Communist Party USA
The modern movement for queer liberation—or gay liberation to use the as-yet less inclusive terminology of the 1960s and ’70s—wouldn’t exist without the Communist Party USA. That might sound like a big claim to make, but it was Communist ideology and political strategy that provided the theoretical and practical architecture of the earliest effort to win gay equality in the United States—the Mattachine Society, a group whose ideas underpinned all the struggles and victories that have been won over the past half century. The Stonewall Rebellion is generally (and rightly) regarded as the moment when the fight for gay rights broke out into the mainstream, led by Black and brown trans women and drag queens in New York City. Credit is certainly due for figures like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and others who first had the courage to fight back against police repression that hot June night in…
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Queer liberation’s Communist Party roots