The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture
Volume 11, 2018
A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties
By John McMillian,
For many years – when I was in college, graduate school, and even for some time after that – I used to envy those Baby Boomers who had immersed themselves in the American left during the 1960s and 1970s. They had been righteous in their support of civil rights, outraged about the Vietnam War, and they got to enjoy the era’s great music, as well as various exciting cultural events, like Woodstock and the Moon landing. I always figured it must have been exciting to come of age during such dramatic and compelling times. The Portuguese have a fine word for that kind of melancholy longing I’m describing: saudade.
In recent years, however, that feeling has largely dissipated. I’m no longer sure I’d have enjoyed the Sixties. Part of the reason may be that I’ve been studying that era for about twenty years (so maybe I’ve finally maxed out on the topic). Meanwhile, my thoughts about the desirability of almost any kind of “revolution” have changed. (I now think it’s usually best when social change unfolds gradually.) Furthermore, it turns out that we are currently living through an uncommonly tumultuous time, and I don’t find it too enjoyable. I’m apprehensive about the future, and the social justice left that prevails on American campuses nowadays frequently offends me.
It is in some ways surprising, then, that I have such a fond appreciation for Allen Young’s memoir, Left, Gay & Green: A Writer’s Life. (The title alludes to the fact that Young was a red diaper baby, and then a journalist who was active in the New Left, gay rights, and environmental movements.)
Let me say upfront that I have known Young, from a distance, for many years. Back in the mid-2000s, when I was researching my book, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, I visited the Allen Young Papers at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, and I interviewed Young over the telephone. Since then, we have occasionally exchanged cordial emails. We have only met once, however, and that was just for a few moments, by pure chance, many years ago. (He was walking out of Columbia University’s Fayerweather Hall, and I was walking in.) Put another way, if it had turned out that I had significant criticisms of Left, Gay & Green, I would not have been particularly hesitant to say so.
But mostly I have compliments. Young calls his book an “autobiography,” rather than a “memoir,” because it encompasses his entire life, rather than just the years when he was most intensively engaged in leftwing activism. His amiable, conversational prose style makes for quick reading, but Left, Gay & Green resists easy summary. It is not a didactic autobiography, meant to impart a lesson, or develop a theme. And although it is a longish book (480 pages) each of its twenty-four chapters is subdivided into short, discrete sections. Frequently, Young will pause his narrative in order to share various musings, ponder conundrums, or poke gently at people’s foibles and eccentricities – sort of like a hip Andy Rooney. Some readers may find these digressions excessive, but I found them delightful. Young also occasionally includes excerpts from his writings long ago, which he analyzes from his perspective today.
Young grew up on a Jewish farm in the Catskill Mountains. For years, his main daily chore was to collect eggs from his family’s chickens, clean them, and pack them for shipping. His parents were secretly members of the American Communist Party, which of course put the family at risk during the Red Scare. Unlike some communists who resided in big cities, however, Young’s parents were not bohemians. They were hard-working, straight-laced, and stoic. That posed a problem for Young, because he knew from an early age that he was gay. He lived in “the closet” – and repeatedly tried dating women, while also having secret liaisons with men – from his adolescence until about age twenty-five.
Young was thrilled to matriculate at Columbia University in 1958, and at the time, he was certain he was leaving rural life behind for good. Academically and socially, he thrived, and eventually he became the Daily Spectator’s editor-in-chief. Meanwhile, he began demonstrating his enviable knack for meeting or befriending various successful, well-known, or otherwise interesting people. One of the lifelong friends he made at Columbia was the great historian Eric Foner; another is Michael Meeropol (who was orphaned after the United States government executed his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). Other notable names appear in this book, too, and he includes some entertaining yarns about his friendship with Abbie Hoffman.
During his undergraduate years, Young grew appalled by the crimes of the Soviet Union, but he continued working on the same issues his parents had taught him to care about, mostly around racial justice, war, and peace. He did graduate study at Columbia’s School of Journalism, traveled extensively in South America, and at age twenty-six, took a job at the Washington Post. (Young was hired by Ben Bradlee, who would later become famous for publishing the Pentagon Papers, and for overseeing the Post’s Watergate coverage. Young sketches a brief but memorable portrait of this gruff and no-nonsense newsman.)
Young did not last long at the Post, however. Instead, he became increasingly committed to building the antiwar movement, which was in turn supported by the fast-growing American underground press. In the fall of 1967, Young made what he says “was probably the biggest single decision” of his life and defected from the Post to Liberation News Service (LNS). Often described as a radical version of the Associated Press (AP), LNS produced hundreds of news packets full of reporting, commentaries, graphics, and illustrations, and this material regularly made its way into underground newspapers across the country.
Some of the most edifying and analytical passages in Left, Gay & Green concern the topic (applied anachronistically) of “political correctness.” Young acknowledges that, like others in his cohort, he could be aggressively hostile to opposing viewpoints. By the late ’60s, New Leftists had grown dismissive of voting and non-violent civil disobedience. Most white radicals tended to zealously support the Black Panthers (despite that group’s obvious flaws), and they were prone to dogmatically making snap judgements about who had “good politics” (and who did not). New Leftists frequently dehumanized their political opponents with words and images that, especially from today’s vantage, seem scurrilous and grotesque. Young went along with some of this, but not always comfortably, and only to a degree. After the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society turned to political violence, for instance, Young strongly criticized the group, even as he maintained friendships with some of its members.
Exemplifying the maxim “the personal is political,” in 1970, Young became an early member of the Gay Liberation Front. He participated in the world’s first gay pride march, and he promoted gay equality in numerous periodicals. Meanwhile, Young started collecting personal essays and manifestos from other radical homosexual writers that he admired. In 1972, he published (with Karla Jay), Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, a classic compilation.
In 1973 – defying the expectations he formed when he started at Columbia in 1958 – Young moved to Butterworth Farm, an intentional community in Royalston, Massachusetts. Young calls Butterworth Farm “the love child of two unique and consequential movements … back-to-the-land, and gay liberation” (303). Perhaps surprisingly, given the frenetic pace of the first half of his life, Young has continued to reside there ever since. He has been an avid gardener, a valuable participant in local institutions, and in 1980 he got busted for growing marijuana. (The chapter describing the marijuana bust is amusingly titled “Reefer Madness, or, The Sacred Herb and Me.” Fortunately, Young largely escaped punishment for what he now refers to as his “so-called crime.”) In the 1980s and 1990s, Young worked at the Athol Daily News and did public relations for a local hospital. After living frugally this whole time, he was able to retire in 1999, at age fifty-eight. Today, Young lives in an octagonal house that he helped build many years ago
Even when Young is not writing directly about movement issues, Left, Gay & Green offers salutary lessons about how to engage politics wisely. He thoughtfully ponders arguments and counterarguments; he does not assume bad faith or bad character from those with whom he disagrees; and he easily admits when he was wrong. I’ve no idea whether Allen Young is familiar with Walt Whitman’s famous directive (“be radical – be radical – be not too damned radical!”) but that quote came to mind numerous times while reading Left, Gay & Green. Young spent a big part of his life deeply immersed in revolutionary politics, but one gathers, while reading this charming autobiography, that the cut and thrust of his personality has changed substantially since the vertiginous Sixties. “Nuance,” Young says at one point, “has now become one of my favorite words”.
Just over five years ago an article I had scanned from the July 20, 1947 PM newspaper titled “Utopia in the Catskills” appeared in CounterPunch. PM was a leftist newspaper that published between 1940 and 1948 and as such found Woodridge, my little village in the Catskills, as noteworthy as some on the left find Rojava. Reporter Croswell Bowen was impressed with the co-op movement that for all I know was more advanced than Rojava:
Actually, Woodridge is unique among the neighboring communities, because it possesses five highly successful consumer co-operatives, owned and operated by their members. Three of the five comprise one large intercounty co-operative association. All five are loosely connected with national co-operative groups which furnish over a billion dollars in services and goods to more than 2,500,000 member-owners throughout the United States each year. In practice, the Woodridge co-ops follow along the lines of the Rochdale pioneers.
Among those photographed in the article was one Lou Young, who was chairman of the board of the Inter-County Farmers Co-operative Association and is shown feeding some white roosters. His son Allen was six years old at the time and would soon begin doing chores on the family poultry farm in Glen Wild, a village even tinier than mine. Among his tasks was gathering egg yolks and whites into a gallon jar that would be sold to a local baker in Woodridge, renowned for their challah (the bread Jews ate on Friday nights) as was my father for the kosher dill pickles he made and sold at his fruit store.
When Allen was 12 years old, he accidentally dropped a gallon jar of egg contents in the back of his father’s pick-up truck and felt guilty over the loss of income. In his stunning new biography Left, Gay and Green: a Writer’s Life, Allen vividly recalls his father’s reaction:
It was surely my fault that the jar fell and broke, but I have no recollection of my father getting angry with me. Perhaps, despite all of our family’s financial problems (and the monetary loss associated with the gallon of eggs), be saw the humor in that odd gooey cascade of yellow yolks and shiny albumen (the technical word for egg whites).
I suspect his father’s generosity of spirit might have had something to do with his membership in the Communist Party. Whatever its political failings, the party attracted people who put other people before profits.
The first time I ever heard the name David McReynolds was shortly after joining the SWP in 1967. At the time, the antiwar movement was a tripod made up of the Trotskyists, the CP and the pacifists. As the executive director of the War Resisters League (WRL) and a colleague of A.J. Muste who was to the peace movement in the USA as Bertrand Russell was to the British peace movement, David was a key figure.
David arrived in New York in the early 50s and eventually took an editorial job in 1957 with Liberation, a radical pacifist magazine closely tied to the WRL whose founders included three leaders of the pacifist leg of the peace movement tripod: Sidney Lens, David Dellinger and Muste himself. Both Lens and Muste were Trotskyists in the 30s before evolving in a pacifist direction. Lens was a member of Hugo Oehler’s ultraleft Revolutionary Workers League and Muste was the chairman of the American Workers Party that fused with Cannon’s Communist League of America in 1934 to form the Workers Party.
Although I was too much of a rank-and-filer to sit in on strategy meetings with these people, I always had the impression that the SWP got along better with Lens and Muste than they did with people who were ideologically pacifist from the get-go like David Dellinger and Norma Becker. They tended to bloc with Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman at the time because they all were into “propaganda of the deed”, which didn’t mean setting off bombs but getting arrested in a civil disobedience protest. Despite not seeing these people interact with each other directly, I suspect that David helped to keep the various factions together since he was such a warm and empathetic figure.
But there was no doubt about his commitment to the sort of actions pacifist groups were carrying out for most of the 20th century. David participated in some of the more important civil disobedience actions in New York under the impact of the Cold War. In the 1950s, there were civil defense drills meant to minimize the effects of an H-Bomb being dropped on the city. Instructions were utterly lunatic as David pointed out in an oral history interview with the NY Public Library. People on the 80th floor of the Empire State Building were supposed to go to the 40th floor while those on the 40th floor and below were supposed to go into the basement. Here’s a newsreel from the time showing a drill. So you can imagine how a 9-year old like me would be scared out of his wits.
Those who refused to take cover during these drills were subject to a misdemeanor arrest. David, A.J. Muste, and Catholic Worker leader Dorothy Day took part in protests at City Hall. Muste and Day served 6-month sentences and David somehow slipped through the fingers of the cops.
During the 50s, such protests managed to take place because it was difficult to smear pacifists using Red Scare tactics. The anti-nuclear movement was one of the few areas in which open socialists could operate since it involved issues that did not touch directly on the Red Scare. Like climate change, the fear of extinction was palpable especially since the slogan “Better dead than red” was gaining popularity in the 1950s.
David adopted civil disobedience tactics once again in November, 1965 when he burned his draft card at a protest in Union Square. I remember how the SWP wrestled with these tactics as they grew more popular. Clearly, they were helping to deepen antiwar resistance but they didn’t follow our Bolshevik norms. To show how warped we were, a few months before I joined the party I attended the SWP convention held in a NY hotel as an observer. A debate had ensued over whether our newspaper should take exception to the growing popularity of speaking out against the war as being “immoral, illegal and unjust” since it fostered pacifist illusions. Harry Ring, a leader of the party’s antiwar fraction, got up to oppose such a sectarian position. The fact that it was even considered showed how isolated we were from normal thinking.
In the oral history interview, David includes a fascinating anecdote that speaks volumes about his political approach. It seems that as a gay man who never hid his sexuality but never made a point of it, he never felt quite satisfied with such a defensive position. At one point he went to a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg in the East Village in which during the Q&A a woman asked him why he wrote so much about homosexuality in his poems. He replied that he did so because he was a queer. That impressed David so much that he went up to Allen later and introduced himself, the beginning of a deep friendship. At a certain point, David became responsible for persuading Ginsberg to become a public figure opposed to the war. Ginsberg was wary at first since he saw himself as a poet and not a politician. David won him to our cause by making the point that writers had a responsibility to oppose the war. Thereafter, Ginsberg became omnipresent at protests.
In 1972, the Socialist Party of America (SPA), whose lineage went back to Debs, suffered a split. Some of its rightwing leaders, who would soon become aligned with or even members of the Reagan administration, renamed the group Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Sensing where they were headed, Michael Harrington led a faction into the newly formed Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) that would merge with the New America Movement to form the DSA. Wary of Harrington’s orientation to the Democratic Party, a small faction went ahead and formed the Socialist Party USA (SPUSA) that David belonged to until recently. He was the party’s presidential candidate in 1980 and 2000. Unlike the DSA, you don’t find much Marxist analysis being spouted by its members such as the kind you will find in Jacobin. Also, unlike the DSA, the SPUSA hearkens back to Debs’s opposition to the two-party system. Like Debs and Norman Thomas, David had no use for the donkey or the elephant. He preferred cats and radicalism.
I am not quite sure when I hooked up with David but around twenty years ago I began making it my business to learn more about what you might call native radical traditions. Since so much of the Trotskyist experience involved applying the Bolshevik legacy mechanically to our country, I decided that David’s experience would help me fill in the blanks.
For about a year, we would get together for lunch down in the East Village where we would chew the fat. One time I got a big kick out of how he was warmly greeted by Quentin Crisp when we walked into a restaurant, where Crisp was sitting at a table by himself. It reminded me of how bohemianism, including sexual openness, and socialist politics go together.
When I joined the SWP in 1967, being outed as a gay could get you expelled. Party leaders defended the policy since supposedly the FBI could get a party member to “turn” by threatening to out him or her to the party. Marxist scholar Christopher Phelps, who was working on an article about gays in the SWP titled “The Closet in the Party”, had gotten in touch with David to sound him out. This led to David writing an article for New Politics titled “Queer Reflections” that I urge everybody to read since it epitomized his sensibility and political instincts.
I EXPERIENCED LITTLE BIAS WITHIN the Socialist Party. The late, and nearly great, Samuel H. Friedman (a Jew who kept kosher and whose wife was an Irish Catholic) said to me “I’ve heard some nasty things about you, Comrade McReynolds, but I don’t believe them.” Dwight MacDonald once said “You aren’t one of those, are you?” But it was never used against me except by some of those around Max Shachtman (I always thought it ironic that Max ended up with Tom Kahn, whose homosexuality was an open secret, as one of the few who remained on his side to the end). Within the War Resisters League (WRL), where I worked on staff for 39 years, it was never an issue, not because there was some secret gay cabal in the WRL, but because the radical tradition of the secular pacifists was much more profoundly radical than that of most Marxists. Bayard Rustin wasn’t hired by WRL because he was gay (or black) but because he was incredibly talented. (Let it be noted, as part of the historical record, and as a reminder that even great leaders have feet of clay, that A.J. Muste, so clearly a mentor for me, resigned from the executive committee of WRL in protest against the hiring of Bayard, because he felt Rustin’s record of making indiscreet homosexual passes would threaten the organization. And Bayard himself, in 1969, when the WRL magazine WIN had a “gay liberation” issue, with pieces from Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg and myself, phoned Ralph DiGia to say, “you guys are going to have to fire David — he will destroy the organization.” I never held this against Bayard, understanding only too well what his own experience had taught him.)
What makes David McReynolds so special was his ability to reflect the deeper traditions of the American left that go back to the early Communist movement, what Timothy Messer-Kruse called the “Yankee International”. Victoria Woodhull, who worked closely with Frederick Douglass, launched a Marxist current in the USA that competed with the one sanctioned by Karl Marx and that was led by Friedrich Sorge, a German immigrant. Sorge was not only exceedingly dogmatic, he was also hostile to Black-led protests since they might divide the working class.
Woodhull’s group made no such concessions, as their political traditions were rooted in the abolitionist movement. Indeed, when they called for a mass demonstration in New York City to commemorate the martyrs of the Paris Commune, the first rank in the parade went to a company of black soldiers known as the Skidmore Guard. The demonstration passed by a quarter million spectators and the sight of armed black men in the vanguard was electrifying. Sorge’s group complained that the demonstration was a distraction from working-class struggles, whose participants would lose a day’s pay by participating. He called for a boycott.
It is too bad that Marx regarded Woodhull as a spiritualist crank. Who knows? If she had received his benediction, we might be living under communism today. The tension between the Marxist high priesthood symbolized by Karl Marx in the 1870s or V.I. Lenin in the 1920s on one hand and the indigenous radical roots of living movements that sprout up according to their own rhythm and affinities has plagued us for nearly 150 years.
When people like Victoria Woodhull, Eugene V. Debs or David McReynolds come along, they deserve pride of place in building the revolutionary movement that is so desperately needed. The last time I saw David was in 2005 or so when I went to a brunch at Cynthia Cochran’s apartment on West 94th Street. She knew David for many years and admired him for the same reason she went with the “Cochranites” in 1954. In my discussions with David over lunch, we always came back to the need for a revolutionary movement that broke with the dogmatic obsession over the “Russian questions”. Like Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman, David knew how to put things into perspective. Sooner or later, the left will cohere around a program that emerges out of our living experience as Americans. David had a talent for sensing the mood of ordinary Americans.
Finally, for a really sweet and revealing interview with David that includes his story of how he decided to accept his homosexuality after meeting Alvin Ailey as a young man. It also includes some great photos of the young David McReynolds who was a handsome devil.
My wife and I are huge fans of Ryan Murphy, the gay writer/director/producer who just signed a 5-year deal with Netflix for $300 million that begins after his contract with Rupert Murdoch’s FX expires in July. Murphy is probably best known for “Glee”, an ABC network show about a high school glee club that is a backdrop for various dramas involving gender, race, class and other fragmented identities in American society. My impression is that it had a lot in common with “The White Shadow”, a CBS network show that ran in the late 70s using a racially mixed high school basketball team to offer the same sorts of social commentary.
We originally got hooked on Ryan Murphy after discovering “Nip/Tuck”, a cable TV show that ran on FX from 2003-2010. We only decided to pay for cable TV after we lost our barebones network TV connection as a result of the 9/11 attack taking out the TV transmitter that fed our high-rise.
“Nip/Tuck” used a plastic surgery clinic in the same way that “Glee” used its youthful singers–as a way of commenting on American society, in this instance the foibles of rich people who were never satisfied with their appearance. As I pointed out in my review of Mehrdad Oskouei’s “Nose, Iranian Style”, this is a sad practice that has been adopted in the Islamic Republic.
With enough postmodernist tropes to keep a MLA convention going for an extra week, FX’s “Nip/Tuck” uses plastic surgery as a metaphor for various gender, racial and broader cultural issues. Although not as acclaimed as some of HBO’s marquee attractions such as “The Sopranos” or “Sex and the City,” “Nip/Tuck” is certainly as well written, acted and directed. Now in its fourth season on the FX cable network, which is not a premium outlet like HBO or Showtime, it is a true pop culture achievement. Past seasons can be viewed on DVD as well.
A year after “Nip/Tuck” came to an end, a new Ryan Murphy show began. Like “Nip/Tuck”, “American Horror Story” was laden with Grand Guignol visual effects but this time using a butcher’s knife instead of a scalpel. It borrows elements from the genre involving vampires, zombies, killer clowns, serial murderers, etc. and wraps them in Murphy’s unique comic sensibility, as well as exploiting them for social commentary.
If you haven’t seen “American Horror Story”, I urge you to watch “Cult”, an 11-episode series from last year that can be seen on Amazon and iTunes. The first episode depicted a clash between candidates Trump and Clinton supporters in a small, upwardly mobile town. Two of the main characters are married lesbians who have had a falling out over one deciding to back Jill Stein instead of Clinton. The main Trump supporter is a Richard Spencer wannabe named Kai whose top lieutenant was abducted by the two lesbians and tied to a chair in order to prevent him for voting for Trump. To make his escape, he cuts off an arm. He is played by Chaz Bono, the transgender son of Cher and Sonny Bono originally named Chastity.
The show is not that interested in presenting an MSNBC type commentary (thank god) but much more in examining American cults of one sort or another. Kai is trying to build a fascist cult that will start by taking over the small town the characters live in and using it to catapult him into the presidency with the help of his stormtroopers.
The series incorporates reenactments of infamous cults, including those led by Jim Jones and Charles Manson, who are played by the same actor who plays Kai. Blood flows by the bucketful as the characters become increasingly crazed. It is vastly entertaining.
Once again, a psycho criminal is the main character in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” that is now showing on Season 2 of FX’s American Crime Story. As you may know, this is based on the July 15, 1997 murder of the trendy designer on the front steps of the mansion he owned in South Beach, Florida. The killer was Andrew Cunanan, a deranged gay man who had traveled across the USA, serially killing people one by one to facilitate the mission he was on. To this day, there has never been a satisfactory explanation why he targeted Versace, nor any of the other mostly gay men along the way.
Since my wife and I have always been curious about the Versace murder, having stayed a month in South Beach not far from his mansion in 2009 and sharing a general interest in fashion (she is an adjunct at Fashion Institute in addition to her main gig as a tenured economics/business professor). What we had trouble understanding is how FX and Murphy could have turned this into a 9-episode series since the story could have easily been told in an hour or so, as it was in a documentary we saw some years ago and that can be seen here:
Watching episode 5 titled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” last night, it became crystal-clear why Murphy decided to create a show based on the killing of Versace. He saw it as much more than the tale of a serial killer. It was to be an ambitious epic tale about the state of Gay America in 1997 when equality was still beyond the grasp of gay men and lesbians. In an amazing coincidence, it turns out that the first of Cunanan’s victims was a former Navy officer named Jeff Trail who was an important figure in the struggle for gay liberation.
All this is detailed in Maureen Orth’s “Vulgar Favors” that Murphy’s docudrama is based on. In 1992, Trail was a naval officer on the USS Gridley, a cruiser docked in San Diego, where Cunanan lived. Just by chance, the two met in a gay bar where the Cunanan approached the still closeted sailor. The two became fast friends, mostly because Cunanan—very much out of the closet—helped him to navigate the gay world that Trail had begun to explore.
Even though Versace was in an industry that had as many out of the closet men as in ballet, he still kept his sexuality a secret. In this episode, you see him arguing with his sister about being seen too often in gay hangouts. It might alienate men who would otherwise wear his clothing, especially from the macho sports world and among those actors who cultivated a macho identity. The two men’s wrestling with homophobia is interwoven skillfully by Murphy.
In 1995, Versace did an interview in the Advocate, the U.S.’s most widely read gay magazine that can be read here: https://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2018/2/15/seen-american-crime-story-read-interview-where-gianni-versace-came-out Unlike Jeff Trail, Versace never denied who he was sexually but neither did he advertise it. Over the past 22 years, the struggle has been to make it as easy as possible to be upfront about your sexuality in the fashion industry, the navy and in public restrooms even if that turns off the Christian Right and the homophobic morons in the Socialist Equality Party.
“Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four” is a documentary that opened today at the Cinema Village in NY on the outrageous conviction of four lesbians in San Antonio–three of whom were Mexican-American–for sexually assaulting one of the women’s two young nieces. It might seem to have little in common with “Snowden”, but they overlap on one very important issue, namely the power of film to raise awareness over the rights of the accused whether they are obscure working-class figures accused of sex crimes or a whistle-blower known across the planet either as a hero or a traitor.
“Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four” mostly consists of interviews with the four women and their relatives as well as the lawyers who got involved with their defense. Among them is an old friend and comrade named Jeff Blackburn who was best known for his yeoman work in defending the 39 African-Americans in Tulia, Texas that were victims of a drug sting. At one point Blackburn states that trials such as these are not decided in the courtroom but in the world at large when a mobilization to change the public’s mind is mounted. That has been the case with the San Antonio Four, the Black men who were victimized in Tulia and before that all of the major political trials of the past 100 years when dedicated lawyers like Jeff, William Kunstler and Michael Ratner proved their mettle.
In the early 1970s the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist group I belonged to at the time, conducted an infelicitously named “probe” of the gay liberation movement to help it decide whether to “intervene”, another infelicitous term considering that it means the same thing as interfere. At the 1973 convention it decided to terminate the probe since it had gathered enough information to help it decide that the movement was more middle-class than the woman’s movement or the Black struggle, for example. Reflecting back on those times, I am sure that the SWP leadership thought that the gay movement was made up largely of well-off window dressers for Bloomingdales or florists. It simply lacked the political insight to understand that there were women like the San Antonio four that had more class credibility than anybody in the party.
They lived in west San Antonio, a barrio made up of people like Anna Vasquez, one of the four lesbians. She had figured out in her early teens that she was attracted to women and was reconciled to put up with homophobic abuse as the consequence of being true to her own identity. She was accepted to college but dropped out in her freshman year because of money problems. At that point she took a job working in a fast food restaurant with the hope of returning to college when she had the funds. In other words, she was the average working class youth with the exception of being attracted to her own sex.
Anna was in a relationship with a woman named Liz Ramirez, who was the aunt of the two young girls whose testimony led to their victimization. The two ran with Cassandra Rivera and Kristie Mayhugh both for moral support and the type of fun that working class people enjoy together–dancing, going to the beach, playing pool, etc.. Ramirez’s sister was separated from her husband who had decided to put the make on her despite her obvious preference for her own sex. The animosity that arose out of her rejection could have possibly influenced him into coaching his daughters to lie. One afternoon when the four women were hanging out at Liz’s house in the company of the two young girls, their world came crashing down. Instead of being called witches and put to death like in Salem, the false accusations of the children condemned them to years in prison.
The story they gave to the cops was filled with the wild inconsistencies that was typical of the period when Satanic cult panics were a stain across America. During the Reagan era, day care centers became witch covens where 6 year olds were supposedly serially raped by their caretakers and often “helped” to remember what happened by psychotherapists who could extract “repressed memories”.
Debby Nathan, one of the USA’s leading authorities on the neo-Salem witch-hunts of the 70s and 80s provides insightful background on why the four women were so easily convicted. San Antonio was not that much different than the rest of Texas, a place where sexism, racism, and homophobia were nurtured by the church, government and other powerful institutions.
Based on the word of the two children and a complete lack of physical evidence except a questionable medical examination of their vaginas, Liz Ramirez was sentenced to 37 ½ years and the other women received 15 years each.
Director Deborah S. Esquenazi described how she combined filmmaking and activism:
I collaborated with LGBTQQ activists to engage in a community-driven campaign to make noise about the women. Along with the Texas QPOC organization, ALLGO, and various national / local non-profits and student groups, we held 17 work-in-progress screenings across the state in a two-year span. We showed raw, unedited interviews with the women from their prisons as well shared interviews with attorneys, journalists and investigators, who were first-responders into the reinvestigation into this case.
I have long believed that Lenin’s concept of the vanguard needs to be adapted to 20th and now 21st century realities. In my view documentary film makers like Deborah S. Esquenazi are part of an informal vanguard that use a video camera in the same way that the Bolsheviks used Iskra. Causes such as the vindication of the San Antonio Four remind me of the attitude that Lenin had toward constructing a vanguard in “What is to be Done?”:
Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny…It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of Wilhelm’s refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against ‘obscene’ publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc.
Conservative right-wing and liberal leftist reactions to the catastrophic mass-shooting at Pulse, the friendly gay club in Orlando, falter around the shooter Omar Seddique Mateen’s Muslim background. While conservative pundits and populist anti-immigration politicians drum up the perpetrator’s Islamic background, liberal commentators, including members of the Muslim and LGBTQ communities, try to downplay it. The former get caught up in right-wing Islamophopbic histrionics and the latter in politically correct taboos.
Both responses, however, are misguided, since they shift the discussion to cultural issues, thereby displacing the important question of the political economy of terrorism and homosexuality. These responses thus obfuscate the ways in which these terrorist acts be it homophobic, religious fundamentalist, or white fascist supremacist, are byproducts of the dynamics of global capitalism, in which sexual violence, including homophobic violence, has become central to its hegemony around the world.
The Fascist Islamophobic Backlash
Opportunistic politicians and conservative media pundits are using this homegrown lone-wolf terrorist act to continue framing the massacre in terms of the failure of liberal multicultural ideology and integration. They are adamant about making political capital out of this tragedy, by stoking the fire of Islamophobia. They resort to hackneyed colonial Orientalist narratives of the “clash of civilizations” between allegedly distinct and homogenous cultures and the “domestic radicalization” of immigrant Muslim youth.
Political leaders in both U.S. and around the world wasted no time pointing the finger at the homophobic Muslim shooter and to pay lip service to the humanity of the LGBTQ community. At the same, these same leaders have consistently supported anti-LGBTQ legislation or exploited LGBTQ issues as well as the massacre to pinkwash their atrocious records on human rights violations.
But Mateen’s links to ISIS or any other radical Islamic terrorist group remain tenuous at best. Although IS radio claimed responsibility for the massacre, which they referred to in Islamic military terms as “ghazwah” (incursion), Mateen had actually pledged allegiance to two ideologically opposed radical Islamic terrorist groups at war with each other. While the FBI has just confirmed that prior to the attack, Mateen had no connections whatsoever with ISIS, the FBI was the only organization that tried to recruit Mateen to commit terrorist acts.
By drumming up his religious affiliation and spurious terrorist connections, right-wing politicians and conservative commentators simply displace deeper socio-economic changes that result from the contradictions of the global capitalist economy onto a whole faith, culture, or race. The anti-Semite’s Jew of yonder years has been effectively replaced by the fascist’s Muslim. This fascist rhetoric also covers up not only the FBI’s “indirect role” in inadvertently fostering a culture of domestic terrorism. More importantly, it occludes the imperial interests of Western countries and their role in supporting the same radical Islamic terrorist groups, against whom they are supposed to be waging the “war on terror.” This way they can push their hysterical campaign to consolidate an “expanded police state” in the service of the global capitalist class.
Liberal Guilt
The liberal reaction, on the other hand, understandably downplays the shooter’s Islamic background. Even if Mateen’s links to ISIS were categorically proven to be inexistent, however, it is counterproductive to suggest that the shooter’s Islamic background played no role in shaping his views. Mateen’s putative links to ISIS notwithstanding, the fact remains that this fantasy of membership in a terrorist group is what sustained his sense of reality and what gave it consistency. His actual links to ISIS or any other terrorist group are really beside the point.
Predictably, liberals also seeks to demonstrate that homophobic terrorism is democratically distributed across all faiths and cultures. They tend to pin the Orlando massacre down on Christian fundamentalist homophobic rhetoric. This might be useful in dealing with the guilt Western liberal leftists feel about their putative Islamophobia or the Western role in fragmenting Arab and Islamic countries, but it does not help account for the deeper causes of homophobic terrorism across the globe.
Blaming the massacre on cultural discourses simply ignores the structural changes that global capitalism has introduced especially, in gender and sexual norms, around the world. A better explanation is needed of how homosexuality is rejected even among Christian fundamentalists in the West as a byproduct of (Western) liberal discourses of gender performativity or postmodern permissiveness.
This can also shed better light on homophobic terrorism as an expression of the desire of different cultures and traditions to reclaim the past and return to fictitious traditional notions of cultural and religious purity, in which homosexuality did not allegedly exist.
The liberal response also insists on using the mantra that every individual, friend or foe, has a story of suffering and victimization. By providing a personal story to criminals and perpetrators, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes, “the monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.” Along the same lines, liberal leftist pundits insist on reconstructing Mateen’s story, giving him a human face and making it possible to identify with his tragic humanity and suffering.
According to these reports, Omar Mateen is “a simple, Americanized guy,” who was going through a cultural and sexual identity crisis. He changed his name from Omar Mir Seddique to Omar Mir Seddique Mateen and was believed to be a closeted homosexual who “chose to hide his true identity out of anger and shame.” Indeed, Mateen has been reported to patronize gay bars, use gay chat apps, and even befriend a drag queen. This also explains his history of domestic violence.
The pop psychological analysis was quick to follow. Writing for Salon, Amanda Marcotte suggests that “Mateen had some self-loathing issues going on” which “he projected onto men who lived more unapologetically queer lives.” She concludes that Mateen “was acting on his sexual resentments more than . . . some well-articulated devotion to the ISIS caliphate.”
Media reports also leave no doubt as to the toxic environment in which Mateen grew up. Mateen’s father, a self-proclaimed homophobe, has reportedly posted a Facebook comment, expressing his shock and disbelief at his son’s actions, since “God will punish those involved in homosexuality.” It is not simply that the father passed his homophobic comments on to his son, as one report suggests, but that he instilled in him a characteristically “homosexual panic” at his own unspeakable forbidden desire.
The father’s political views also seem to have influenced Mateen’s actions. His support for the Afghani Taliban and his resistance to Western imperial intervention in his home country must have trickled down to his son. In a facebook post, Mateen had lashed out on Russia and the US for bombing IS and killing innocent women and children. In the midst of the killing spree, moreover, an eyewitness reported that Mateen told police negotiators on the phone he “wouldn’t stop his assault until America stopped bombing his country.” Nothing can explain this homophobic terrorism better than his alleged anti-colonial sentiments, but the real ideology, whether religious or nationalist, underpinning such anticolonialism is not clear.
Imperial designs were also intermixed with multicultural politics. As a fellow security guard stated in an interview with Newsday, Mateen hated everybody—“blacks, Jews, gays, a lot of politicians, our soldiers. He had a lot of hate in him.” Ironically though, the same eyewitness reported that as he was shooting, Mateen was trying to be politically correct: He made it clear he did not have a problem with “black people,” who have “suffered enough” in this country.
However, less emphasis has been placed on the link between his violent behavior and his employment at G4S. But it is equally important to understand the role this international private security company plays in maintaining new zones of apartheid within the global capitalist system around the world. G4S is responsible for managing prisons and military installations, erecting apartheid walls, and protecting the transnational capitalist class. Indeed, G4S is the same company that is responsible for constructing the 600-mile Great Wall around Mecca as well as the apartheid separation wall in Palestine.
Islamic Homophilia
On their part, Muslims around the world, but especially in the West, have fallen in line to perform what seems to be by now a familiar script in the aftermath of catastrophic terrorist acts: They refuse to accept, and correctly so, that these terrorist acts are committed “in the name of Islam” and at the same time, they insist on showing that Muslims account for the majority of victims of extremist Muslim violence.In this particular case, moreover, the focus in Islamic circles has shifted to theological squabbles about the meaning and status of homosexuality in the Quran and the traditions of the prophet Mohammad. As the first openly gay Imam Daayiee Abdullah states, “Nowhere in the Quran does it say punish homosexuals. And historians have also never found any case of the Prophet Muhammad dealing with homosexuality.”Undoubtedly, this theological squabble can be important for deconstructing the tyranny of the literalist interpretation of religious texts. This emphasis on interpretation can also demonstrate the diversity of theological views on homosexuality in different Muslim countries around the world. Indeed, as liberal commentators insist on reminding us, a 2015 Pew poll shows that most Muslims in the U.S. are more tolerant of homosexuality and gay marriages than major Christian groups
Nonetheless, the hermeneutic question keeps the problem within the cultural realm, away from questions about the political economy where attitudes to homosexuality and terrorism can be articulated together. In other words, the attitudes of diverse Muslim countries towards homosexuality should not only be examined in relation to the struggle over religious authority, however important that is for the project of reforming Islam, but more significantly in relation to the impact of global capitalism on these countries and their integration into the global capitalist system.Although some countries endorse homophobic terrorism as an expression of their anti-colonial struggle against Western hegemony, most countries that criminalize homosexuality have major stakes in the geopolitical struggle over power in the region and world, even more as allies of these same Western colonial powers. This might explain the difference in the official governmental position on the issue between on the one hand, more gay friendly or neutral countries such as Indonesia, Jordan, and Albania, and on the other, homophobic countries such as Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia that actively criminalize queer desire and disparage the LGBTQ community as “perverts.”
Re-inscribing the Class Struggle
Understanding homophobic terrorism in the context of global capitalist dynamics clears a space for dealing with the problem of terrorism in new ways. Indeed, no serious measures or policies can be taken to prevent another mass-shooting of this scale, unless the global dimensions of such acts are clearly worked out. By erasing the role of global capitalism in reproducing these acts of terrorism, moreover, conservative and liberal approaches also fail to offer a new emancipatory universal position that can unite diverse groups in the struggle for fundamental change in the global capitalist system.
This cannot be done, as Kenan Malik states, by “celebrating diversity, while treating everyone as citizens, rather than as simply belonging to particular communities.” Since local traditions work well with global capitalism, as Žižek points out, the precondition for a new path of freedom is precisely the renunciation of all roots in favor of an emancipatory universal identity. Žižek is thus right to insist, in his recent book Against the Double Blackmail, on the need to reinscribe the class struggle, since the task of the left today should be building “global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed,” a politics of solidarity structured around a common struggle for a “positive universal project shared by all.” This is the only ground from which a meaningful solution to terrorism can emerge.
This year publicists sent out three film screeners about the lives of LGBT people for consideration by NYFCO in our December 2015 awards meeting. One was “Tangerine”, a film that was distinguished technically for having been made with IPhones but I could not even watch to conclusion since it was undistinguished in every other way. It starred transgender actress Kitani Kiki Rodriguez as a transgender prostitute who is trying to track down her pimp in Los Angeles and take revenge on him for cheating on her. I found it amateurish, cartoonish and exploitative despite the 96 percent Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Moving right along, there’s “The Danish Girl”, a biopic based on transgender artist Lili Elbe who was the first man to ever undergo sexual reassignment surgery. It was a high-minded affair that smacked of Merchant-Ivory and hardly worth the 71 percent fresh rating it received on Rotten Tomatoes.
And then there is “Carol”, a film for the ages based on a Patricia Highsmith novel about the love affair of two lesbians. A number of her novels have been made into films, including the Hitchcock masterpiece “Strangers on a Train”. “Carol” was based on her 1952 novel titled “The Price of Salt” that appeared under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Unlike many films and novels about homosexuals or lesbians such as “Brokeback Mountain”, Highsmith defied convention and gave her tale a happy ending. Perhaps this was related to the fact that she was a lesbian herself but just as easily could have been a function of her affection for outlaws in her novels, most especially Tom Ripley, the shifty and resourceful working class criminal of a number of her novels who aspires to join the bourgeoisie and succeeds on its own terms.
Unlike Gore Vidal’s 1948 “The City and the Pillar”, a gay coming-of-age novel that appeared under his own name and was published by the prestigious E.F. Dutton, Highsmith’s novel was rejected by Harper’s—her regular publisher. It ended up as a 25 cent Bantam pulp paperback with “The novel of a love society forbids” appearing on the front cover.
Highsmith wrote the novel after spotting a beautiful woman in a fur coat when she was working as a clerk in Bloomingdales the same year Vidal’s novel came out. Unlike her novel, Highsmith never ended up in bed with the woman but was sto smitten by her beauty that she was moved to write what amounted to a wish fulfillment story. What is so unusual about “Carol” is its ability to identify with the two main characters whatever your sexual orientation. As part of Hollywood’s general drift into the sewer, there are fewer and fewer love stories that have the power of the Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn epoch. Working with Highsmith’s gold, director Todd Haynes has exactly the right sensibility to make sure that not a single carat is lost.
As an openly gay man, Todd Haynes was obviously some suited to treat the material lovingly. Beyond his sexuality, he has a flair for the ambience of “Carol”, which is close to that of “Far from Heaven”, his 2002 film about a repressed gay man living in suburban Connecticut in the 1950s whose wife develops a platonic relationship with a Black gardener that comes within a hair’s width of becoming physical. “Far from Heaven” was viewed as homage to Douglas Sirk, a filmmaker who might have made a film like “Carol” if it was permissible in his day. Fortunately for Highsmith’s legacy, Todd Haynes is the Douglas Sirk of our day.
The film stars Cate Blanchett as Carol, the wealthy shopper who becomes the embodiment of Highsmith’s 1948 fantasy. While shopping for a Christmas present for her daughter, she runs into Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a younger aspiring photographer, who persuades her to buy an electric train instead of the typical feminine gift, a clever way to signal that the two women are not interested in playing by society’s rules.
Therese eventually gets invited out to Carol’s mansion in Connecticut for a Christmas dinner. As the two settle in for a comfortable and possibly intimate evening, their mood is broken by the arrival of Carol’s husband who is in the process of divorcing her. When he spots Therese in the house, he goes ballistic at the two women for their sexual transgressions.
To get away from the angst of her divorce, Carol suggests to Therese that she join her for a cross-country drive in her Cadillac. Like Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy, the two women go on the road to discover America and to satisfy their physical and spiritual needs. In a series of motels, their love deepens until her husband’s crude and vengeful intervention drives a wedge between the two—at least temporarily.
Since Highsmith is a novelist of the greatest story-telling ability and profound psychological insights with dialog to match, suffice it to say that the film is equal to the original material. While my respect for Alfred Hitchcock is second to none, Todd Haynes was a director born to make such a film. Through effective costume design, film score, and sets, “Carol” has a lot of the atmosphere of “Mad Men” but it is not meant to call attention to itself. It is instead just a backdrop to the story and as such works perfectly. Haynes is also a master of cinema and the road scenes are deeply evocative when traveling across the USA in a Cadillac was everybody’s fantasy, including Jack Kerouac’s.
Almost eight years ago, I wrote an article on Patricia Highsmith for Swans. My recommendation is to see “Carol”, my pick for one of the best three films of 2015. If you enjoy it and other film adaptations of her work including “Strangers on a Train” and the Ripley films, I urge you to read her fiction that I regard as neglected masterpieces. Let’s hope that the deserved acclaim for “Carol” leads to a Patricia Highsmith revival since she certainly deserves it.
Patricia Highsmith
The Crime Novels Of Patricia Highsmith
by Louis Proyect
(Swans – January 28, 2008) Well-read Americans might not be familiar with the name Patricia Highsmith. At least this was the case for me before I stumbled across the movie Ripley’s Game on the IFC cable channel a couple of years ago.
Directed by Liliana Cavani and starring John Malkovich as Tom Ripley, a professional thief, it was quite unlike anything I had ever seen. Ripley, an American émigré living in rural France, pressures Jonathan Trevanny, a British frame shop owner in the local village who has never committed a crime in his life, to carry out a series of hits on Ripley’s enemies in the Italian mafia. Since Trevanny is suffering from leukemia, Ripley reasons that he would be amenable to killing complete strangers for a handsome fee in order to help meet family expenses after his death. Ripley has another motive in recruiting Trevanny. At the start of the movie, Ripley overhears Trevanny describing his estate as typically nouveau riche and out of character with the French countryside. Further study on my part would reveal that the Ripley films, and the nonpareil novels they are based on, nearly always involve such class resentments at their core.
Eventually I discovered that Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game also provided the narrative for Wim Wenders’s The American Friend that featured Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley and Bruno Ganz as the frame-maker Jonathan Zimmermann (a Germanized character in keeping with the film’s relocation to Rotterdam from rural France). Wenders took some liberties with Highsmith’s novels that are not quite successful in my view. The Ripley character seems more in keeping with Dennis Hopper’s public image rather than the fictional character. With a cowboy hat lodged permanently on his head, Hopper’s Ripley is much more macho than Highsmith’s character, whose epicene malevolence is rendered far more successfully in Cavani’s movie.
Since Ripley’s Game was such an outstanding film, I was persuaded soon afterwards to watch The Talented Mr. Ripley, based on a much younger Tom Ripley’s introduction to the criminal world. Starring Matt Damon as the title character, it involves Ripley’s introduction to the world of the haute bourgeoisie. Hired by a shipping magnate to persuade his playboy son to return home to America from Italy, Tom Ripley allows himself to become the son’s paid companion in a relationship that has strong homoerotic implications, another theme that is omnipresent in Highsmith’s novels. When Tom Ripley learns that Dickie Greenleaf, the boating heir, has plans to dump him, he murders him and assumes his identity. Damon, like Malkovich, is adept at capturing the utterly cynical and amoral psyche of this most intriguing character.
As so often happens with excellent movies like Ripley’s Game, I make an effort to read the novel upon which the screenplay is based in order to find out more about the author. Eventually I discovered that Highsmith’s novels have inspired some of the finest movies over the past 50 years including her first, which provided the scenario for Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Like the Ripley novels, Strangers on a Train involves homoerotic themes and a penetrating study of the lifestyles of the rich and infamous. Unlike the movies, however, the novels are blessed by Highsmith’s narrative voice, which is an utterly distinct one as demonstrated by this excerpt from Strangers on a Train.
That evening, Charles Anthony Bruno was lying on his back in an El Paso hotel room, trying to balance a gold fountain pen across his rather delicate, dished-in nose. He was too restless to go to bed, not energetic enough to go down to one of the bars in the neighborhood and look things over. He had looked things over all afternoon, and he did not think much of them in El Paso. He did not think much of the Grand Canyon either. He thought more of the idea that had come to him night before last on the train. A pity Guy hadn’t awakened him that morning. Not that Guy was the kind of fellow to plan a murder with, but he liked him, as a person. Guy was somebody worth knowing. Besides, Guy had left his book, and he could have given it back.
For those who have seen Strangers on a Train, you will remember Bruno as the worthless rich boy who cuts a deal with the tennis pro Guy Haines (an architect in the novel), who he has met on the train. If Guy will kill Charles Bruno’s wealthy father, thus facilitating his inheritance of a fortune, Bruno will kill Guy’s estranged wife, another worthless person, who has refused to give him a divorce. In the movie, Guy Haines struggles to release himself from the deal, even after Bruno has killed his wife. Despite Hitchcock’s dark sensibility, the movie is a sanitized version of the novel in which Guy Haines does carry out his end of the deal and is apprehended by the cops in the end.
This is not the only sanitized treatment of a Highsmith novel. In an otherwise masterful production, René Clément’s 1960 treatment of The Talented Mr. Ripley released in France as Plein soleil (the title Full Sun becomes Purple Noon in the English release) ends with Tom Ripley being nabbed by the cops for murdering his patron Dickie Greenleaf. In the novel Ripley goes scot-free and inherits Dickie’s fortune, thus proving that crime pays. It also downplays the homoerotic aspects, which is understandable given the period in which it was released. Starring Alain Delon as Tom Ripley and Maurice Ronet as Philippe Greenleaf (he has been Frenchified), the film does excel at showing the class distinctions between the two men. In one memorable scene that takes place on Greenleaf’s yacht, Ripley is humiliated by his bourgeois companion for not using his silverware properly. Delon was cast perfectly in this underdog role, as indicated by a particularly useful Wiki article:
At 14, Delon left school, and worked for a brief time at his stepfather’s butcher shop. He enlisted in the army three years later, and in 1953 was sent to fight in the First Indochina War. Delon has said that out of his five years of military service he spent 11 months in prison for being “undisciplined.” After being dishonorably discharged from the army he returned to Paris. He had no money, and got by on whatever employment he could find. He spent time working as a waiter, a porter, and a sales clerk.
This is somebody who would understand in the marrow of his bones what it meant to be a Tom Ripley. In Highsmith’s novel, we are introduced to the character as somebody who lives by his wits and on the fringes of the law. Indeed, he is even more dissolute than the character played by either Alain Delon or Matt Damon. He is sharing a seedy apartment with a window dresser (traditionally, a job done by gay men) where he spends his days sending out letters to unsuspecting victims in the name of the IRS demanding back tax payments.
When Dickie Greenleaf’s father approaches him with the proposal to go over to Italy to persuade his son to return to the U.S., Tom Ripley leaps at the opportunity since it would enable him to leave this sordid life of petty crime behind. After joining Dickie, Tom finds himself more and more drawn to the wealthy young man, to the point of trying on his clothes one day in secret. Matt Damon draws out all the homoerotic implications of this act, Delon less so.
Ripley is caught in the act, however, and humiliated by his social better — thus helping decide to take his eventual revenge. The scene is pivotal both to the American film (directed by the Briton Anthony Minghella) and Purple Noon. In Highsmith’s novel, the writing conveys what is beyond any movie to convey, once again establishing the priority of the written word as an art form. (The Marge referred to in the dialog is Dickie Greenleaf’s girlfriend.)
“What’re you doing?”
Tom whirled around. Dickie was in the doorway. Tom realized that he must have been right below at the gate when he had looked out. “Oh—just amusing myself,” Tom said in the deep voice he always used when he was embarrassed. “Sorry, Dickie.”
Dickie’s mouth opened a little, then closed, as if anger churned his words too much for them to be uttered. To Tom, it was just as bad as if he had spoken. Dickie advanced into the room.
“Dickie, I’m sorry if it—”
The violent slam of the door cut him off. Dickie began opening his shirt, scowling, just as he would have if Tom had not been there, because this was his room, and what was Tom doing in it? Tom stood petrified with fear.
“I wish you’d get out of my clothes,” Dickie said.
Tom started undressing, his fingers clumsy with his mortification, his shock, because up until now Dickie had always said wear this and wear that that belonged to him. Dickie would never say it again.
Dickie looked at Tom’s feet. “Shoes, too? Are you crazy?”
“No.” Tom tried to pull himself together as he hung up the suit, then he asked, “Did you make it up with Marge?”
“Marge and I are fine,” Dickie snapped in a way that shut Tom out from them. “Another thing I want to say, but clearly,” he said, looking at Tom, “I’m not queer. I don’t know if you have the idea that I am or not.”
“Queer?” Tom smiled faintly. “I never thought you were queer.”
Dickie started to say something else, and didn’t. He straightened up, the ribs showing in his dark chest. “Well, Marge thinks you are.”
“Why?” Tom felt the blood go out of his face. He kicked off Dickie’s second shoe feebly, and set the pair in the closet. “Why should she? What’ve I ever done?” He felt faint. Nobody had ever said it outright to him, not in this way.
“It’s just the way you act,” Dickie said in a growling tone, and went out the door.
Although Patricia Highsmith wrote almost exclusively about the homoerotic tensions between male characters, she knew the gay life from her own experience as a lesbian. Written under the pseudonym Clare Morgan, her 1952 The Price of Salt is the story of a love affair between two women based on her own coming out experience in New York. Along with Gore Vidal’s 1947 The City and the Pillar, it is an honest account of the gay experience and a breakthrough for American fiction.
Like Gore Vidal, Highsmith’s outsider sexual identity went hand in hand with outsider politics. As a student at Barnard College in New York City, Highsmith discovered an attraction for communism around the same time that she discovered an attraction for other women. As a native Texan, she found herself marching to the tune of a different drummer from an early age. Eventually, the contradictions of living in a society that was hostile to her political views and sexual identity became unbearable and she moved to France.
Despite working almost exclusively in the crime genre, Highsmith was not the typical pulp fiction author. In everything she wrote, there was an affinity with the more complex psychological novels that she studied as an undergraduate, including such favorites as Gide and Dostoevsky. Indeed, as one of the few openly gay novels of the 1920s, Gide’s The Counterfeiters had a major influence on Highsmith’s work. With a plot focused on forgery (Tom Ripley’s specialty) and its shifting identities — including the use of a pseudo-author — one can see how Gide’s masterpiece informed Highsmith’s work. Andrew Wilson’s very perceptive biography of Highsmith titled Beautiful Shadow: a Life of Patricia Highsmith makes this connection clear:
For Gide and for Highsmith, feelings, like love, were prone to the fantastical fluctuations. Highsmith’s protagonists bore witness to Gide’s theory, outlined at the end of The Counterfeiters, that emotions taken on as pretence, those which are feigned, can be felt as keenly as so-called ‘real’ feelings. Just as Gide uses the counterfeited gold coins to symbolise the notion of the fabricated personality, so Highsmith would work out elaborate plots featuring fakes and con-men in order to explore the mercurial fluidity of human identity.
It seems as if Highsmith used Gide’s novel as a blueprint for her writing; she reread it in late 1947, together with his journals and Corydon [four dialogues on homosexuality written in the spirit of Socrates] and looked to the character of Edouard as a kind of fiction-dised mentor figure. Like Edouard, Highsmith believed that reality did not exist unless she saw it reflected in her journal, while she also subscribed to his theory of depersonalisation, the ability of writers to negate their identities and take on the qualities of others. Such writerly empathy, Edouard states, ‘enables me to feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own’. Similarly, Highsmith, in her notebooks, often wrote about how her imagination provided her with inner experiences which were more ‘real’ than the actuality being played out around her. Although she was occasionally attacked for creating characters riddled with inconsistencies and illogicalities, Highsmith articulates the paradox of human nature: the irrationality of the civilised rational man. Gide, in The Counterfeiters, expressed another contradiction — the fact that in fiction one is often presented with men and women who behave in a logical fashion, while in real life it is common to meet people who behave irrationally.
With the advent of the 1960s radicalization, Patricia Highsmith became more outspoken on the issues tearing apart the United States. She opposed the war in Vietnam and took a keen interest in the plight of the Palestinians, as Andrew Wilson makes clear:
In an unpublished essay Highsmith wrote about the Middle East conflict in August 1992, she outlined the historical background that had formulated her position. When Israel was created — in May 1948, while Highsmith was at Yaddo, writing Strangers on the Train — following the withdrawal of the British, she remembers feeling optimistic about its future. ‘How happy and cheerful we all were then, gentiles and Jews alike!’ she wrote. ‘A new state had been born, and was therefore to be welcomed into the community of democracies.’ Yet soon after the state was formed — initially an area comprising of Jewish and Arab land, together with an internationally administered zone around Jerusalem — it was invaded by Arab forces, a move which in turn prompted Israeli troops to seize and gain control of three-quarters of Palestine. Highsmith was appalled at what she saw as Israeli brutality and insensitivity, remembering how some of her Palestinian friends were forced to flee their homeland. Since then, of course, the area has been the site of a series of complex, and increasingly violent, power struggles, yet from the beginning Highsmith aligned herself with other writers such as Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky and Edward W. Said, who believed in Palestinian self-determination. In December 1994, Highsmith nominated a collection of Said’s essays and talks, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969-1994, as her book of the year for the Times Literary Supplement, commenting that she thought him ‘both famous and ignored. His eloquence on the real issues makes America’s silence seem all the louder.’ Highsmith agreed with Said’s opinion that the alliance between Zionism and the United States had resulted in the continued displacement of Palestinians. As a result, she felt forced to take a stand, no matter how small. After the election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister in 1977, Highsmith would not allow her books to be published in Israel. ‘I’m sure the world couldn’t care less, but it shows that not every American refuses to see what’s happening,’ she said. In interviews she told journalists that she loathed Ariel Sharon and the Likud party, and that she found America’s support of the Israeli regime to be despicable.
‘Americans and the world know that America gives so lavishly to Israel,’ she wrote, ‘because the United States wanted Israel as a strong military bulwark against Soviet Russia during the Cold War. Now that the Cold War is over, America has cut none of its aid . . . What is an American tax-payer to make of the fact that the USA gives thirteen million dollars a day, still, to Israel without any request for repayment? . . . I blame my own country for the majority of injustices now being inflicted by the Israelis in what they consider Greater Israel… I blame [the] American government for the bad press permitted about the Arabs in the United States.’
As someone who has written about spy genre novelists in the past for Swans (e.g., Eric Ambler’s A Coffin For Dimitrios and Alan Furst’s Red Gold), I am happy to recommend Patricia Highsmith’s crime genre novels to its readers. While a source of great entertainment, the crime novel has the distinction of being able to serve as commentary on the phenomenon described by Honoré de Balzac in Le Père Goriot: “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
Ernest Mandel, the great Belgian Marxist economist and Trotskyist politician, was a life-long fan of crime novels and took time off from his busy schedule to write Delightful Murder: a Social History of the Crime Story in 1984.
In the chapter titled Inward Diversification, Mandel treats the class detective story in which the hero (Sherlock Holmes, et al.) outwits the villain as a kind of parable on commodity production in the early competitive days of industrial capitalism:
With the arrival of monopoly capitalism, however, reason has more and more trouble triumphing over irrationality, particularly in the era of fascism. A Sherlock Holmes has little chance of coming out on top of a jackbooted SS member who would defy the law even when confronted by his guilt. To get to the top of the heap under such a system, having superior intelligence is insufficient. Instead you need cunning and determination, two qualities that typify Tom Ripley, the quintessential modern man.
The crime novelist of the monopoly capitalism epoch can even decide to subvert the norms of the genre by making the criminal rather than the detective the real hero. Indeed, Mandel points to Patricia Highsmith as best representing this category. In Ripley’s world, the criminal always comes out on top. Even if Tom Ripley achieves his goals through brutal violence and a talent for falsehood, he will be a mere piker in comparison to the men who have invaded Iraq and wrought the financial scams that have resulted in the forfeiture of millions of American homes. Unlike Ripley, who retains a raffish charm throughout the series of novels that bear his name, these criminals evoke nothing but disgust and a fervent desire to disarm them before they manage to destroy the planet.
Although I am generally put off by prizes and “best of” lists, I would be remiss if I did not cite Asghar Farhadi as one of the best filmmakers in the world today, who is to Iran what Nuri Bilge Ceylan is to Turkey: a supremely gifted dramatist that weaves the stories of individual men and women into the social and political fabric of his nation.
Opening tomorrow at the Film Forum in New York, “About Elly” is the third Farhadi film I have seen. Even though its release follows “A Separation” and “The Past”, it was made first—back in 2009. Made in 2011, “A Separation”—as the title implies—deals with the break-up of a husband and wife in Tehran whose marital problems are exacerbated by Iran’s charged political climate, especially for such well-educated and secular middle-class people. Made a year later and set in Paris, “The Past” examines some of the same family issues of “A Separation”. An Iranian husband has traveled to Paris to sign the divorce papers for his French wife. Although the primary tension in the film is about the pending break-up, a parallel drama revolves around the fate of foreigners in an increasingly nativist France.
This social milieu and its particular problems are once again the subject of “About Elly”, a film that works both as a story of responsibility and guilt after the fashion of Ian McEwan’s earlier (and better) novels, as well as the problems facing single women in Iran today.
“About Elly” opens with a small caravan of cars barreling through a tunnel in Iran as one of the women passengers is yelling out the window for no good reason except to be heard. She and the others are in high spirits since they are driving to a beachside resort on the Caspian Sea, the Iranian counterpart to a weekend in the Hamptons.
One of the male passengers is a handsome and bearded (but probably not for religious reasons) man in his thirties named Ahmad, who like the protagonist in “The Past”, has just separated from a European wife—in this instance a German. He is visiting Tehran where he hopes that Sepideh, a female member of the entourage, can fix him up with a nice Iranian woman.
Sepideh invites Elly, her daughter’s teacher, along for just that reason. Despite the Western-sounding name, it is just an informal version of Elizeh or Elika, etc. The fact that Sepideh has no idea of Elly’s full name might indicate that the ties between her and the rest of the group are tenuous at best. In essence, what is taking place in this well educated and secular milieu of law school faculty members is not that much different than traditional courtship rituals that have taken place for a millennium and one that usually empowers man at the woman’s expense.
As the group drives along toward the resort and even after they have unpacked, they tease the two who have just met about the upcoming marriage—to Elly’s mounting irritation. Perhaps the fact that all the women wear scarves—even indoors where it is not mandatory—indicates that their modernity is incomplete.
In the only moments when Ahmad and Elly are alone together, she asks why he and his German wife had divorced. His answered that she told him “a bitter ending is better than an endless bitterness.” He obviously agreed.
About twenty minutes into the film, there is an abrupt shift toward the tragic. Sepideh has asked Elly to keep an eye on her young son who is wading in the sea just behind their villa. As the film cuts to the group playing volleyball in their villa’s back yard, we see one of the younger children come crying. Sepideh’s son has been carried out to sea. The men rush into the turbulent waters and rescue the boy from drowning but Elly is nowhere to be seen. They fear that she has drowned trying to rescue the boy but hold out hope that she might have only left unannounced back to Tehran out of annoyance with their teasing.
The remainder of the film consists of mounting tension between Sepideh and her husband over her role in procuring a date with Ahmad, especially in light of the fact that Elly has been engaged for the past three years. If Elly had mixed feelings about the arranged tryst with Ahmad, she is simply miserable about being engaged to a man who will not allow her to break it off. All of this takes place against a backdrop of a desperate search for her body in the foreboding waters of the Caspian.
It is worth mentioning what David Bordwell, arguably the most respected Marxist film critic in the world today, wrote about the film in 2009:
The best, and my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year, was About Elly. It is directed by Asghar Fahradi, and it won the Silver Bear at Berlin. I can’t say much about it without giving a lot away; like many Iranian films, it relies heavily on suspense. That suspense is at once situational (what has happened to this character?) and psychological (what are characters withholding from each other?). Starting somewhat in the key of Eric Rohmer, it moves toward something more anguished, even a little sinister in a Patricia Highsmith vein.
Gripping as sheer storytelling, the plot smoothly raises some unusual moral questions. It touches on masculine honor, on the way a thoughtless laugh can wound someone’s feelings, on the extent to which we try to take charge of others’ fates. I can’t recall another film that so deeply examines the risks of telling lies to spare someone grief. But no more talk: The less you know in advance, the better. About Elly deserves worldwide distribution pronto.
While not quite “pronto”, we can be grateful for the opportunity to see a film that according to Wikipedia was rated the 4th greatest Iranian movie of all time by a national society of Iranian critics. Considering the artistic merit of Iranian films in general, this is high praise indeed.
Arriving as VOD (identified at the distributor’s website), “Salvation Army” is a major breakthrough since it is the very first film with a gay protagonist to come out of the Middle East and North Africa.
Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay author in the Arab world, has now adapted one of his novels as a film, one that showed at the New Directors/New Films Festival in New York last year. Set in Casablanca, this is a bildungsroman in Taïa’s own words. The main character is a teenaged boy named Abdellah who is a closeted gay who has desultory trysts with older men in his neighborhood but whose most amorous feelings are directed toward his older heterosexual brother. His mother, sensing that there is something “wrong” with him, abjures him from spending too much time going through his brother’s clothes, especially his underwear.
It is obvious that family life has gotten the better of him. With a father who beats his mother and a mother who treats him like a servant, and sisters who laugh at his softness without actually openly engaging in gay bashing, there is not much joy to be found in Casablanca. In many ways, this is a tale that subverts the stereotypes many people have developed from reading Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs and the like.
Deliverance arrives in the form of a gay Swiss professor who kept Abdellah as his courtesan in exchange for help in a visa and entrance into the college where he works. The second part of “Salvation Army” depicts and older and wiser Abdellah fending off the professor and trying to eke out a living in Switzerland just before his first semester begins. This includes crashing at the local Salvation Army, the title of the film.
The film does not have a conventional plot but moves along as a series of vignettes that reflect different aspects of gay life in Morocco. It is not surprising given its provenance that it has a novelistic quality, with most of the drama having a subdued if not repressed quality. In the most evocative scene, Abdellah has gone to a beachside resort with his older and younger brothers. Just before they leave, the mother gives him an amulet to put under his older brother’s bed as a spell to ward him away from prostitutes. When he hooks up with a surly but willing waitress, Abdellah phones his mother to advise her that a stronger spell was needed.
I strongly recommend the Wikipedia entry on Abdellah Taïa that reveals him to be a multifaceted figure with a willingness to take up many other issues besides gay rights, including repression in Putin’s Russia and the terrorism that afflicts the Muslim world.
There is also a N.Y. Times article that is very much worth reading that I include below, just so that you do not run into the usual paywall issues:
HE was born inside the public library of Rabat in Morocco where his dad worked as a janitor and where his family lived until he was 2. For most of his childhood, he hid his sexuality as best he could, but his effeminate demeanor brought mockery and abuse, even as it would later become a source of artistic inspiration.
About eight years ago, the author Abdellah Taïa, now 40, came out to the Moroccan public in his books and in the news media, appearing on the cover of a magazine under the headline “Homosexual Against All Odds.”
It was an act that made him one of the few to publicly declare his sexual orientation in Morocco, where homosexuality is a crime. The hardest part, he recalls, was facing his family. They probably always knew, he said, they just never talked about it. Still, it took years to overcome the rifts.
“They cried and screamed,” said Mr. Taïa, who now lives in Paris. “I cried when they called me. But I won’t apologize. Never.”
In February, Mr. Taïa screened his film “Salvation Army” at the National Film Festival in Tangier, an adaptation of his book of the same title, and a promising directorial debut that gave the Arab world its first on-screen gay protagonist. The film, which has already been shown at festivals in Toronto and Venice and won the Grand Prix at the Angers Film Festival in France, was shown at the New Directors Festival in New York last month.
“Salvation Army” is based on the author’s life growing up in Morocco, his sexual awakening, his fascination with a brother 20 years older, his encounters with older men in dark alleys and his complex relationship with his mother and six sisters who mocked him for being too girly or too attached to them.
SHOOTING the film in two countries, he made clear artistic choices: no voice-overs, no music, no explicit love scenes. The film details a trip with his brother on which the two men bonded and also, a few years later, an affair with a Swiss man. After he moves to Switzerland in his 20s, he connects again with his mother.
But the film also shows the anger and frustration of the young Abdellah, as he fends off the advances of older men in a society that publicly rejects homosexuals.
“A lot of men in Morocco have sexual relations with men, but I looked feminine so I was the only homosexual,” he said. “In Morocco, sexual tension is everywhere and I wanted to show that in my film without having crude sex scenes; to stay true to these secretive behaviors.”
One night when he was 13 and with his family, drunken men outside called out his name and asked him to come down to entertain them, a traumatic scene he recalled in a New York Times Op-Ed article, “A Boy to Be Sacrificed.” After that he decided to change his persona, to eliminate his effeminate mannerisms to stop men asking him for sexual favors.
He worked hard to learn French so he could move to Europe to escape the oppression, moving to Switzerland in 1998 and then to France the following year.
“I can’t live in Morocco,” Mr. Taïa said in an interview in a Parisian brasserie. “The entire neighborhood wanted to rape me. A lot of people in Morocco are abused by a cousin or a neighbor but society doesn’t protect them. There, rape is insignificant. There is nothing you can do.”
Mr. Taïa spent his childhood watching Egyptian movies, detailing them in a scrapbook where he collected pictures of movie stars he admired, like Faten Hamama and Souad Hosni. The freedom in Egyptian cinema, where women appeared without veils and alcohol was consumed openly, pervaded his living room and gave him hope. In a scene in “Salvation Army,” the family is seen watching “Days and Nights” (1955) by Henri Barakat, and a scene where Abdel Halim Hafez sings, “Ana Lak ala Tool” (“I Am Yours Forever).
“Egyptian movies saved me,” he said. “There was already the idea of transgression through television happening in my house with my sisters. In my head, I connected that to homosexuality.”
THE author says he considers himself Muslim because he is very spiritual, and he believes that freedom has existed in Islam through those such as the Arab philosopher Averroes and the Iranian poet Rumi, and in works such as “1001 Nights.”
“I don’t want to dissociate myself from Islam,” he said. “It is part of my identity. It is not because I am gay that I will reject it. We need to recover this freedom that has existed in Islam.”
His books have stirred some negative reviews and reaction. His writing, in particular, has been criticized as undisciplined, as if it were dictated. Others say that it is the rawness of the writing that makes his work authentic and touching.
Mr. Taïa says he always wanted to become a filmmaker. He became a writer by accident after writing all his thoughts and experiences down in a journal to learn French. While he draws on his experiences growing up, he says he has never looked to art to exorcise the pain and abuse he experienced as a child and teenager.
“Books, like the film, do not solve anything,” he said. “My neuroses are, at some level, what we might call my creativity. But what I produce artistically does not help me in any way in my real life. Nothing is resolved. Everything is complex, complicated. I sincerely believe that there is only love to heal and soothe troubled souls.”
He says he has no preference between writing and filmmaking. “To me, both have the same source: the wonderful Egyptian films that I discovered with my family on Moroccan television during my childhood. Everything comes from images. For years, my brain has been structured from images of films I thought and rethought, in a manner at once naïve and serious. I will continue to write books inspired by images — and by my neuroses, of course.”
Today, he has patched up relations with most family members, though there are still awkward moments. His older brother, always cold and distant, remains estranged, a point of particular pain for Mr. Taïa. The brother was worshiped by the entire family not only for his charisma but because he saved them from poverty when he took several government jobs before marrying at the age of 35.
His mother died shortly after Mr. Taïa came out, and he now has a cordial relationship with his sisters. He has over 40 nieces and nephews who symbolize a new more open-minded generation of Moroccans — they often post messages of encouragement on his official Facebook page.
Still, Mr. Taïa finds it very difficult to go home.
“I can’t talk to them,” he said. “I am just a human being. They were ashamed of me. I always felt they were. I don’t want them to be proud of me. And anyway, they’re not.”
HE was one of the few Moroccan authors to denounce the oppressive policies of the kingdom and to strongly back the Feb. 20 movement that led protests in Morocco in 2011 demanding democratic reforms. His thoughts on this experience are detailed in chapters of the book “Arabs Are No Longer Afraid,” which was released at the biennial at the Whitney Museum in New York in March.
Mr. Taïa is working on his next book: a tale about old Moroccan prostitutes who at the end of their careers touring the world have landed in Paris. He lives in a small studio apartment near the central Place de la République, and worked as a baby sitter for over 10 years to finance his work. He still hasn’t found love but is convinced it is what will heal his wounds.
Representing a men’s room stall at the Lenin Museum, where gay men cruised
It would be hard to imagine any art show more topical than “The Lenin Museum” that opened at the James Gallery in the CUNY Graduate Center on 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street) in New York on November 14th and runs through January 17th. As a statement on the troubled relationship between gay people and the state in Russia, it is not to be missed. The show is the latest in a series by conceptual artist extraordinaire Yevgeniy Fiks, a Russian émigré whose work I have been following with keen interest for the past two years.
In conceptual art, the ideas take precedence over traditional aesthetic and commercial considerations. Since much of it is one-time installation, it is hardly the sort of thing that you can take home and mount over a mantelpiece. While many of its adherents have taken it up as a challenge to the tyranny of the gallery, someone like Damien Hirst creates conceptual art that caters to the decadent-minded hedge fund speculator with a taste for the transgressive.
Fiks has created his own niche, one that is dedicated to the examination of the Soviet legacy. As someone left-of-center, he is intrigued by the experience of official Communism, both in the USSR and in the USA, the home of this 42-year old artist for the past twenty years.
Fiks is a mischievous sort who in some ways hearkens back to the glory days of Dadaism, when every work of art conveyed a bit of the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. that depicted the Mona Lisa with a mustache. Nothing expresses that more than his “Lenin for your Library?”, a project that involved sending copies of Lenin’s “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism“ to 100 major transnational corporations including the Gap, Inc., Coca-Cola, General Electric, and IBM as donations to their corporate library. He received 35 response letters with 14 companies accepting the donation.
Fiks’s latest show is more somber. It deals with one of the most troubled legacies of the former Soviet Union that persists until this day, namely homophobia. In 1917 the young Soviet state decriminalized homosexuality. At the time the socialist movement was finally tackling this medieval prejudice, especially in the Weimar Republic where Magnus Hirschfield organized the First Congress for Sexual Reform in 1921. In a key article on socialism and homosexuality, Thomas Harrison wrote about the possibilities that were opening up at the time:
In 1923, the Commissar of Health, N.A. Semashko, on a visit to Hirschfeld’s Institute, assured the Germans that Soviet legalization was “a deliberately emancipatory measure, part of the sexual revolution.” Two years later, the Director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene Grigorii Batkis, in a pamphlet, The Sexual Revolution in Russia, described Soviet policy as “the absolute non-interference of the state and society in sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured and no one’s interests are encroached upon. Concerning homosexuality, sodomy and various forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against morality — Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called ‘natural’ intercourse.”
In 1934, Stalin recriminalized homosexuality, a measure that was consistent with the Bonpartist retreat from the early 20s when the heavens were being stormed. Even under the threat of repression, gay men and women were determined to hold on to the gains of 1917. In May 1934, Harry Whyte, the editor of Moscow’s English newspaper, The Moscow News, sent an open letter to Stalin titled “Can a Homosexual be a Member of the Communist Party?” that is part of the installation. Whyte stated:
Since I have a personal stake in this question insofar as I am a homosexual myself, I addressed this question to a number of comrades from the OGPU and the People’s Commissariat for Justice, to psychiatrists, and to Comrade Borodin, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper where I work.
All that I managed to extract from them was a number of contradictory opinions which show that amongst these comrades there is no clear theoretical understanding of what might have served as the basis for passage of the given law. The first psychiatrist from whom I sought help with this question twice assured me (after verifying this with the People’s Commissariat for Justice) that if they are honest citizens or good communists, his patients may order their personal lives as they see fit. Comrade Borodin, who said that he personally took a negative view of homosexuality, at the same time declared that he regarded me as a fairly good communist, that I could be trusted, and that I could lead my personal life as I liked.
The title of the show “The Lenin Museum” is a reference to a favorite cruising spot, the men’s room of an institution that housed Lenin memorabilia of the sort that Fiks keeps returning to in his remarkable career. An article on “Sex in the Soviet closet: a history of gay cruising in Moscow” in the Moscow News (the only reliable newspaper in Putin’s Russia) will give you a sense of what will await you at this stunning show:
One day in 1955, a railway stoker named Klimov entered the GUM department store, looking for a bite to eat. While inside, Klimov, 27, stopped by the bathroom.
“In the toilet a young lad came up to me, shook my hand and said, ‘Let’s get acquainted,'” Klimov later recalled. The man’s name was Volodya. He invited Klimov to the Lenin Museum.
“He bought the tickets with his money, and we went straight to the men’s toilet.”
An intimate encounter began, but they were interrupted by a pair of strangers.
Several weeks later, the men happened to meet in the GUM toilet again. This time, they opted for the secluded woods of Sokolniki Park.
From 1933 to 1993, homosexuality was officially outlawed in Russia under Article 121 of the Soviet Criminal Code. But all the while, the Communist capital’s most famous landmarks served as pick-up spots for gay men.
In a new photo book, titled “Moscow” and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, Russian-American photographer Yevgeniy Fiks captures the city’s Soviet cruising grounds as they look today. They are familiar to any resident of the city: the square in front of the Bolshoi Theater, Alexandrovsky Sad, Okhotny Ryad metro station.
Most of the spots are usually crowded. But in Fiks’ photos, they stand empty.
“This book is a type of kaddish [mourning prayer] for the lost and repressed generations of Soviet-era gays,” Fiks said.
Thirty years ago when I was working closely with Peter Camejo on getting the North Star Network off the ground, I totally agreed with him that the left should not be divided on historical questions like when and if the USSR became capitalist. Or on international questions such as whether to support Eritrea or Ethiopia, etc. You can obviously have sharp differences that must be debated openly but they are not “split” questions as is the norm in the Trotskyist movement.
After watching “Hunted: the War Against Gays in Russia”, I am not so sure any more, at least on the international question. This 48 minute documentary that can be seen on HBO Go, a streaming service available to HBO subscribers, left me in a complete state of rage both for what is happening to Russian gays but also for the open affection for Vladimir Putin that exists on wide sectors of the left.
Needless to say, the Western left would never support a politician who was responsible for fostering a war on gays in the USA or Britain. Furthermore, in all of the pro-Putin propaganda in the “anti-imperialist” left, you will never see him applauded for his anti-gay legislation that serves as legal cover for the vigilante movement exposed in the HBO documentary. That instead is what you will hear from the rightwing movements that also back the Kremlin, including just about every neofascist group in Europe, including Jobbik, Golden Dawn and the National Front in France. They love Putin because he stands up for “traditional values”. One imagines that in their heart of hearts, the “anti-imperialists” have no problems with crackdowns on NGO’s that defend gay rights in Russia since they are obviously a necessary defense against plots concocted in the basement of the State Department by George Soros, Nicholas Kristof and Samantha Power. After all, if you were going to make a choice between gays being forced to drink piss by skinhead vigilantes and coming down on the same side of an issue as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, you’d naturally opt for gays drinking piss.
Fortunately, you can see the documentary as well on Youtube. This is identical to what is being shown on HBO but with a different narrator:
The film will give you a good idea why a sixteen-year-old gay youth sought political asylum in the USA. Here on an exchange program, the boy decided that he would stay in the USA rather than put up with the kind of bigotry seen in the film. Tass said that this was all the result of a gay cabal and Russia said it would no longer participate in the exchange program.
Directed by Ben Steele, the documentary takes a look at two of the major vigilante organizations in Russia, Parents of Russia and Occupy Pedophilia. Leaders of both groups were more than willing to allow the cameramen to film every one of their attacks. Naturally, this would be the case since the cops are their accomplices.
To give you an idea of how the cops operate in tandem with the ultraright, you see gay rights activist Yekaterina Bogatch hounded by the cops for simply standing on the sidewalk holding a sign calling for equal treatment of all citizens. If she had put the word gay on the sign, she risked arrest.
Parents of Russia is a group that is dedicated to exposing gays by putting information about where they live, etc. on the Internet. Yekaterina Bogatch, a schoolteacher, is one of their prime targets. They want her fired from her job even if she is straight. Gay teachers, who are not even involved with protests, have just as much to worry about since Parents of Russia deems them as pedophiles.
That is basically the strategy of the vigilantes, the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin’s base of support in elected officialdom. Although laws against homosexuality were lifted fifteen years ago, the attacks are mounted as against pedophiles rather than gays. Occupy Pedophilia is a prime example. It tells Steele that is only after pedophiles but in the one entrapment scene that involves their activists openly tormenting a gay man they have lured through the Internet, there is not the slightest evidence that pedophilia was involved.
I have often scratched my head trying to figure out the attraction that Putin has for the “anti-imperialist” left. It reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer’s Night Dream” when Puck puts a potion in Titania’s eyes. Upon waking, she falls madly in love with Bottom, a man whose head has been replaced by that of a donkey. Who has put such a potion in the eyes of Pepe Escobar, Andre Vltchek and Michel Chossudovsky, I ask you?
For an unrepentant Marxist like me, the Russia I adore is the Russia of the 1920s when laws against homosexuality were not only lifted, there was a pervasive sense that sexual freedom and socialism went hand in hand. Ironically, despite the Workers World Party’s tendency to fall in line behind the Kremlin, one of their activists has written some very useful material on sexual freedom in the early USSR:
During the 1920s, in the first decade of the Russian Revolution, signs that the struggle to build socialism could make enormous social gains in sexual freedom–even in a huge mostly agricultural country barely freed from feudalism, then ravaged by imperialist war and torn asunder by civil war–were apparent.
The Russian Revolution breathed new life into the international sexual reform movement, the German Homosexual Emancipation Movement, and the revolutionary struggle as a whole in Germany and around the world.
It was a historic breakthrough when the Soviet Criminal Code was established in 1922 and amended in 1926, and homosexuality was not included as an offense. The code also applied to other republics, including the Ukrainian Republics. Only sex with youths under the age of 16, male and female prostitution and pandering were listed. Soviet law did not criminalize the person being prostituted, but those who exploited them.
For example, author Dan Healey states, “The revolutionary regime repeatedly declared that women who sold their bodies were victims of economic exploitation, not to be criminalized, and campaigns to discourage them from taking up sex work were launched.” The growth of prostitution had of course been spurred by the chaos and dislocation of people accompanying war.
Historian Laura Engelstein summarizes, “Soviet sexologists in the 1920s participated in the international movement for sexual reform and criminologists deplored the use of penal sanctions to censor private sexual conduct.” (“Soviet Policy”)
In 1923, the Soviet minister of health traveled to the German Institute for Sex ual Science and reportedly expressed there his pride that his government had abolished the tsarist penalties against same-sex love. He stated that “no unhappy consequences of any kind whatsoever have resulted from the elimination of the offending paragraph, nor has the wish that the penalty in question be reintroduced been raised in any quarter.”
Also in 1923, Dr. Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Soviet Hygiene, published a pamphlet titled “The Sexual Revolution in Russia.” It stated, “Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle: it declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, as long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon.”
And the pamphlet spelled this out clearly, “Concerning homosexuality, sod omy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality–Soviet legislation treats these the same as so-called ‘natural’ intercourse.”
