The following are remarks at the memorial service for Comrade Bob McCubbin, held on March 21, 2026, at the People’s Forum in New York City. Bob McCubbin was a pioneering theorist of LGBTQIA+ liberation, author of the groundbreaking 1976 work “The Gay Question: A Marxist Appraisal,” and a tireless organizer who built branches of revolutionary organization with nothing but knowledge, passion, and commitment.
From the Stonewall era through his final days organizing at San Diego Pride 2025, Bob never wavered in his belief that queer liberation was inseparable from the fight against capitalism and imperialism.
Gregory E. Williams is a longtime food service worker from south Louisiana now working in public health. He is co-editor of Struggle-La Lucha magazine and a member of the Struggle for Socialism Party.
Hi, comrades. First of all, most of you don’t know me — I’m Gregory from New Orleans. I’m bringing a message from Workers Voice Socialist Movement in New Orleans, which includes a former comrade of many of you, Gavrielle Gemma. The first thing I’m going to read is the statement they wrote.
“Bob’s groundbreaking pamphlet, published by World View Press and encouraged by Sam Marcy, then chairman of Workers World Party, sent an electric wave through the U.S. and international communist movement. Bob demonstrated how LGBTQ oppression arose out of class society — but that before class society, LGBTQ identity was an integral, accepted, and ordinary part of human society for thousands of years.
“Bob lifted the dusty thinking off our minds to understand that all gender oppression was the result of the rulers — be they slaveholder over slave, feudal monarchy over serf, or capitalist over worker. He showed that the exploiting class imposed deadly bigotry — often using their religious accomplices — in order to divide society and accumulate wealth. Bob advocated fighting for every inch of LGBTQ rights while aiming to overthrow the exploiters and all their rotten bigotry and death.
“He understood, with proof, that by overthrowing the exploiting class, humanity can return to a natural state of peace, respect, genuine love, and prosperity — first by building socialism, a society run by the formerly exploited and abused workers and oppressed. Bob’s work was an act of liberation for the LGBTQ population and an act of liberation for the straight population as well, destroying repressive ideas about sexuality and gender. Bob McCubbin, ¡presente!”
And here is what I wrote as a member of the Struggle for Socialism Party.
Bob McCubbin’s 1976 pamphlet “The Gay Question” — later retitled “The Roots of Lesbian and Gay Oppression” — came out 10 years before I was born. So I didn’t experience the impact it had on the movement at the time. But as a young queer person entering the movement, I benefited from his influence without knowing it. I came on the scene taking it for granted that Marxism and LGBTQ+ liberation went hand in hand.
I didn’t know anything about Bob until about 2018. At that time, I was part of a socialist collective in New Orleans, and we had decided to hold an LGBTQ+ study group. Around that same period, we also organized our first Take Back Pride contingent, which marched ahead of the city’s official Pride parade — and I think Bob would have appreciated that.
I was tasked with giving a presentation as part of a study group on LGBTQ+ liberation, and I was trying to figure out where to start. Comrade Gav gave me a copy of The Roots of Lesbian and Gay Oppression. She said, “you need to read this.” So I did. And I was blown away.
Bob explained all this history, showed how all these struggles are interconnected, and laid out how we have to fight back — all in a very accessible way. I used this framework in my class presentation, and the response from the other comrades was great. Together, we were developing a deeper understanding.
Bob lived a revolutionary life and continued to develop his own understanding, assimilating new information from science, academia, and especially from the struggle itself. This is why in 2019 he published “The Social Evolution of Humanity” — updating his analysis and making it accessible to new generations.
Bob was also very encouraging to me personally in helping raise funds for our delegation that went to Cuba in 2023 — the U.S. Friends Against Homophobia and Transphobia delegation that went to learn about Cuba’s new Familes Code. Melinda was the key organizer of that trip. Bob helped make it a reality.
I was fortunate to interview Bob last year for the Pride issue of Struggle–La Lucha. I asked him about his past as an activist and a writer, but also about the current wave of attacks against LGBTQ+ people — especially trans people — and about the threat of fascism in the U.S. and other capitalist countries.
He said: “What we’re facing right now parallels Nazi 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 on 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.”
As we can see, Bob was laser-focused on the tasks at hand: beating back this brutal, vile offensive from the ruling class. But it wasn’t just about this one offensive. Bob believed that we actually can win, that we can overthrow this system and replace it with one that’s humane and meets everybody’s needs. And that system is called socialism. It’s not a dirty word anymore.
Working-class people look around them today, and they’re disgusted by what they see. What kind of system denies people food when there’s plenty to go around? What kind of system produces war for profit? What kind of society tolerates a military that blows up schoolchildren like they were targets in a video game? What kind of society allows a man like Jeffrey Epstein to amass so much money that he can buy his own private island to abuse women and girls? What kind of society allows a handful of rich people to destroy the planet and treat human beings as objects?
This is a social order that is rotten and ready to be overthrown.
Bob McCubbin took the long view. He looked back into human history and prehistory, showing that all of this horrible oppression grew from class society, which has transformed through stages before reaching its current form as a global capitalist-imperialist system. And now humanity is on the brink. But Bob showed that things don’t have to be this way.
Things were different in the past. The earliest forms of society were characterized by cooperation and equality. And in modern times, socialist revolutions — like Cuba’s — have resulted in huge strides in eliminating oppression and exploitation.
Bob showed us that there was a time before class – before patriarchy. And there will be a time after.
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