reactionary organizing. RC had come to our attention in February, when some residents in its neighborhood called a rally to oppose their presence, attended by some of our cadre and contacts. While the contacts made at that rally did not pan out, it was a target that there was spontaneous mass opposition to, and an initial phase of research had already been completed, making it ideal for our organizing efforts.

This research revealed a. the specific political character of the church, and b. that it was a relatively weak target. Public pressure was already on them – the initial mass action had led to a local business ending their relationship with them and general disdain in the area for them (as revealed in social media commenting in local Facebook groups and our conversations over the course of the campaign). Since they were new and not integrated into the area (our later research would show that typical attendance at their services was <10 people), we thought it would be relatively easy to isolate them and force them to shut down. Doing this would accomplish the dual objectives of smashing an enemy of the masses and consolidating our organization.

After laying the groundwork in 1 on 1 meetings with GRO members, we proposed the campaign at the May general meeting and got to work. GRO members began conducting research, planning out the campaign. Substantial work was done in identifying their networks and their strategy (specifically, that evangelical churches saw our area as a site ripe for their organizing efforts). GRO members also did some "on the ground" intelligence gathering, listening to and attending RC online services and chatting with the leadership, and even digging through their trash to find information about them and their suppliers.

This research revealed two key things; first, their strategies, plans and connections (as already discussed) and second, just how weak they really were. Intelligence gathering over the course of the campaign revealed that one pastor had developed acid reflux over the opposition, other staff members had quit and even moved out of the area, and the church was in dire financial straits, kept running by only wealthy donors. We decided to construct our demands to underscore their relationships to the larger project, declaring we would protest them until they broke with their parent church and changed their positions or closed. While we had no expectation that the former demand would be met, we believed this would present a clear line of escalation in agitation, emphasize their connections to a larger project, and allow us to develop the basic political consciousness among our new activists.

Research and demands in hand, we compiled a short infosheet and held an info-session and a canvassing session of RC’s neighborhood in preparation for a rally. The info-session was relatively sparsely attended (~10-15 people) largely due to it being scheduled for a holiday, but succeeded in mobilizing people to canvass, which became a recurring task. The rally itself was also a limited success; held a week later, rain dampened the turnout to 30 people, mostly either GRO members or contacts. Our rally likely forced them to close for the day (though they claimed they were attending an unspecified "conference" only after the rally was announced) and also succeeded in successfully in building organizational and personal relationships with those we invited to speak. Following the rally, we internally organized two unannounced standouts (attended by ~10 people each) to deliver our demands to them in person and catch them when they were open, which took a verbally combative posture but remained within legal bounds.

Also of note here is the insight we got into the concrete process of co-option by the state. Following our initial formation and announcement on social media, an employee (notably, a former BLM and LGBT+ activist who had been integrated into the state’s repressive/cooption apparati) of the local Democratic Party’s “LGBTQ+ Community Initiative,” reached out to us to “plug in” to what we were doing. We ignored this initial message, but following our first action at RC we were contacted again (rumor has it that the pastors reached out to contacts in the state and sparked this second effort). We obviously had no interest in such a meeting, and used it as an opportunity to agitate and denounce these efforts, since this was the same process that had happened to the gay movement overall. This process facilitated some productive internal struggle and enabled us to further demarcate political lines in our movement. Some of our members were concerned about taking a stance that was “too aggressive,” or wanted to obfuscate our position on the question of revolution, which could make us a target for repression. Those representing the left line, led by communists, struggled against this by explaining that it is good to be attacked by the enemy and be open about our revolutionary positions, and through this, successfully prevented us from watering down our public position on interaction with the Democratic Party and state institutions.

Moving into July, we began planning another round of escalations: further unannounced standouts culminating in a drag show and rally outside, and potentially targeting other suppliers and/or their parent church. But these plans were not needed; after two months of relatively mild pressure, they caved to us and closed. Following this announcement, we held a celebratory rally on their announced "last day open," to which they did not even bother to show up, though someone did call the police on us to collect the signs left on their stoop. Following this struggle, the organization produced a summation for external use that is as of yet unpublished, but with plans to post online in the near future.

This project was a resounding success, and speaks well to the strategic judgment of our organizers. We identified a (relatively weak) enemy, united our organization in struggle against it, and came out the other side more consolidated practically and politically, and ready and willing to take on bigger and more significant targets.

Political Education and Study Group Meetings within GRO

Ongoing throughout this process was the development of public study groups on various texts. In order to take up revolutionary gay practice it is essential that we simultaneously take up revolutionary gay theory, as part of our struggle against incorrect lines in the gay movement. In other words, we needed to take up a course of study and theory that applies historical materialist, Marxist analysis to questions and issues surrounding LGBT+ life. This was our first minor road block – we found relatively little that approached gay questions from this perspective. The field as we saw it was overwhelmingly filled with post-modernist philosophy and aesthetic, liberal politics. This is not to say that were without any options. Initially, RSCO cadre compiled a list of texts such as Leslie Feinberg's “Where are the transgender warriors?”, Engels' “Origin of the Family, Private Property, and The State” and documents from past LGBT+ organizations like ACT UP. As GRO took form, we decided to create regular reading groups with the goal of politically advancing our membership. Our goal for political education within GRO is to deepen our analysis of LGBT+ oppression beyond the often cursory, aesthetic viewpoint advanced by the recent and popular wave of pro-LGBT+ liberalism wherein the ultimate goal of gay liberation is Gay Marriage and assimilation into the hetero-patriarchal status quo. We intend to do this by promoting a materialist study of gay questions, and maintain the centrality of materialist analysis to our work within GRO.

At our initial meeting, a political education working group was assembled to brainstorm the types of texts we would focus on as an organization. The text “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” by Cathy Cohen was selected as our first study group piece. The study groups were set to be public, accessible meetings where a selected text would be read and discussed. The text itself was met with a mixed response by GRO attendees. Some felt that the text was post-modernist, particularly members who were RSCO cadre. However, others felt that the text did argue valid points, and was agreeable in its own right. This sparked a lively, but constructive debate during the meeting. One of the fiercest defenders of the text eventually joined the leadership for GRO, and along with another RSCO cadre, took the task of organizing further study groups.

The two study group leads decided that we would need to get creative in order to effectively politically develop the organization membership. We needed to ensure that the study groups were accessible to all, but also advanced a sufficiently materialist and politically coherent analysis. We realized we would struggle to meet these categories focusing solely on classically Marxist texts that analyzed LGBT+ questions. We also recognized a lack of common history among our members as far as leftist organizing or LGBT+ life in our area. To address these issues, we decided to create study group sessions that would read a text of LGBT+ theory, and local organizational history. The focus of our meetings would be to draw connections between the two subjects so that our members have the tools to draw those connections in our work.

Our first such meeting incorporated several pieces by Leslie Feinberg, we also brought in an organizer involved with LGBT+ activism in the 1970s. The study group was well received by the members, and we sought to reach out to more past organizers, LGBT+ or otherwise, to bring us the local history that we so desperately needed. Our next study group meeting came while Reactionary Church campaign was in full swing. We decided to shift our focus to a topic that arose during one of our actions – we wanted our members to understand the relationships between charity work, religious fundamentalism, and the capital behind both. In retrospect, shifting the focus of our reading groups to organization work so abruptly meant they were no longer really for the general public. The meeting was smaller in attendance than our first. Nonetheless, the discussion was constructive, as most of the attendees were involved in GRO working groups for the RC campaign. The focus on the RC campaign remained central in our approach to the study groups. We tried to find more topics that could be addressed by the study, and eventually fell off of our study group schedule due to work with the campaign. In the future, our study groups should remain fairly independent of our political campaigns. Given the capacity, it would be ideal to have a particular working group within GRO just to keep the study groups on track, and maintain topics that have a broader focus, while also deepening the politics of our members.

As the RC campaign came to a close, another “curriculum” of study group sessions was created. We decided to go back to the original design of focusing on organizing history and LGBT+ theory, first starting with a study of the organizations we model ourselves after: GLF, S.T.A.R., and ACT UP. It is our hope that having a clearer direction will help us to use the study groups to bring in more members, connect to other communities of LGBT+ people and give our membership a shared base of materialist history to work from. It is important that we keep these study groups somewhat separate from our campaign work – it becomes too easy to turn the study groups into quasi research-working group sessions, and with that they lose their purpose and muddy their value. In essence, because there is not much by way of pre-formed Marxist LGBT+ theory, we have to create it in real time. We need to develop a materialist understanding of LGBT+ oppression, a proletarian understanding of LGBT+ demands, and a revolutionary understanding of LGBT+ action; as well as advancing the political level of the less consolidated and newer members of GRO.

Practical and Theoretical Work, Economic and Political Struggle

Since the writing of the bulk of this document, we have continued our work and developed a few additional projects and campaigns that need their own summation, but on the most immediate and concrete level, our organizing over the past ~year has been a complete and unambiguous success. We were victorious over our enemies, forcing a reactionary institution to close its doors and winning a concrete revindication. We have monthly meetings that consistently draw between 20-30 people, and successfully recruited new elements into the organization through those, which now has ~50 people in its comms channels. Many of those involved, perhaps a majority, gained their first experience in struggle through this organization, developing basic practical skills necessary to organizing. It was a success in pushing some level of political development as well: for example most of the inexperienced members had never been confronted with the police before, and even if the police did not disrupt our action, the leadership of experienced organizers demonstrated to them that confrontations with the police are an inevitable part of engaging in political work. The combative tone we took with our enemies was also a learning experience; some newer members expressed some discomfort at this posture, but also recognized that this discomfort was a liberal impulse. And our organization has continued to grow and build links with the broad “left,” drawing in new elements and advancing to a leading position within the gay movement in our area. And our reading groups and internal ideological agitation, struggles, and trainings have been productive as well.

It is worth discussing here that our work produced success because we, so to speak, were “organizing where we were.” We have explained our reasons for initiating this intervention at the political level, which we believe to be sound and applicable for the communist movement as a whole. But we would be remiss if we did not reflect on the fact that RSCO is a heavily gay and trans organization – every RSCO cadre that participated in initiating GRO is gay and/or trans, and as such many of our social lives are already integrated with certain sections of the gay and trans populations of our areas. It made it significantly easier to establish this organization when we were pulling on organic social ties rather than trying to intervene from without. This is, to be sure, not a particularly novel or profound observation, but it reaffirms the necessity of applying the PCP’s “Three Withs” (live with, work with, struggle with). This is in stark contrast with our experiences in organizational construction elsewhere, where we have seen errors and failures when attempting to intervene in the mass movement from without or externally.

We have argued elsewhere that we believe the question of organizational construction is primarily a tactical one, and we believe it was the correct tactic here. Our integration into the group we were trying to organize and our correct diagnosis of a line of scission in the gay movement along revolutionary ideological and combative practical lines; and our access to contacts that can carry significant portions of the administrative and logistical overhead for running an organization has enabled us to take up independent organizational initiation and construction. In possible contrast to Oak, we do believe that ultimately, in some form or another, organizing gay and trans people does require specifically gay and trans organizations, and additionally, our successes here prove that such work can be a fruitful endeavor. Whether that involves going through (and ultimately breaking with) the gay and trans NGOs or independent construction, one will not be able to organize gay and trans people and intervene in the gay and trans movement simply through labor and tenant work.

We should acknowledge that Oak’s position here is somewhat ambiguous – they do not anywhere condemn participation by communists in gay and trans organizations as such, and suggest that SLC - area locals join a list of organizations that includes groups appearing to be by and for gay and trans people. But they do call for the forming of “separate” “class centered organizations” as “necessary for the protection and uplifting of the majority of queer (and all) people,” argue that “working-class LGBTQ needs are largely (though not entirely) shared in common with the working class,” and heavily emphasize labor and tenant mass organizations as sites of the gay and trans struggle over and above the extant gay organizations throughout. We do not believe that Oak and SALT801 are explicitly arguing for the liquidation of gay and trans political struggle as such, but we see the principal practical position advanced here – “get involved in class-based organizing, which may or may not be gay/trans” as insufficient for a serious communist treatment of this issue. At best, this position represents an (ambiguous) defense of the dogmatic line on separate organization construction that we have criticized in regards to the class struggle and women’s movements (i.e. it is, as a matter of political principle, necessary to construct organizations separate from extant coopted ones); and at worst represents a real risk of falling into chauvinist positions on the gay and trans question.

On the latter, the heavy emphasis on class-based organization above all else could, if its worst aspects are taken up, result in a position akin to the line held by various dogmatists that national struggles, the women's struggle, etc are “distractions” from the “pure” working class struggle. Such a position negates the real historical and political phenomenon of the mass movement of gay and trans people as gay and trans people. Yes, working-class gay and trans people share the interests of the working class as a whole, but additionally have democratic aspirations for an end to the chauvinism, discrimination, and abuse that plagues our lives. These aspirations are articulated by the historical and present existence of a mass movement. The just and righteous demands of the oppressed gay and trans masses require the victory of the communist movement, but that does not mean that these demands are not distinct from the demands of the working class as such. The reason for the dominance of the bourgeois NGOs Oak stridently and correctly criticizes is because of the past failure of the communist movement to correctly understand and articulate these demands, take them up and elevate them to a higher theoretical plane, and lead the gay and trans masses in their struggles against their oppressors. Thus, we believe it necessary for the communist movement to develop gay and trans communist organizations, and not simply have gay and trans people in organizations of the working class.

We suspect that Oak and SALT801 will find the above positions above unobjectionable – ambiguous argumentation aside, nowhere do they oppose the gay and trans movement or dismiss the real needs and aspirations of gay and trans people. But it is critical for the communist movement to articulate itself clearly and develop concrete and unambiguous positions on our orientation towards the gay and trans movement – our failure (as communists) to do so thusfar results in our current situation (as gay people), with the bourgeois line in leadership of our movement.

With that in mind, we provisionally advance the following theses:

  1. We provisionally articulate the demands of the gay movement as follows:

a) Complete self-determination over our bodies and lives:

b) The end of at-birth sex assignment – the right of all to self-describe or self-assign, and to change that description or assignment, from the beginning of life to the end

c) The end of the family-form through the collectivization of child-rearing, education, cooking, cleaning, and other tasks of social reproduction.

d) We understand that the permanent achievement of all our demands can only occur through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the exploited and oppressed masses united behind the proletariat.

  1. The question of organizational construction, in regards to the gay movement and elsewhere is a tactical one determined by the concrete conditions communist organizers and activists are facing.

a) We suspect that for those (like us) concentrated in urban areas with significant gay life independent of NGOs, independent organizational construction focused on building groups to win concrete revindications against enemies of gay and trans people and political development is the correct line; provided that the organizers and organization are sufficiently embedded in the area’s gay and trans life and have sufficient organizational resources to manage the (significant and time-consuming) practical and logistical tasks of running an organization.

b) In the suburbs and exurbs where gay life is limited and may consist of only one or two organizations, it is likely necessary to work within those organizations for a time and develop a left line before effecting a break – the task of developing contacts cannot but go through the existing places where gay and trans people are already organized, which in those areas will exist as catch-all organizations and may have advanced elements within them. This may take the shape of entering or building a relationship with say, a group organizing a drag story hour that is being attacked by fascists, or working with a non-profit to identify the problems of activated gay members (e.g., is there a local clinic denying trans healthcare?).

c) All of the above should seek to integrate themselves and their organization into gay and trans life – flyer at bars and events, make friends, etc.

We understand these points as provisional – there is more practical work to be done before we can fully articulate the correct positions of the communist movement. We admit to an incomplete understanding of the process by which the gay movement can become a detachment of the proletariat – while our practical work has been impressive, our political-ideological work has been perhaps less so. The default postmodern world outlooks of many of those coming into the organization has been reflected in the general orientation within the group towards a “movementist” style of work – the logic (subconscious or otherwise) is that if we simply link our organization with enough other organizations, we will generate a revolution. We as communists know this is not the case and a party is required.

RSCO’s strategic line answers the question "What is our role in the mass organization?" thus:

To identify and fight for the proletarian class line; to ensure the maintenance of communist leadership and denounce revisionism, opportunism and petit-bourgeois distractions; to develop leadership and draw advanced elements further into the struggle; to win revindications, and, in so doing, demonstrate the necessity for further class struggle; and to connect isolated struggles into a united front.

On many of these points, we did succeed, but on the most important goals of advancing the political struggle, we failed. While it is worthwhile to develop militancy and practical skills, these are not communist politics as such. To be clear, this is not to suggest that this sequence could have or should have gone a different way. We are largely dealing with very new and unorganized elements, and the process of political development is a long one. The communists in the organization are open about this, and have done our best to seize on opportunities that present themselves to educate and agitate around basic political problems that come with political work, and to build up people’s skills. It is also appropriate for a new mass-oriented organization to be broad-based and focused on practical work, at least initially. GRO cannot and should not be an explicitly Maoist organization; to do so would prevent GRO from organizing the masses of gay people. And organizations that attempt to mobilize the masses cannot simply be reading groups – there must be work to be done, people do not learn and develop through study alone. But again, the question must be answered: how do we transform the struggle for revindications (which are ultimately “democratic” demands) into the struggle for political power in the name of communism?

The course that suggests itself here is uniting the advanced, which divides itself into two tasks: recruitment and consolidation.

On recruitment, ultimately the task of advancing the struggle for communism, particularly at this juncture, is the task of generating communists – those who are involved in the practical work of the communist organization. Going forward, RSCO cadres in GRO should make efforts to develop relationships with non-cadre within GRO and identify which elements are the most promising – who already have communist ideological positions, and who are the strongest and most advanced practical leaders. While we have done the latter, with a concerted effort taking place organization-wide to bring up and develop those taking initiative and leading roles in our practical campaigns, we must redouble our efforts at identifying the ideologically and politically advanced, so as not to fall into an economism or practicalism. With newer members increasingly taking on the time-consuming practical and logistical tasks involved in running an organization, hopefully RSCO cadres can be freed up to do the slower work of relationship building and recruitment.

On consolidation; by this we mean two things: consolidation within the anti-revisionist movement, and consolidation within the organization. On the former, our group should work to develop its own understanding of the gay and trans movement and the current conjuncture it faces, write about its findings, and struggle against incorrect ideas. This document is an attempt to do exactly that. Related to this process we must also consolidate internally, struggling against the incorrect post-modernist, anarchist, and left-adventurist lines that are the default dominant positions among certain elements in GRO. This likely takes the shape of the communist elements writing documents and proposals to sharpen our basis for political unity, continue to draw lines of demarcation, and struggle internally for the correct line on issues before the organization, with primacy given to ideological and political questions over strategic and tactical. This should be handled carefully and with due attention given to avoiding dogmatism, but it is our duty to struggle against these incorrect lines and identify a path forward for communist political work within the gay movement.

As we move forward and continue, as communists and as gay and trans people, to confront the enemies of our people that seek to force us back into the closet, we can know that we have broken the back of at least one of our enemies, and will take up the struggles of the gay and trans masses to smash many more of them. But we must push further than that – to smash the ideology of the family and sex-gender system itself if we are to win a communist future.