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The left — above all the Italian Communist Party, but also all the self-proclaimed revolutionary organisations — were slow to adopt even an attitude of 'protection' towards gays. For a long time they simply repressed homosexuality directly, negating it by exalting the tough, virile figure of the productive (and evidently reproductive) worker. They ridiculed homosexuals, defining them as an expression of the corruption and decadence of bourgeois society, thus making their own contribution to confirming gays in an attitude that is in some respects counter-revolutionary. They put forward an image of revolution that is grotesquely bigoted and repressive (based on sacrifice and on the infernal proletarian family) and a caricature of virility (based on productive-reproductive labour and on brute militarised violence), and they held up the model of those countries defined as socialist, who liquidate homosexuals in concentration camps or 're-education centres', such as Cuba or China. It is scarcely surprising, then, that gay people saw only the system itself as their 'salvation'.
When the homosexual liberation movement started in Italy, the left did their best to induce it to silence and discourage it. We can all cite an endless series of insults, provocations and even physical attacks from militants of the left. Those of us who belonged for a while to such groups know very well the sum of humiliations and frustrations involved in being a gay activist in the heterosexual left.
The left thus did all it could to extinguish our movement. They stubbornly characterised it as 'petty-bourgeois' at the very time that we were starting to come out in a revolutionary way. As far back as 1971, Joe Fallisi could write that the left was concerned above all to 'modernise reformist politics and impose (in the heaven of the Spectacle) new ideological images of the "challenger", the "tough guy", the "extra-parliamentarist", the "new partisan".' And if the reformist politics of the left are phallocentric and heterosexual, their ideological counterpart was the 'tough guy with a big cock and muscles of steel', who sets even the fascist bullies to flight. [16] It is no accident that the extra-parliamentary groups of yesterday are today seated in Parliament.
Today, the real revolutionary movement includes above all else the movement of women and gays, in struggle against the system and the heterosexual phallocentrism that upholds it, chaining to it the (male) proletariat itself. The organisations of the left, on the other hand, essentially male and male supremacist, heterosexual and anti-homosexual, support the public and private capitalist Norm, and hence the system itself. The movement of revolutionary women has shaken the entire society, putting in crisis even those groups who call themselves revolutionary and yet have so far been ramparts of male supremacist bigotry. Even the movement of conscious homosexuals, revolutionary or at least open to a vision of themselves and the world that is different from the traditional one, can no longer be simply neglected by the left politicos. The parties of the left, great and small, now have to try and recuperate homosexuals too, though I think Stalin would still turn in his grave at the very idea.
The heterosexual left, in dealing with the homosexual question, is trying a similar recuperation, if on a lesser scale, to that which it has effected vis-a-vis feminism. Up till only recently, the thieving and 'fascist' government, for the extra-parliamentary left, was also obviously 'queer'. Today, however, it seems even a gay person can prove himself a 'good comrade', a 'valuable activist in the service of the proletariat', while it is also opportune that all 'good comrades' should begin to take account of the contradictions inherent in the sexual sphere. The contrast is blatant. On the one hand, the term 'queer' is used as an insult; on the other, the wolf dresses up as a lamb, preaching acceptance and understanding for homosexual comrades.
For almost all activists in these groups, the homosexual question is a problem of secondary importance, 'superstructural' and involving only a minority. 'We must tolerate homosexuals, so that they don't cause trouble by questioning our heterosexuality and pretending that we too would like to get fucked in the arse'. This last type of reaction enables us to grasp, behind the appearance of a new and more open attitude, the really closed mentality of the heterosexual 'comrades'. And, as a general rule, I would reply : Dear comrade, you are upset when someone questions the repression of your homosexual desire ? And don't tell me : 'You can do what you like among yourselves, but don't interfere with me', when you are not free to desire me, to make love with me, to enjoy sensual communication between your body and mine; when you rule out the possibility of sexual relations with me. If you are not free, then how can I be free ? Revolutionary freedom is not something individual, but a relation of recipocity : my homosexuality is your homosexuality.
I believe that homosexuals are revolutionary today in as much as we have overcome politics. The revolution for which we are fighting is among other things the negation of all male supremacist political rackets (based among other things on sublimated homosexuality), since it is the negation and overcoming of capital and its politics, which find their way into all groups of the left, sustaining them and making them counter-revolutionary.
My arsehole doesn't want to be political, it is not for sale to any racket of the left in exchange for a bit of putrid opportunist political 'protection'. While the arseholes of the 'comrades' in the groups will be revolutionary only when they have managed to enjoy them with others, and when they have stopped covering their behinds with the ideology of tolerance for the queers. As long as they hide behind the shield of politics, the heterosexual 'comrades' will not know what is hidden within their own thighs.
As always, it is only rather belatedly, in the wake of the 'enlightened' bourgeoisie, that the left-wing groups have begun to play the game of capitalist tolerance. From declared hangmen, and a thousand times more repugnant than the hustlers and fascists, given all their (ideological) declarations of revolution, the activists of these groups have transformed themselves into 'open' debaters with homosexuals. They fantasise about becoming well-meaning and tolerant protectors of the 'deviant', in this way gratifying their own virile image, already far too much on the decline, at a time when even the ultra-left have suddenly to improvise 'feminist' representatives for 'their' women. Moreover, the fantasy of protectors helps them to exorcise the problem of the repression of their own homoerotic desire. Under it all, the activists of the left always hope to become good policemen. They do not know that real policemen get in there more than they do, and that when this happens, they make love precisely with us gays. When will there be a free homosexual outlet for the activists of the ultra-left ?
As good policemen for the system, the grouplets are doing their utmost to construct an 'alternative' ghetto for us 'deviants', and since they do not want to pollute their serious and militaristic organisations with anything gay, they prefer to concede us free access to the rubbish-heap of the counterculture. For the time being, however, the left is more stupid and clumsy than the system's traditional Mafia, and in no position to create for us homosexuals attractive ghettoes comparable with those constructed by the capitalist 'perversion' industry. Anyone who says that we are 'paranoid' simply means that we are quick to grasp the insufferable atmosphere created by people who can scarcely even tolerate us, the hidden aggression of phallocentric 'comrades', the negation of homosexuality that — in the typical form of male bonding — both unites and divides them at the same time, and certainly divides them from us.
But times are finally changing. The groups are now giving us a certain space of our own : a weekly broadcast on the 'free' radio, and two or three regular pages in the underground press. This is a space well guarded by the policemen of the left, whose function is that of reinforcing the lack of confidence that gay people have in themselves, and convincing them of the need to put themselves in tow to (and at the whim of) this or that powerful protector. All the more so, in that 'If it wasn't for the left, we would have fascism'- a new scarecrow to replace that of revolution, so that everyone, homosexuals included, will remain well lined up, separate and tidy on the democratic and anti-fascist parliamentary benches.
Those homosexuals who appeal to the left are only preparing a new prison for themselves, providing new energy to keep alive these organisations and the male supremacist, anti-woman and inhuman ideology that they propound.
We conscious homosexuals can find the strength to defend ourselves and to live in this homicidal and homocidal society only in ourselves. No kind of delegation is possible any more. Paternalism and appeal to the democratic pretensions of the left-wing groups can only construct a new ghetto. Only an intransigence that leads us to tell things they way they are, and to act together in a coherent way without renouncing any aspect of the communist world that we bear within us — only this can put in crisis, a gay crisis, the men of the political organisations, forcing them to abandon their role and thus to abandon these organisations. Only the strength and determination of the oppressed, and his power of fascination that leads his oppressor to recognise himself in him and to recognise in him his own desire, can direct the violence of gay people (up till now almost always turned against ourselves), and the violence of youths who are anti-homosexual but homosexual underneath (up till now turned against open gays), against the system that oppresses both the victim and the murderer, the system that is the real murderer, always unpunished and ever ready to defend itself against its victims. Only we homosexuals can discover and express this gay strength.
Finally, let us have done once and for all with the argument that the homosexual question is 'superstructural', and that priority should be given to the socio-economic (structural) level over the sexual struggle. Leaving aside the critique, no matter how important, of the mechanistic and non-dialectical sclerosis, among many so-called Marxists, of the concepts of 'structure' and 'superstructure', it is a grievous mistake to continue to treat the sexual question as superstructural, given that labour itself, and hence the entire economic structure of society, depends on the sublimation of Eros. Sexuality is hidden at the base of the economy, so that Eros is actually substructural.
Even before this conception of the psychoanalytic matrix of economics and the fundamental function of libido in the process of civilisation, Marxism already maintained the structural character of the sexual function, though as yet from a certain historically limited standpoint, since, among other things, this was heterosexual and thus partially ideological. As Engels wrote :
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character : on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organisation under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production. [17]
Here we can see how the rigidly heterosexual social institutions of nineteenth-century Europe led Engels to see sexuality as a determining moment of history only in its procreative role. Engels referred in particular to the men of ancient Greece who 'fell into the abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede'. [18] Today, the materialist conception has recognised the structural importance of desire, which cannot be reduced to coincide with the procreative instinct alone. And on the other hand, our revolutionary critique must eliminate the present prejudices of Marxism itself, its masculine spirit that would 'ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a manly resolution... ' [19]
As for our heterosexual 'comrades', only if they free themselves from their structural fixations, from the mental superstructure that leads them to act in the way that the system allows, will they be able to grasp why the liberation of homosexuality is indispensable to human emancipation as a whole. At the present time, it is above all the repression of their own gay desire and their acceptance of the anti-homosexual taboo so dear to the system that leads them to treat the homosexual question in a capitalist fashion, and essentially to negate it.
[16] Joe Fallisi, 'Lettera a Irene', Comune Futura 2, November 1976.
[17] Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, London, 1972, pp.71-72.
[18] ibid., p.128.
[19] Paul Lafargue, op. cit., p.66.
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