Gay communist
Innovative and controversial in its day, Towards a Queer Communism is among other things a vivid document of a time when sexual liberation was a wing of the revolutionary struggle. An idiosyncratic synthesis of 1970s Italian radicalism, psychoanalysis, and Marxist feminism, Mieli’s provocation both shows his vintage and retains a critical urgency. The following is an excerpt from a new translation from Pluto Press.
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Ibelieve that this conclusion does not add anything new to what has been discussed and maintained in the preceding pages. It is simply a concise synthesis of the main perspectives that arise from an analysis of the lgbtq+ situation. Those who acquire followed me to this point, therefore, will detect in these last pages a kind of recapitulation of what they should by now have understood. For those who instead have started by casting an eye at the conclusiAs lengthy as women reject or fear the sexual approach of another woman, as long as men are at pains to guarantee and defend the virginity of their own asshole, the reign of release will not have been attained; this is the certainty from which the homosexual perspective illuminates the future. —Mario Rossi
What Happened When a Gay Communist Wrote to Stalin
Published: May 5, 2022written by Stefan Guzvica, PhD History, MA Comparative History
During his lifetime, the Soviet autocrat Joseph Stalin received many unusual letters: this practice of writing directly to their leader had its roots in Tsarism, and it continued after the Russian Revolution. It was not even uncommon to collect letters from eccentrics abroad. In 1931, for instance, an anonymous Egyptian wrote to Stalin asking if the Soviet Union had any interest in the development of his design for “death rays.” Nonetheless, the letter he received in the spring of 1934 must have stood out as questioning the stance of homosexuality in the Soviet Union. Wasting no time, the creator opened with a bombastic question, “can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?” The writer of the letter, Harry Whyte, was protesting a decree, passed just a month earlier, which proscribed criminal liability for homosexual acts.
Harry Whyte was a working-class gay man from Edinburgh, Scotland. Born in 1907, he left school at the age of sixteen to pursue a career in journalism, a rather unusual choice for youn
Zhou Enlai: Was Communist China's first premier gay?
According to Ms Tsoi, the dashing Zhou was already in love with Li, the 17 year-old son of a wealthy benefactor, who he had studied with at a prestigious, Western-style school in Tianjin.
During his years in the city, he also met Deng, an acquaintance who would one day be his wife.
But in 1918, says Ms Tsoi, Zhou's main ambition was to get a place at university in Japan, and to convince his beloved to join him there.
According to his diary, by August, he was devastated to hear that Li had been accepted at the University of Hong Kong, and planned to move there.
"I felt a terrible pain in my heart, all my happiness suddenly turned to dust, and with a shock like frosty water being poured down my back, I suddenly swooned," he wrote in an entry dated 26 August.
"I was absolutely unable to put the matter into words. I drifted off yet was unable to stay asleep. I was miserable!"
Ms Tsoi says she was unable to discover any evidence of a physical relationship between the two, or indeed written evidence of Li's romantic feelings toward Zhou.
It is just one of many interpretations of the missing p
Iron Curtain Project
Karol Radziszewski worries about the position of homosexual people in Poland. “A lot of older gay men considered Poland to be a safer environment for them during the communist era than in the current day,” he says in fluent English via Skype. The musician is the founder and publisher of DIK Fagazine, an artistic gay magazine on the former Eastern bloc, in which arty pictures of (semi-)naked men are alternated with in-depth interviews and features. In 2015, Radziszewski also founded The Queer Archives Institute, an archive for queer history in Eastern Europe. Since then, he has organized expositions on this subject around the world.
Forgotten History
Poland de-criminalized homosexuality in 1932, decades before many other European countries did. It gave the gay community a certain measure of freedom. It wasn’t so much that homosexuality was acknowledged as it was ignored. People simply pretended it didn’t exist. “A lot of gay men were married, but had sex with men on the side,” Radziszewski explains. “Homophobia came mostly from the church.”
Lukasz Sculz did study into homosexual media in communist Poland at the University of Antwerp. He thinks that when it co