Towards a Gay Communism

by Mario Mieli

The accusation of plagio, moreover, can always be injected to liven up the charges against someone like Braibanti.49

  But if present Italian legislation is relatively permissive as far as homosexuality is concerned, repression by the police is severe indeed. Moreover, if the law only indirectly threatens to punish, moral norms proclaim the conscious internalisation of a far more severe law.

  In the course of the last thirty years, there have been various attempts to introduce specific anti-gay penalties. On 5 April 1972, for example, the Italian Centre of Sexology50 organised the first international festival of sexology at San Remo, at which certain people declared their ‘intention to collect . . . information to support a legislative proposal by the Social-Democrat party which would put homosexuality outside the law’.51

  A similar situation obtains in France. For a whole century, until the Vichy regime, there seem to have been no condemnations expressly for homosexuality. On 6 August 1942, however, Marshal Pétain published an anti-gay decree. Guy Hocquenghem has shown how the new French penal code drawn up after the Liberation contained an article that reproduced the fascist decree almost word for word. Article 331 of this code, adopted on 8 February 1945, punishes with ‘a term of imprisonment from six months to three years . . . whosoever will have committed an indecent or unnatural act with a person of the same sex, under the age of twenty-one’. A second law on homosexuality, this time phrased in terms of ‘public indecency’, was voted in 1960 after the return of De Gaulle. Up till then, the penal code had not distinguished between homosexual and heterosexual ‘indecency’. Article 330, paragraph 2 of the law of 25 November 1960, however, prescribes that: ‘When the public indecency consists of an unnatural act with an individual of the same sex, the penalty will be a term of imprisonment from six months to three years and a fine of 1,000 to 15,000 francs’. As Hocquenghem points out, heterosexual indecency is cheaper: a 500 to 4,500 francs fine only.52

  In 1964, the French courts condemned 331 people for ‘unnatural’ acts, rising to 424 in 1966. A bitter police persecution continued to be waged against what deputy Paul Mirguet classed alongside tuberculosis and alcoholism as one of the most dangerous ‘social diseases’ (18 July 1961). The Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire later adopted this phrase as the title of their first newspaper, ‘Le Fléau Social’.

  In the Federal Republic of Germany, it was only recently (in 1969, and again in 1973) that the Bundestag modified paragraph 175 of the penal code that had made homosexual relations between males a criminal offence, although lesbian relations were not included.

  Yet Germany was the country that had seen the first formation, anywhere in the world, of a gay liberation movement, at the end of the nineteenth century – even if this did have a ‘petty-bourgeois democratic character’, as Thorsten Graf and Mimi Steglitz put it.53 In 1897, two years after the death of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the great pioneer in the struggle for homosexual liberation in Germany, the first official organisation seeking equal rights for gays, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, was founded in Berlin.54 This committee was set up and led for thirty-five years by Magnus Hirschfeld, author, among other works, of a kind of encyclopedia of homosexuality titled, Male and Female Homosexuality.55 The main activity of this organisation, for three decades, was a petition against paragraph 175 of the Prussian legal code. The signatories of this petition were not only homosexuals. It was signed by some six thousand ‘personalities’ of the day, half of these being doctors. On 13 January 1898 the Social-Democrat leader August Bebel took the floor in the Reichstag to support the petition, which Kautsky and Bernstein had also signed.

  During the Weimar period in Berlin, the homosexual question became highly topical, and it seems to have been discussed on all sides.56 In December 1922, the Reichstag voted to draw the petition to the attention of the government, but the government rejected it, and for several years nothing more was done. Finally, ‘on 16 October 1929 the Reichstag commission on criminal law decided that, “immoral acts between males” should not be included in the new penal code. The provisions of paragraph 175 . . . were abrogated, with the support of both Communist and Social Democrat deputies’.57

  At the same time, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee sponsored a World League for Sexual Reform. In this cause, Hirschfeld and other fellow workers travelled across the globe, especially in the United States, but also to the Far East and even China, everywhere holding meetings on the theme of homosexual emancipation. At the time of its greatest expansion (in the late 1920s), some 130,000 people belonged to organisations affiliated to the World League for Sexual Reform.

  The triumph of fascism in 1933 prevented the abrogation of paragraph 175 from coming into force. Between 1933 and 1935, the gay movement was brutally smashed by the Nazis, and in 1935 the laws against homosexuality were not only reintroduced, but actually strengthened. The penal sanctions of paragraph 175 were extended to include the ‘crimes’ of homosexual kissing, embracing, and even fantasy.

  The last of a series of bulletins from the Scientific Humanitarian Committee was published in February 1933 by Kurt Hiller.58 Magnus Hirschfeld emigrated to France, where he died a short time later. In 1933, a Nazi attack wrecked the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, where both the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and the World League for Sexual Reform had their offices. More than ten thousand books in the Institute’s library were destroyed. A bust of Hirschfeld was carried in a torchlight procession and thrown onto the flames.

  In June 1934 Hitler decreed the purging of the SA, Ernst Röhm’s ‘brown-shirts’. In the ‘night of the long knives’, Röhm was caught by the SS in bed with a young man, and executed in the Munich plison of Stadelheim. The greater part of the SA leadership, who were holding a jamboree at Weissee, in Bavaria, were murdered on the spot. The yellow press organised ‘the stupid staging of “moral crimes” which had long been common knowledge’ (Thomas Mann).

  From then on, the concentration camps began to swell with homosexuals, their uniforms bearing on the chest and right trouser leg a pink triangle some seven centimetres high, to distinguish them from the Jews, Gypsies, political detainees, etc. Later, homosexuals from other countries occupied by the Nazis were sent to concentration camps in Germany and Austria.59 These ‘inverts’ were often castrated by doctors officially entrusted with this task; many died as a result of forced labour or disease, others ending up in the gas chambers. Today, the homosexual liberation groups in West Germany have adopted the pink triangle as their badge.

  We do not know exactly how many gay men and women were exterminated in the camps, though the homosexual victims of Nazism must have totalled some hundreds of thousands. ‘An exact estimate is impossible’, write John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, ‘because homosexuals, especially those in the military, were routinely shot without trial. The concentration camp records, which would have provided information, were systematically destroyed when the German defeat became apparent’.60

  We do know, however, that between 1937 and 1939 alone, some 24,450 men were condemned to imprisonment in Germany for ‘unnatural acts’.61

  In England, as mentioned above, the death penalty for the ‘crime of sodomy’ was abolished only in 1861 – and in Scotland not until 1889. In the late nineteenth century, an influential campaign for homosexual liberation was waged in Great Britain by the socialist writer Edward Carpenter, destined to occupy a leading place in the gay pantheon. His works were known in many countries, being translated into German, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Bulgarian, Russian and Japanese. The anti-homosexual hysteria that broke out in England after the Oscar Wilde trial prevented the publication in some countries of Carpenter’s masterwork Love’s Coming of Age. But several decades before, the appearance of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, whom Carpenter had twice met and highly esteemed, had already exerted a notable emancipating influence among Anglo-Saxon homosexuals.62

  The trial of Oscar Wilde, accused of ‘gross indecency’ for his homosexual relationships, took place
in London in 1895:

  The Wilde affair was a turning-point in the literary and social life of England, as the Dreyfus affair had been in France. Certainly England was not divided politically and there was not the slightest doubt about the guilt of the culprit, but in both cases the conservative elements felt themselves threatened.63

  It is said that trains leaving for the Continent were packed with anxious gays. And the Irish, too, began to stir, spreading the view that Wilde had been slandered by the ‘abominable English judges’. The same protests were issued in 1916, when one of the greatest Irish patriots, Sir Roger Casement, was charged with secret dealings with the German enemy. In order to prejudice the jury, the police issued to them Casement’s homosexual diary. The judges succeeded in antagonising his own supporters, both in Ireland and the United States, who publicly denounced his homosexuality. Still today, many Irish nationalists continue to maintain that the Casement diaries are not genuine, but were rather fabricated by the police and courts in order to slander and turn public opinion against him. In their eyes, it seems, homosexuality is incompatible with greatness of spirit and heroism.

  It was only in 1967 that homosexuality was legalised in England and Wales. Paradoxically, the anti-gay statute is still in force in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so that a homosexual who is a ‘free’ citizen in London and Cardiff, becomes a criminal if he moves to Edinburgh or Belfast! Nor does the legalisation of homoeroticism apply to the armed forces or merchant navy.

  Swiss laws permit ‘unnatural’ relations between adults, but ‘protect’ young people under twenty and punish ‘abuses’ of their ‘inexperience’ … gays can thus be condemned for making love with minors, even when these consent.

  Legislation in Denmark, Sweden and Holland is more permissive. These states contain the best-organised homosexual ghettoes in Europe, and within certain limits the police protect the good functioning of the ‘perverts’ ’ activities. Far smaller ghettoes have also grown up in France and West Germany. In England, on the other hand, a more overt repression is directed against the ghetto meeting places: there do not exist, at the present time, safe gay baths or orgy rooms in bars and dance halls. Each day, magistrates condemn dozens of homosexuals arrested on cruising grounds the night before.

  In Belgium, it was only in 1965 that a specific law on homosexuality was voted. Under the rubric of the ‘protection of youth’, this made a criminal offence of ‘indecent assault’ committed without violence against a youth of less than eighteen. And a certain Captain Tilmant of the Belgian police wrote in the Revue de la gendarmerie belge (1969, iv):

  For the purposes of adequate prevention and firm repression, the police force must endeavour to have a thorough knowledge of that secret world [of the homosexual] where, we understand, witnesses are rare and informants reticent . . . In the case of homosexuality more than in any other, the old adage ‘the police are only as good as their files’ takes on its full meaning.64

  In Austria, homosexuality was legalised only recently (1971). Even so, gay people are not allowed to form organisations of an explicitly homosexual character. The gay community in Vienna is one of the most constricted in Western Europe.

  In Japan, however, one need only reach the age of thirteen to be officially authorised to dispose of one’s body in gay relations; no other country in the world has such a low age of consent. Japan, in fact, still preserves a historic, if contradictory, tradition of tolerance towards homoeroticism.65

  In the USA, with the exception of Illinois, Connecticut, Hawaii, Oregon, Delaware, Texas, and (since 1975) North Dakota and California, homoeroticism is still considered a crime in its own right. (It was only recently that the Californian legislature repealed a law which had been on the statute books for more than a century, and punished homosexuality with penal servitude and castration.) The penalty provided for varies from State to State, but around ten years’ imprisonment is often prescribed. ‘Not only are these laws ineffective in preventing millions of Americans from engaging in the “crime” of homosexual love, they actually encourage other real crimes, like the blackmail of gays’.66

  Besides police violence and corruption, and the severe legal repression which American homosexuals face in all those states where homosexuality is still not legalised, the very existence of anti-gay laws poses a constant threat, and at times even strengthens the forms of open discrimination that gay people must confront every day. In some States, it is difficult for gays to find work; they must carefully conceal their sexual inclinations if they are to be accepted, and they are forced to live in constant fear of being discovered or sacked, with very little chance of finding new employment, given the cause of their dismissal. Besides, the majority of landlords are not prepared to rent housing to gay people; it is very difficult to find accommodation, except for those able to pay highly inflated rents. Even in the privacy of their own homes, homosexuals have to be extremely careful: there’s sure to be trouble if their neighbours find out that they are gay. They will very likely be denounced and evicted. And in schools, hospitals, prisons and barracks, if a homosexual is discovered, or someone is even suspected of homosexuality, he finds himself isolated, mocked, segregated and even beaten up by both his ‘superiors’ and his ‘comrades’.67

  But it is in no way as if the USA was particularly backward. We have to admit, in fact, that on the whole America today is the most gay of the countries under the real domination of capital. Even in countries where homosexuality is not considered a crime in itself, such as Italy for example, similar forms of discrimination are an everyday fact. We shall see shortly how the legalisation of homosexuality does not in fact bring full rehabilitation of homosexuals in the eyes of public opinion, nor does it do much to lighten the burden of repression that weighs on their shoulders.

  In very many other countries, homosexuality is still completely outlawed. This is the case, for example, in Spain,68 Portugal, Greece, and Israel,69 not to mention the ‘socialist’ or Third World countries. It is worth mentioning the official reply of the German Democratic Republic to a letter from the international liaison group of London GLF in February 1972, which reveals how ‘socialist’ East Germany deals with the problem of homosexuality. According to that country’s official representative, the problem does not exist there, as there are no homosexuals.70 No comment.71

  As far as the USSR is concerned, the tsarist legislation against homosexuality was repealed in December 1917. This testifies to a certain relaxation towards homoeroticism on the part of the proletarian state power at the time of its birth (and this in a country that had passed suddenly from feudal to socialist legislation). In a pamphlet titled The Sexual Revolution in Russia (1923), Dr Grigorii Batkis, director of the Institute of Social Hygiene in Moscow, wrote:

  Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offences against public morality – Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called ‘natural’ intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters. Only when there’s use of force or duress, as in general when there’s an injury or encroachment upon the rights of another person, is there a question of criminal prosecution.72

  When the Soviet Union sent delegates to the first international congress of the World League for Sexual Reform held in Berlin in 1921, an increasingly clear counter-revolutionary tendency had started to proliferate in Russia. The defeat of the revolution in central Europe dealt the Soviet Union a blow that led to the establishment of a bureaucratic capitalism.73 But the USSR continued to send delegates to successive international congresses of the League (held in Copenhagen in 1928, London in 1929, and Vienna in 1930; a fifth congress, originally due to be held in Moscow on the theme of ‘Marxism and Sexual Problems’, was in the event held in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1932).

  The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, published in 1930, showed how the USSR, while now entering into the years of full counter-revolution, still maintained at this time an at
titude of ‘toleration’ towards homoeroticism:

  In the advanced capitalist countries, the struggle for the abolition of these hypocritical laws is at present far from over. In Germany, for example, Magnus Hirschfeld is leading an especially fierce and not unsuccessful struggle to abolish the law against homosexuality . . . it is already obvious that the Soviet evaluation of the features and characteristics of homosexuals is completely different from the West’s evaluation. While understanding the wrongness of the development of homosexuality, society does not place and cannot place blame for it on those who exhibit it. This breaks down to a significant degree the wall which actually arises between the homosexual and society and forces the former to delve deeply into himself.74

  But, suddenly, the full weight of the counter-revolution came down upon Soviet gays. In March 1934, a law was introduced in the Russian Federal Republic providing up to eight years’ imprisonment for homosexual acts. This law was the result of Stalin’s personal intervention. Its definition of homosexuality was confined to males. The non-Russian republics were subsequently requested to inscribe this statute in their own legal codes without modification. The Soviet press launched a vicious campaign against homosexuality, now defined as a symptom of the ‘degeneration of the fascist bourgeoisie’. In both tone and content, this attack was virtually identical to the anti-gay campaign waged at the same time by the German Nazis. And as in Germany, so in the Soviet Union too, the persecution went unheard. Those arrested included a large number of writers, musicians and other artists; they were condemned to various terms of imprisonment or deported to Siberia. These mass arrests led to panic among Soviet homosexuals, and were also followed by a large number of suicides in the Red Army. For any itching of the ass, Stalin prescribed extermination: capital can be sneaky, after all …

  Today, Soviet doctors are not even aware of the etymological roots of the term ‘homosexuality’. Thus according to the third (1971) edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia: