Currents

As of January 1st, 2024, same-sex couples are legally able to marry in Estonia. The significance of this development may be lost on many. After all, Estonia is a country of just 1.3 million people and one that arrived rather late to this party — more than 35 countries had previously enacted similar policies. But Estonia is the first ex-Soviet Bloc state to legalize same-sex marriage. Throughout the rest of the former Soviet Union, LGBT rights are little more than a dream. Russia, in particular, has made a show of criminalizing and openly persecuting LGBT people. Nevertheless, if asked about the state of LGBT rights in the Western world, many progressives seem to see nothing but doom and gloom. Coupled with their denial of Western progress is a rewriting of the historical track record of socialist and communist countries on LGBT issues. “The modern movement for queer liberation”, we are told, “wouldn’t exist without” communist ideology. LGBT rights, these activists insist, are a product of socialist politics. They even go as far as to frame communist states as “havens for LGBTQ rights.”

This historical revisionism not only erases the reality of non-leftist LGBT people, it also tethers being LGBT to a very particular kind of politics that is completely divorced from the realities of history. Communism was never the answer for improving LGBT people’s lot in life — indeed, quite the opposite: the argument that “capitalism led to gay rights” is very strong. The belief that the further left a society moves, the better off LGBT people will be simply isn’t the case. This is not to say that Western capitalist democracies have always been bastions of LGBT rights, but if one is to make a qualitative comparison between the West and every major communist country of the last century, the latter will lose the human rights contest by a country mile.

One of the most infamous examples was Fidel Castro’s abysmal treatment of gay and bi people in Cuba during his reign. Castro’s Cuba had laws that included throwing LGBT people into literal concentration camps called the Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (or UMAPs) during the height of Cold War tensions in the 1960s. Even after the UMAPs were closed down, repression continued. As James Kirchick reported in a 2016 Daily Beast retrospective in response to Castro’s death, the Cuban government “continued to repress gay men as ideologically subversive elements,” banned them “from joining the Communist Party,” and deprived them of the ability to work. Kirchick quotes the famed gay Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas — who was powerfully portrayed by Javier Bardem in the 2000 film Before Night Falls, based on Arenas’ autobiography — about his experience being jailed for his sexuality:

“It was a sweltering place without a bathroom. Gays were not treated like human beings, they were treated like beasts. They were the last ones to come out for meals, so we saw them walk by, and the most insignificant incident was an excuse to beat them mercilessly.”

This foul treatment led to the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 (made famous by the 1983 classic Scarface), in which Castro had over 125,000 Cubans he called “worms” exiled to the United States on makeshift rafts. These “worms” included criminals like Scarface’s Tony Montana, but also (in real life) thousands of gay and bisexual people. As Kirchick also reported, when the HIV/AIDS crisis hit, instead of staying callously silent (as Ronald Reagan did), Castro had HIV-positive patients interned in sanitariums and barred from leaving. During the last decades of his life, Castro finally reversed many discriminatory policies against the LGBT community and took responsibility for the rise in homophobia in Cuban culture and the horrendous mistreatment of LGBT people, but that’s nothing for misguided admirers to brag about. By the 21st century, all of the mea culpas in the world from Castro or his family couldn’t erase the terrorism committed against their own LGBT citizens in the name of failed utopian ideology. (As of the 2022 Cuban Family Code referendum, the current Cuban regime under Miguel Díaz-Canel has some of the most progressive LGBT laws in Latin America. Better late than never.)

Compare the Castro regime’s human rights violations to America’s treatment of LGBT people around the same time, and there was indeed heartless disregard and casual homophobia in the culture. There were moral panics such as the Lavender Scare, and hateful campaigns to demonize queerness in general and homosexuality in particular. But even back then, there were also thriving queer club scenes, neighborhoods, and celebrities. None of these things would have been possible in a place like Cuba.

If nothing else, the example of Cuba demonstrates that hostility toward LGBT people is most certainly possible in a communist society. But the problem with communist homophobia runs far deeper. It’s not just possible — it’s inevitable. Even when the tides of cultural fashion rebrand LGBT rights in a way that seems compatible with the larger communist cause, they are always at risk of being reframed as opposing the cause. To understand this dynamic and the fundamental and ideological incompatibility between LGBT rights and communism, we need to look no further than the Soviet Union.

In 1989, the Soviet Union — and European communism itself — was on the verge of total collapse. In the midst of this implosion, gay and bi Russians were experiencing waves of hatred and discrimination. According to a poll taken that year, homosexuals were the most hated group in Soviet society. 30% of respondents believed that gays needed to be “liquidated.” This was not a response to the ongoing collapse of the Soviet empire or of government itself, but rather part of a long-standing trend. But if one were to confine their examination of queerness in the Soviet Union only to its earliest years, they could be forgiven for coming away with a different impression.

Russian sodomy laws were put in place during the Tsarist era, starting with Peter I’s military ban on sodomy in 1716 and culminating in the 1832 passage of Nicholas I’s Article 995, which broadened the ban on muzhelozhstvo (meaning “men lying with men”) to the entire public. Positioning itself as antithetical to the Tsarist government, the new Bolshevik government after 1917 had plenty of incentive to reject these (and all other Tsarist) standards. In some cases, the Bolsheviks actively encouraged the opposite of whatever the Tsarist status quo was. This meant going further than simply repealing anti-sodomy laws. As historian Andrei Znamenski explains in his 2011 book Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia:

“In early Bolshevik Russia, very much like in Western countries in the 1960s, free love, contempt for so-called family values, and various projects of collective living ran amok. In fact, several Left-leaning theoreticians elevated sexual promiscuity to the level of the new Bolshevik morality. From time to time, pedestrians on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad and passengers in trams bumped into the naked bodies of nudists, who viewed their public exposure as a revolutionary act.”

This air of sexual revolution in the Soviet Union of the 1920s extended to the LGBT experience, at least in Russia proper and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, many of the other Soviet Republics — particularly the Muslim-dominated states like Azerbaijan in 1923, Uzbekistan in 1926, and Turkmenistan in 1927 — implemented new laws that made sodomy a criminal offense. This was likely due to central Soviet authorities exercising their control over sociocultural autonomy in these regions, such as banning the use of bachi, or feminine boys who dress as women and perform for men as dancers and prostitutes. The Soviet authorities saw practices that involved same-sex relations as “survivals of primitive custom.” In time, these “modernizing” efforts of the early Soviet Union took on a moral and ideological dimension, leading to the institutionalized homophobia that kicked into high gear after Joseph Stalin took power in 1927.

On March 7th, 1934, the Soviet Union’s first nationwide anti-sodomy law, known as Article 121, was put in place, which particularly targeted gay and bisexual men. If caught engaging in same-sex relations, men (and occasionally women) would face up to five years in prison with hard labor, which often meant being shipped to a gulag. According to the Office of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, “During the Soviet regime, Western observers believed that 800 to 1,000 men were imprisoned each year under Article 121.” The brutality of the gulag system, established by Vladimir Lenin and exacerbated by Stalin, is well-documented, especially in Aleksandr Solzhenitsy’s famous account, The Gulag Archipelago (1973). According to historian Golfo Alexopoulos in her book Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin’s Gulag (2017), of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag system between 1930 and 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million perished, thousands of whom were LGBT.

Soviet-era Gulag living quarters. Source: The Daily Mail.

The question of why Stalin’s regime felt the need to target the Soviet Union’s gay and bi folks is answered by looking at the communist rhetoric of the era, as well as the growing tension between the Soviet Union and the world’s other totalitarian system in vogue at the time — fascism. Communists believed that homosexuality was evidence of bourgeois decadence among the aristocracy and, of course, among fascists. Famed Soviet propagandist Maxim Gorky made this case in an article titled “Proletarian Humanism”, published in both Pravda and Izvestia in 1934. In it, he wrote that the “corrupting influence of fascism” was taking hold in Europe and that the Soviet Union did not have the same problem. He elaborated:

“In the land where the proletariat governs courageously [also translated as ‘manfully’] and successfully, homosexuality, with its corrupting effect on the young, is considered a social crime punishable under the law. By contrast, the ‘cultivated land’ of the great philosophers, scholars, and musicians [referring here to Nazi Germany], it is practiced freely and with impunity. There is already a sarcastic saying: ‘Destroy homosexuals — fascism will disappear.’”

The original anti-fascists wanted homosexuality eradicated. This association between fascism and homosexuality would appear even more ironic two decades later in the United States, where Senator Joe McCarthy associated communism with homosexuality. However, Soviet propaganda did not merely associate fascism with homosexuality as a means to delegitimize it — they also associated homosexuality with capitalism. As historian Laura Engelstein notes, Justice Commissar Nikolai Krylenko “asserted that homosexuality was a noxious remnant of the capitalist past” when he claimed the following:

“The laboring masses believe in normal relations between the sexes and are building their society on healthy principles. In this environment, there is no place for such effete gentlemen. Who provides our main clientele for such affairs? The laboring masses? No! The déclassé riff-raff [those having fallen in social status], whether from the dregs of society or the remnants of the exploiting classes. With nowhere to turn, they take up pederasty. In their company, in foul secret dens, another kind of work also takes place, using this pretext — counter-revolutionary work. These are people who destabilize the new social relations we are trying to establish between people, between men and women, within the laboring masses. And therefore, it is these gentlemen whom we prosecute in court and deprive of five years of freedom.”

Homosexuality became a feature of Soviet paranoia about subversion from within from both fascists and capitalists and thus, anti-LGBT bigotry became a feature of communism in practice, not merely a bug. Some historians, like those who collaborated on the 1990 anthology Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, argued that much of the anti-LGBT animus came not from socialist ideology itself, but from opportunism as a means to crush dissidents to Stalin’s authority. However, in 1993, newly declassified Soviet documents showed that Stalin demanded the anti-sodomy law be put in place after the deputy secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda led a series of raids in which hundreds of gay men were arrested for what he termed “pederast activism” as well as espionage. In other words, ulterior motives about destroying ideological enemies are less likely than Stalin seeing homosexuality as a hindrance to his utopian vision.

The Soviet Union’s hostility toward homosexual behavior did not go unnoticed by LGBT communists of the time. The famous British communist activist and openly gay writer Harry Whyte wrote a letter to Stalin in 1934, protesting the new anti-sodomy laws as “absurd and unjust”, arguing that it “contradict[ed] the basic principle of the previous law” that allowed for same-sex relations within the Soviet Union. He attempted to appeal to Stalin’s sense of solidarity with non-Soviet communists, proclaiming,

“I would like to point out that I view the condition of homosexuals who are either of working-class origin or workers themselves to be analogous to the condition of women under the capitalist regime and the colored races who are oppressed by imperialism. This condition is likewise similar in many ways to the condition of the Jews under Hitler’s dictatorship, and in general it is not hard to see in it an analogy with the condition of any social stratum subjected to exploitation and persecution under capitalist domination. […] One cannot find any justification for declaring [homosexuals] criminally liable for their distinguishing traits, traits for whose creation they bear no measure of responsibility and which they are incapable of changing even if they wanted to.”

Stalin’s response was to bark at his underlings to archive the letter, referring to Whyte as “an idiot and a degenerate.”

As morally unthinkable as anti-LGBT bigotry in a communist country was to Western communists like Whyte, homosexuality remained illegal for the regime’s entire lifespan. In a sense, Whyte’s protestations mirror those of some LGBT activists today who believe that communism is the way forward. The difference is that Whyte had the opportunity to see the prospect of LGBT rights in a communist society die, while most 21st century communists have no such real-time reality check in their TikTok feeds. Whyte, having written his letter as an expat living in Russia, had the good sense to leave the country in which he had built up so much hope. There is no evidence he ever completely gave up his dream of a communist utopia, but like many more principled Western leftists, he knew a failed project when he saw one. Instead of settling back into a normal life in Britain, Whyte lived on the move, eventually dying in 1960 under mysterious circumstances in Istanbul.

The truth is that in practice, homosexuality and bisexuality represented the kind of individual freedom that has always been anathema to the communist project, whether under Stalin, Castro, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, or any other regime. Whether or not some hypothetical future communist society might accept same-sex relations, the fact remains that the LGBT rights we enjoy today are a function of liberal values like individualism, equality before the law, and civil liberties that can only exist in a free society. Communism, like all collectivist and utopian ideologies, cannot allow for silly little frivolities like personal freedom to get in the way of “progress.”

It may seem hard to imagine today’s Western far-leftists, in the event that their much pined-for revolution came to pass, ever smashing LGBT rights beneath their jackboots the way previous generations of communists have. But history has shown that when you’re in the game of subordinating individual freedom in the service of some imagined collective march toward progress, sexual freedom is rarely spared. George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That’s especially true for those who whitewash the past.

Published May 8, 2024