On Homosexuality - Revolutionary Union (1975)

On Homosexuality cover

"A Stalino-Leninist guide to love and sex." A homophobic American Maoist tract reprinted by mischief-making anarchists.

Author
Revolutionary Communist Party (USA)
Submitted by Fozzie on May 29, 2026

Content warning: homophobia, Maoism, speculation.

Libcom Introduction: What Is Going On Here?

Revolutionary Union was a Maoist group formed in the Bay Area of San Francisco in 1968. It reconstituted itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975.

The wildly homophobic Position Paper of the Revolutionary Union on Homosexuality and Gay Liberation was published in 1974, but not publicly distributed.1

The bigotry of the position paper is ably tackled by an article already on Libcom: Red Evangelicals: Genesis.

In April 1975 the position paper was republished in a curious edition in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is again credited to Revolutionary Union, but includes what I assume are a number of unusual additions:

  • An anti-Leninist introduction
  • "Address to those who think themselves Normal" - translation of text by Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire (a Parisian movement known for giving radical visibility to homosexuals during the 1970s in the wake of student and proletarian uprisings of 1968)
  • Several graphics and homophobic/sexist quotes by historical figures from the revolutionary movement
  • Detourned comics with quotes from the position paper
  • A three-page appendix on homophobia in Fidel Castro's Cuba
  • A final quote from Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire

The publication is a riot of colourful graphics, paper and inks, which suggests a creativity at odds with the usual Maoist pamphlets of the era.

Some of these additions are reproduced below and can be seen in full context in the attached PDF, which is regrettably in black and white only.

It's unclear who was responsible for this mischievous publication, which can only be seen as an attempt to expose the prejudiced views of so-called communists from a revolutionary queer perspective.

Sure enough:

The first rumbles of discontent in our group occurred around the issue of gay liberation and the relative importance of “oppressed nationalities” vs. the working class. There was a local newspaper/bookstore collective who were sympathetic to the Weatherpeople and some of our members hung out with them. The RU had already developed a rabidly anti-gay line ("homosexuality as bourgeois decadence"), and this proved to be a source of contention. At one point, some gay liberationists invaded our meeting and demanded to know our position on gays. Most people hemmed and hawed, but being an outspoken person (and feeling like we had nothing to hide), I spilled the beans to the general discomfiture of all. (As an interesting aside, some local anarchists somehow got a hold of the RU position paper on the “gay question", embellished it with sexist quotes from Kim Il Sung, Mao and Ho, and published it as “The Stalino-Leninist Guide to Love and Sex", to our immense chagrin.)

"I Was a Teenage Leninist" by Maoist Moonie, Popular Reality #16, December 1987 p62 .

Whodunnit?

There are few clues about the origins of A Stalino-Leninist guide to love and sex.

The translations from French are by Louis Landerson, a New York based Gay Liberation Front member and appear to be sourced from issue 13 of the California newspaper Gay Sunshine.3 So, not him.

There is no contact address, but the back cover says only "Ann Arbor, Michigan" above this cute graphic:

Ann Arbor is 40 miles west of Detroit, which is where anarchist newspaper Fifth Estate was based at the time. Fifth Estate distributed the On Homosexuality pamphlet from at least 1976 onwards.4

Full colour printing was unusual in US anarchist publications in the mid-1970s, especially beyond the front cover. One notable exception to this was the Detroit Printing Co-Operative which included Fredy Perlman as a member.5

"Stalino-Leninist" is an under-used epithet, which first appears on my bookshelf in Ken Knabb's translation of Mustapha Khayati's 1967 text "Contributions toward rectifying public opinion concerning revolution in the underdeveloped countries"6 for the Situationist International Anthology.

The anthology was first published in 1981, though. So whoever used "Stalino-Leninist" for the title of the 1975 pamphlet either came up with it themselves, or perhaps was reading situationist texts in French in the vicinity of Ann Arbor in the mid 1970s... Certainly we know that the group around Perlman was revising its first collective translation Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle during this time.7

In the UK, quotes from the pamphlet were used in Black Flag8 and Solidarity9 , suggesting international distribution or contact with like-minded groups.

It's not possible to say definitively who was behind this publication, but please add a comment if you know more or can provide a full colour scan of the entire thing. (The colour images below are nicked off Ebay).

Libcom user Fozzie, May 2026

Introduction

NOTE: This pamphlet is a response to male-domination in the East/West social systems of capital accumulation. It is produced from a male perspective and thus contains conscious and unconscious emphasis on the male viewpoint, but the sexism of stalino-leninist ideology can hardly be obscured by a defective presentation.

Leninism, like corporate capitalism, has the notion that persons are "things" to be controlled, manipulated, bought and sacrificed to maintain and support a present or future ruling group. Leninist vanguard parties, in power or out, almost universally condemn love for one of the same sex as a transitory byproduct of capitalism, instead of seeing it as one basic way of relating to people. "Socialist" states recognize that the breakdown of heterosexuality and the monogamous ideal will threaten the breakdown of the family (that "factory for the reproduction of dominant cultural patterns" — Reich), and with it threaten these states with a population no longer held in check by authoritarian conditioning and respect for power and tradition.

A growing few leninist sects in the Western imperialist countries already consider recruitment from and "infiltration" of the gay liberation movement as a potential method for building their organizations. Obviously this tactic will succeed only to the extent that gay organizations follow the leninist model (dogma, hierarchy, manipulation) and to the extent that their members are colonized by bourgeois and leninist behavior patterns (acceptance of intellectual /oral /physical authority, puritanism, uncritical obedience). Similarly, the still-marginal trend in Western society to end legal and social oppression of homosexuals is widening -- but only to the extent that homosexuals adopt the moral values of straight society, play the roles, accept the "right" of straight society to reproduce itself, in other words restrict gay liberation to the bedroom.

The capitalists want to make us believe that if we are not happy with life it is because we are at fault for failing to get a satisfying job and for failing to practice the bourgeois ethical code. The leninists want to make us believe that their Workers' Government is a big improvement over the capitalist way of running things. Nonetheless, we who sell our time to either aren't making decisions, either about how we go about our jobs or whether what we're producing or doing is even worth producing or doing. We fail to rebel against these conditions in part because we have been conditioned since birth to play narrow sexual roles and to accept the legitimacy of parental and social authority.

If people really were free and happy, would they seek self-fulfillment, for example, in (1) participating in a global war industry, (2) converting millions of trees into millions of tons of paper for advertising and administrative purposes, (3) being salespeople or East/West bureaucrats to push that same paper around, (4) being academic apologists for the necessity and virtue of the above activities? The fact that everywhere we are willing to play these and many other roles for global capitalism shows how little control we actually have over our lives.

Are we to overthrow East/West control of our personal relationships without overthrowing that same control of our social-productive lives?? One is impossible without the other, just as there is an indissoluble link between love and creativity.

Down with the Mao Tse-tung/Pepsi Cola/Billy Graham axis!

April, 1975

address to those who think themselves Normal

You do not feel that you are oppressors. You screw like everyone else, it's not your fault if there are sick people or criminals around. You can't help it, you say, since you are tolerant. Your society —- for if you screw like everyone else, then it is yours -- has treated us as a social plague for the State, as the object of scorn for true men, as the subject of fear for mothers. The same words that are used to designate us are your worst insults.

Have you ever thought of what we feel when you string these words together: "cocksucker, asshole, fairy, queer"? when you say to a woman "Dyke"? You protect your daughters and your sons from our presence as though we were disease bearers.

You are individually responsible for the vile mutilation that you have made us undergo by reproaching us our desire. You who want a revolution, have wanted to impose upon us your repression. You fought for the Blacks, you treated the pigs like cocksuckers, as though there didn't exist a worse insult.

You, worshippers of the proletariat, have encouraged with all your might the maintenance of the virile image of the worker; you have said that revolution would be the work of a manly, rugged proletariat.

Do you know what it is like, for a young worker, to be a closet homosexual? Do you know, you who believe in the virtuous influence of the factory, what the person who is treated as a faggot, by his friends at work, goes through?

We know, because we know one another, because we alone can know. We are, with women, the moral door-mat on which you wipe your conscience.

We are saying here that we've had enough, that you won't smash our faces any longer, because we will defend ourselves, that we will lead an offensive on your racism against us even as far as language.

We are saying more: we will not stop at defending ourselves, we are going to attack.

We are not against "straights", but against "straight" society. You ask: "What can we do for you?" You can't do anything for us as long as each one of you remains the representative of straight society, as long as you refuse to see all the secret desires that you have repressed. You can't do anything for us as long as you don't do anything for yourselves.

Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire

translated by Louis Landerson

Selected images


"We are against homosexuality as we are against heterosexuality; these are words which take reality only in a socially determined context. It is necessary to destroy this social context so the words will no longer have any meaning. The same goes for relations between men and women, for the family and for the notion of power: we are against whoever presumes to seize power, whatever the ideology with which he identifies himself. Power is not for the taking, it is the notion of power that is to be destroyed."

— Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire

translated by Louis Landerson

Attachments

On homosexuality a Stalino Leninist guide to love and sex.pdf (4.25 MB)
On-Homosexuality-colour-excerpts.pdf (1.96 MB)

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