The left out left comes out in Aaron Lecklider’s ‘Love’s Next Meeting’

Cartoons and illustrations from 1920s and '30s radical literature and artwork, some of which illustrate Lecklider's book. | Sources: The Liberator, MCS Voice, The Working Woman, People's World Archives

Aaron Lecklider’s book Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture sets out to detail exactly what the title implies. The book is a resurrection of an often intentionally obfuscated history of queer people’s participation in left activism, culture, and the arts in the first half of the 20th century.

While we are typically fed the romanticized narrative of queer politics as beginning with the Stonewall Uprising in the late 1960s, Lecklider illustrates that decades beforehand queer people across gender, racial, and class differences took active political roles in the organizations of the left, especially the Communist Party.

Aaron S. Lecklider is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He also authored Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture.

Rather than approaching his topic through the often tokenized account of Harry Hay’s membership in the Communist Party, the author introduces us to a new cast of characters whose stories have yet to be told. Figures like Betty Millard, Willard Motley, Grace Hutchins, and John Brinnin are brought to life through Lecklider’s use of letters, diary entries, and publications which have until now been excluded from the canon of what is considered valuable left history.

Lecklider’s approach to the subject matter is incredibly refreshing. Unlike many previous publications on queer history which implicitly, or explicitly, generalize white gay men’s history as the central narrative of queer history, the author emphasizes the stories of women and people of color, centering the anti-sexist and anti-racist work that drew many queer people into the left in the first place. Lecklider provides an integrated, holistic approach to this history, illustrating the ways in which the stories of his subjects weave together across identity lines, without dismissing the ways in which one’s race, gender, and class led to differing perspectives and experiences of the world.

While appropriately critical of the historical left for their missteps and exclusionary practices in regard to homosexuality, the author dispels the notion that the left, and the CP and its orbit in particular, were sexually repressed or prudish. Instead, he highlights the alternative sexual/gender culture(s) on the left that, in part, earned it the reputation of being so morally subversive. Reporting on the left’s response to censorship with the Anti-Obscenity Ball, its publication of explicit and risqué content, or the embrace of the “masculine” proletarian woman, Lecklider illustrates that the left provided many a space through which to push the boundaries of early 20th-century gender and sexual conservatism.

This is especially made clear by the way in which the author emphasizes the difference between an explicit organizational homophobia and at times essentialist notions of gender, and an on-the-ground approach to the issue of sexuality. He points to many examples of the ways in which queer people in the rank-and-file of organizations like the CP were able to use their position on the left to experiment with a liberatory sexual politics.

He even points to the ways in which straight party members like Revels Cayton espoused a firm support of his queer comrades in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS) across lines of race, political ideology, and sexuality, arguing, “If you let them red-bait, they’ll race-bait, and if you let them race-bait, they’ll queen-bait. These are all connected, and that’s why we have to stick together” (Lecklider, 123). These counter-narratives compel us to rethink the notion of a sexually repressive culture or totalizing homophobia in the Communist Party, and on the left in general, during the early 20th century.

This new chapter in the history of the “Old Left” accomplishes, more than anything, a means for present-day queer Communists and leftists to rethink the history of the left on their own terms. Rather than viewing the party or the movement as having marginal queer side characters, Lecklider importantly reminds us that this was their party and their movement, too. They were central members of the left, not simply taking top-down directives, but active participants shaping the political and cultural environment of their time. While some were more concealed in their queer desires than others, they nevertheless strategically found ways to bridge a Communist political outlook with their sexual dissidence, to borrow Lecklider’s phrase.

This book will certainly move many queer people on the left today and grant to them a new outlook on their position in the present-day left. Rather than accepting a notion of queer politics separate from, or even an addition to, the left, Love’s Next Meeting reminds modern queer Communists and other leftists that our history, our struggles, and our politics did not start with an assimilationist politics, struggling for marriage and inclusion in military service, but were forged in the early 20th-century radical struggles for a socialist society, before those who fought back at Stonewall were even born.

Aaron Lecklider triumphantly returns to queer people on the left today a history denied to us for over half a century, and in doing so helps us to envision a new path to freedom through the struggles of our predecessors. Thus, Love’s Next Meeting is an unparalleled resource and is guaranteed to be a foundational turning point in the study of U.S. Communist history.

Aaron Lecklider
Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture
University of California Press, 2021
376 pp., $29.95
ISBN: 9780520381421
paperback edition 2023, ISBN: 9780520395589, $26.95

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CONTRIBUTOR

Bennett Shoop

Bennett Shoop is a Washington, D.C.-based activist for the LGBTQ+ community and the Claudia Jones School for Political Education. He is the author of Half The World, a story of radical women whose determination built and led a century of working-class struggles, published by International Publishers of NY.