Following is part one of an interview with gay communist activist Bob McCubbin, who has organized and written political analysis since the 1960s. He is the author of the 2019 book, The Social Evolution of Humanity: Marx and Engels were right! For Pride month, Struggle-La Lucha writer Gregory E. Williams sat down with McCubbin to explore the revolutionary history of the LGBTQ+ struggle and what it means for today’s fight back.
- Part 1: Targeted by fascism, united by struggle: Bob McCubbin on defending trans rights and building class solidarity
- Part 2: Inside the Bay Area’s Gay Liberation Front with Bob McCubbin
- Part 3: Bob McCubbin on LGBTQ+ liberation and Marxist organizing
- Part 4: Leslie Feinberg, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and the radical legacy of LGBTQ+ communists
Gregory Williams: You were in the revolutionary movement at the time of Stonewall, and you’ve been in the struggle ever since. But what’s happening right now with all the fascist attacks that are coming down? Where’s that coming from, and what can we do about it?
Bob McCubbin: We should have a discussion about fascism, because it’s what we’re facing right now. And there are various ways to explain it. Scholars and revolutionaries who studied the fascist movement in Germany – which was in the leadership of the European imperialists – that was a form of fascism designed to crush a very strong workers’ movement in Germany, which was challenging the capitalists as a result of the First World War.
Germany was forced into a very difficult economic position. The workers’ movement grew and grew and became stronger and stronger. At a certain point, the German industrialists decided not to put up with it any longer because even by their own rules, the workers were gaining more and more political power, organizing in the communities and at the workplaces, etc.
So, they began breaking their own rules, but that’s just a part of it. Another part of it is their desire. The economy was terrible in Germany. Their desire was to place the blame elsewhere, always using scapegoats. That’s a favorite tactic of the ruling class, pointing the finger at others. And in this case, they tried to direct the anger of the German people against Jewish people, and also against homosexuals. In general, people of color were considered the enemy.
I hope everyone understands the significance of the concentration camps, which were terrorism. It’s going on right now, though; the same kind of genocidal terrorism is going on in Palestine, for example.
But getting back to fascism now, what we’re facing right now, it parallels Germany in the sense that the ruling class is pointing the finger at trans people and people of color as the source of the economic problems which are really based in the economic system itself, the system of private property and capitalist exploitation.
So, yes, we have to defend the trans community, we have to defend people of color. The U.S. contains oppressed nations that need liberation. They’re finding groups in society that are already denigrated and targeting them. It looks like everything’s on the chopping block in terms of illegality, the illegality of the current rulers of the United States.
It’s important for people to understand what we mean when we say the ruling class. Of course, it’s the billionaires. But they’re just window dressing, in a way. The ruling class includes the military-industrial complex, the industries that make money off war. The ruling class includes big banks and big industries in general. Together, they constitute the sources of oppression of the rest of us. We need to identify them, and they need to be targeted.
We don’t expect any sympathy from the ruling class. They have to be defeated and overthrown. They’re destroying the world. And they know it because their system is in crisis, and that’s why they’re stooping to the worst terrorist tactics, using racism, homophobia, transphobia, and whatever they think they can use to turn the workers against each other. We, on the other hand, are fighting for unity in our class and consciousness of the task ahead of us, which is to overthrow the capitalist system.
GW: The situation can change radically when there’s intense struggles, like in the 1960s. How did you find out about Stonewall in 1969, which was this earth-shaking moment?
BM: To understand the ‘60s, we have to look back at the ‘50s, which are really hard to reconstitute. They were so outrageously repressive. We’re talking about the period of McCarthyism, and preceding that was the return of hundreds of thousands of GIs from World War II looking for jobs. Now we’re talking about the mid-40s, and as a result of all of the class struggles that, to some extent, continued in the war, but definitely erupted very strongly after the war. And again, we have a ruling class confronted and organizing fascist tactics. I mean, McCarthyism was a form of fascism, with the ruling class fighting back against the rising workers’ movement. And the repression was incredible.
There’s an example, I think, that typifies the terror that gay people felt. I remember watching a television program. I think it was a Saturday afternoon, and we are talking about the early ‘60s. It was a student assembly at a high school somewhere in Florida, and the chief of police was speaking to an audience of about a thousand students. And I remember the words, not word by word exactly, but it was really terrifying. He looked out at the audience and said, “There are among you homosexuals, and they cannot be …” — well, whatever horrible and negative things he had to say about it. But he concluded by saying, “The person next to you may be a homosexual. And always remember, if you are a homosexual, you need to go to a police station and identify yourself.”
This was about 1964 and gives you a flavor of what the ‘60s were about, because the ‘60s were a response to the terrible repression of the ‘50s. The youth just wouldn’t have it. And that was the background to a countrywide and international youth rebellion. It was largely a cultural rebellion.
At the beginning of the ‘60s, very few people in the imperialist countries knew what or where Vietnam was. But the youth movement was beginning to develop a good political consciousness to the extent that, by the end of that decade, we were chanting, “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! The NLF is gonna win! Free Huey! Stop the attacks on the Black Panthers!” And all of that was happening in the youthful world, the world of the youth, the cultural background. And it was largely middle class, but some of the revolutionaries made a big mistake writing it off because it did not involve the working class per se. Although, of course, many of the youth were from working-class families.
But, in general, it was a task of educating the youth into revolutionary thought and class consciousness that was tremendously aided by the example of the Vietnamese and the example of the Panthers and the other Black revolutionary movements. A number of new Marxist-Leninist groups began organizing.
It was a fantastic time, and so when the young people at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, when they were confronted with the police, it was just one confrontation too many. Instead of accepting the repression, they fought back. It was beautiful and went on for about four evenings.
The New York Times reported on it in a small back-page column, “Homosexuals Riot in Village.” And there I was in Buffalo, probably at our party office, which was also where I lived, opening up the New York Times, reading this and thinking to myself, “Okay, now you need to make a decision.” What am I talking about? The fact that I was gay, and like most of the gay youth, I was largely in the closet. (And let’s start saying LGBTQ+. There’s been a whole series of vocabularies that have been used.) And anyway, there I was, a revolutionary, largely in the closet, and I had to decide what I was going to do.
I knew that I didn’t have the courage to face everyone. I mean, I’d grown up in Buffalo. I knew hundreds of people. I told the comrades I needed to leave Buffalo. I spent a year and a half in San Francisco, largely working with the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front. I was able to do organizing work in San Francisco, including LGBTQ+ organizing. And was making some progress in terms of organizing it, but the comrades in New York kept calling me, “We need you here, we need you here.” So, at the end of a year and a half, I moved to New York City.
And then that was a whole new stage of my life because working with the party was tremendous – rewarding and tremendously educational. And Dorothy Ballan – I always thought of Sam Marcy, Vincent Copeland, and Dorothy Ballan as the triumvirate of the party, because they were the leaders. They were products of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s, which meant that they had seen the power of the working class in the United States. They understood the potential for our class, as well as having experience in practical organizing. They were all organizers in the working class.
But unlike the other traditional socialist groups, they didn’t write off the youth movement as just a middle-class shindig or whatever it was. No, they understood there’s a revolution here. These youth are drawing their inspiration from the Vietnamese struggle, from the Black struggle. And I remember I was not present, but in the midst of this, right at the time of Stonewall, there was a conversation in the party headquarters, and one comrade was heard saying, about the Stonewall Rebellion, “A new front is opened in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.”
Well, maybe a little exaggerated, maybe a little too much, but the first organization was the Gay Liberation Front. Where did they pick that name from? From the NLF, the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, which was leading the struggle in the south of that country. That tells you something about the consciousness of the youth. Maybe a little bit idealistic, maybe a little bit overblown in some instances.
But I remember a leader of the party saying, “We should much prefer the slightly ultra-left youth to the conservative youth.” And I mean, there was a confidence there that we could win them to the class struggle, that they were already angry, they already knew the contradictions and the outrageous values of the capitalist system, and were ready to hear about something else, something to replace it with.
GW: Just the fact that those youth decided to call their organization the Gay Liberation Front shows how developed their consciousness was already despite coming out of McCarthyism, the extreme anti-communism and extreme homophobia and transphobia – we didn’t necessarily have these words. But in that moment of rebellion, they were able to break through that conditioning, even if they didn’t understand all the ins and outs of Marxist theory and everything that was going on in Vietnam. It’s a learning process.
They were able to put two and two together and see the commonality of those struggles. Because on the surface of it, you might think, “Well, what does the Vietnamese struggle have to do with the gay and lesbian struggle?” But they saw that, yeah, it is related. It actually is related, and not only is it related, but we can learn from each other’s struggles.
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