Lesbians and gay men ~ how do we get equality?

Can lesbians and gay men achieve equality under capitalism? To answer this question, we need to understand the role families and relationships play within the system.

Families vary, but for most people their own family is a place of some security, and if they are reasonbly lucky, acceptance and love. But it is also a basis for the oppression of lesbians and gay men, as well as women generally. That's because, as a social unit, the family is where capitalism reproduces, maintains and – along with schools – educates and trains labour power. From the bosses' viewpoint, that's all workers and their children are: present and future means of producing wealth and profit. It's no surprise, therefore, that any behavior that challenges the family is stigmatized and repressed.

Only a monogamous, heterosexual, child rearing unit is promoted as natural and normal. Sexual and moral codes reinforce this, no matter how stultifying and oppressive for all concerned, but especially women, children, lesbians and gay men. The church, though increasingly marginalized, still plays an important role in perpetuating this morality, as was apparent during the royal wedding of Kate and William Windsor.

Until relatively recent times, medical 'science' and psychology also promoted the view that non-heterosexual behavior was perverse, sick or abnormal, and even attempted to 'cure' it! On top of this, a battery of repressive laws enforced by the capitalist state imposed brutal penalties for gay sex and laws still deny full equality for single-sex partners.

Because capitalism needs to protect its form of the family by perpetuating lesbians and gay oppression, equality and liberation become class questions. This is so even though there are non-working class lesbians and gay men. Only by creating a new social and economic reality where exploitation of labour power for profit is a thing of the past – classless communism – can social oppression be ended.

What are the implications of this for the struggle itself, and for the lesbian and gay and workers' movements? Middle or even upper class gays and lesbians have taken up the fight for equality, but are also often able to avoid the worst effects of oppression. And being oppressed does not automatically turn you into a rebel!

Working class lesbians and gay men formally share the same oppression as thier middle or upper class counterparts, but in more extreme forms, and with much less opportunity to escape either the family environment or oppression in the workplace. Furthermore, the class interests of working class and upper class lesbians and gays are quite antagonistic.

To be successful, therefore, a movement for lesbian and gay liberation needs to do two things. Firstly, it must develop a strong, class conscious working class core, able to work out a program that challenges the social basis of oppression. Secondly, the movement has to resist separatism or autonomism and ally itself with the broader workers' movement – unions and political parties - ensuring these become bastions of the struggle for equality, and that lesbian and gay liberation become integral to the struggle for working class liberation and socialsim.