gay liberation

Published by Chris Shutes in Berkeley, CA, USA; May 1979.

"Everything is said about the spectacle except what it always & fundamentally is: the colonization of the point of view of the individual by the point of view of the collectivity." Daniel Denevert

On the 27th June, 1969 as part of its policy of raiding and closing Gay Bars, the New York Police arrived at the Stonewall Inn to rough up the customers and make a few arrests. New York’s finest encountered black and white drag queens, gay men and lesbians, sick of police brutality, and who on being physically provoked fought back.

As reported previously on libcom.org, the conflict within Canada Post began on October 26 when the letter carrier refused to process a pamphlet, published by a Baptist Mission in Ontario, entitled, “The Prophetic Word: The Plague of this 21st Century: The Consequences of the sin of Homosexuality (AIDS).”

Neither rain, nor hail, nor sleet, nor snow nor refusal to deliver an anti-gay pamphlet will keep the mail from getting through.

That seemed to be the message yesterday from Canada Post in reacting to a brief walkout over the letter carriers union's refusal to deliver a pamphlet the union regards as "homophobic" and "hate mail."

Sir Iqbal Sacranie was to have been a keynote speaker at a trade union-sponsored Unite Against Fascism conference at the weekend; however his views on homosexuality were widely condemned as echoing the anti-gay hatred of the BNP.

'Towards a Gay Communism' was originally the last chapter of Mario Mieli's book 'Homosexuality & Liberation "” Elements of a gay critique', first published in Italy as 'Elementi di critica omosessuale' [Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1977]. An English translation of the entire book was made by David Fernbach [London: Gay Men's Press, 1980]. The same year this chapter was reprinted as a pamphlet [London: pirate productions, 1980]

Daniel Guerin was born in Paris on 19th May 1904. His family was well-off, with a liberal and Dreyfusard* outlook. His family background was conducive to a vivid interest in the arts, letters and music. He distinguished himself at university. Reading Marx, Proudhon, Sorel, Lenin and Trotsky in 1930, Guerin broke with his bourgeois upbringing and began to be active on the left.

Senna Hoy was born Johannes Holzmann in 1882 into a well-off Jewish family. He is mentioned as a member of Helen Blavatsky’s Theosophical circle in Berlin in 1903, when he would have been eighteen.