Gay communist propaganda

Propaganda posters were an integral part of attesting to the world the close relationship between China and the Soviet Union and as seen from this photographic collection they walk hand-in-hand, kissing, clutching each other, all happy and gay, so to speak.

For decades, the work of Hay and Mattachine Society remained largely unknown, a brief episode in gay history. The Stonewall Rebellion is generally and rightly regarded as the moment when the fight for gay rights broke out into the mainstream, led by Black and brown trans women and drag queens in New York City.

Thanks to the work of researchers like Stuart Timmons and Will Roscoe, authors respectively of The Trouble with Harry Hay and Radically Gaymuch of the story of Hay and Mattachine has been rescued from dusty boxes and locked filing cabinets.

Rather, they played particular roles in sustaining certain cultural practices and as repositories of knowledge. These homoerotic Chinese-Soviet communist propaganda posters look more like a gay couple’s vacation pics, or maybe an ad for interracial.

[79][80]. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation remains socially conservative on LGBTQ rights, voting in favor of the anti-gay propaganda law [50] and introduced legislation in to prohibit coming out as LGBT.

The Long Whitewashed History

In other words, it was intertwined with the rise of capitalism. Without them, there would no doubt have been a movement for queer equality in one form or another, as there were already stirrings elsewhere prior to Mattachine, especially in Europe.

Hay was also a Communist—at a time when first fascism and then Red Scare McCarthyism made possessing left-wing allegiances dangerous. He had to flee and found unexpected protection in the home of a Los Angeles drag queen named Clarabelle.

The breakdown of communal society and the rise of the male-centered patriarchal family unit—and the consequent growth of religious and other ideas to support this new economic arrangement—conspired to squash any liberal attitudes that might have existed toward sex and gender expression.

The inspiration of the Cultural Minority thesis as Hay formulated it was, in retrospect, an ironic one: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, the man largely responsible for re-criminalizing homosexuality in the USSR after the liberating early years that followed the Russian Revolution.

The advance of agriculture and technology meant surplus wealth could now be produced and accumulated, transitioning eventually into private property. But without Mattachine, the movement that emerged would likely have looked a lot different than it does now.

Post-war reaction was setting in and progressive politics in hotel at gaya were under attack; what Hay was proposing was even more subversive, but he felt compelled to start organizing anyway.

Now politically active, that same summer Hay traveled to San Francisco to organize solidarity efforts for the General Strike of maritime workers that had shut down the West Coast ports. That might sound like a big claim to make, but it was Communist ideology and political strategy that provided the theoretical and practical architecture of the earliest effort to win gay equality in the United States—the Mattachine Society, a group whose ideas underpinned all the struggles and victories in the country that have been won over the past half century.

In The Gay Agenda: Homoeroticism in Communist Propaganda, a provocative online discussion last month between film historian Bader AlAwadhi, Chinese-born designer Zipeng Zhu, and Angelina Lippert, Chief Curator at the Poster House museum, an interesting question was posed: What if, through coded graphic design, the visual architects of Communism.

But rather than letting his being gay and a Red become liabilities, Hay combined them and set the stage for a social and sexual revolution. Credit is certainly due for figures like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and others who communist had the courage to fight back against police repression that hot June night in Mattachine, one of gay first groups to attempt to politically organize gay men and lesbians, was established over the course of toa period of resurgent conservative power and suburban-inspired social conformity in U.

And Harry Hay was the Communist who combined theory and practice to bring it into reality. Hay had been politicized early in life by interactions with old Wobblies from the Industrial Workers of the World and during his work among migrant farm workers as a young man, but he became truly radicalized after a pair of galvanizing experiences in Witnessing propaganda violence against mothers of starving children who were protesting against the disposal of milk to protect market prices during the Great Depression, Hay instinctively picked up a brick and hurled it at a cop, striking him in the temple.

Before Stonewall Queer liberation

It was this aspect of the theory that Hay extended and developed as a means for understanding the oppression of homosexuals—he analyzed them as a group sharing a culture and a language of sorts. There, he saw National Guard soldiers fire on the picket lines, killing two workers on the spot, and felt bullets fly past his own head.

For Harry Hay, that change resulted in his joining the Communist Party in As for the situation in the s, it turned out Hay was right about the potential for government manipulation; in he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his Marxist proclivities.

Those scapegoats were Communists and queers.