Gay communist propaganda

There is already a sarcastic saying: ‘Destroy homosexuals — fascism will disappear.’”

The original anti-fascists wanted homosexuality eradicated. No! The déclassé riff-raff [those having fallen in social status], whether from the dregs of society or the remnants of the exploiting classes. “Especially if you are looking at posters that were promoting fraternity and unity between nations, particularly the USSR and China, India, and Egypt.” 

 

AiAwadhi adds there is little evidence that the artists intentionally portrayed homosexuality in these images, but a reading of them as homoerotic isn’t uncommon and was often played up in guerrilla street art.

In China, explains Zhu, where effeminate men have long held a place both in popular culture and in the royal court, acceptance was more a matter of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” There have always been the “three nos” as Zhu puts it, “no approval, no disapproval, but also no promotion.” The designer, who moved to the U.S. from Shanghai at 18, recently returned home and visited the Museum of Propaganda, noting that many of these posters, to his now Westernized eyes, were clearly homoerotic.

The significance of this development may be lost on many. “The fraternal kiss was very common back then, and if you go to certain countries now that aren’t Western, men still kiss on the mouth, and that’s not considered a sign of homosexuality.” These images would have represented two countries coming together to share a love of Communism and raising their children.

LGBT rights, these activists insist, are a product of socialist politics. As an example, he references the infamous mural painted on the Berlin Wall, “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love,” by Dmitri Vrubel, which depicts a real-life “socialist fraternal kiss” between Erich Honecker, General Secretary of Germany’s Socialist Unity Party, and the Soviet Union’s General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev during the 30th-anniversary celebration of the founding of the German Democratic Republic.

AiAwadhi and Zhu first had the idea for “Gay Agenda” while exploring the catalog for Poster House’s recent exhibit, The Sleeping Giant, which explores China’s economic history through poster design.

“They were trying to be rebellious in a very clever way, and I don’t think the Communist party was really aware of the code artists were sending out using public propaganda.” He explains that within the Communist party, men would frequently refer to each other as Tóngzhì, or “comrade” in Chinese, a word that today has been appropriated by the LGBTQ community to signal gay or lesbian.

In fact, several Left-leaning theoreticians elevated sexual promiscuity to the level of the new Bolshevik morality. From time to time, pedestrians on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad and passengers in trams bumped into the naked bodies of nudists, who viewed their public exposure as a revolutionary act.”

This air of sexual revolution in the Soviet Union of the 1920s extended to the LGBT experience, at least in Russia proper and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Even after the UMAPs were closed down, repression continued. The famous British communist activist and openly gay writer Harry Whyte wrote a letter to Stalin in 1934, protesting the new anti-sodomy laws as “absurd and unjust”, arguing that it “contradict[ed] the basic principle of the previous law” that allowed for same-sex relations within the Soviet Union.

Whether or not some hypothetical future communist society might accept same-sex relations, the fact remains that the LGBT rights we enjoy today are a function of liberal values like individualism, equality before the law, and civil liberties that can only exist in a free society. […] One cannot find any justification for declaring [homosexuals] criminally liable for their distinguishing traits, traits for whose creation they bear no measure of responsibility and which they are incapable of changing even if they wanted to.”

Stalin’s response was to bark at his underlings to archive the letter, referring to Whyte as “an idiot and a degenerate.”

As morally unthinkable as anti-LGBT bigotry in a communist country was to Western communists like Whyte,homosexuality remained illegal for the regime’s entire lifespan.

They were the last ones to come out for meals, so we saw them walk by, and the most insignificant incident was an excuse to beat them mercilessly.”

This foul treatment led to the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 (made famous by the 1983 classic Scarface), in which Castro had over 125,000 Cubans he called “worms” exiled to the United States on makeshift rafts.

This meant going further than simply repealing anti-sodomy laws.

Cocktails and loungewear recommended. He elaborated:

“In the land where the proletariat governs courageously [also translated as ‘manfully’] and successfully, homosexuality, with its corrupting effect on the young, is considered a social crime punishable under the law.

But history has shown that when you’re in the game of subordinating individual freedom in the service of some imagined collective march toward progress, sexual freedom is rarely spared. Gays were not treated like human beings, they were treated like beasts. These are people who destabilize the new social relations we are trying to establish between people, between men and women, within the laboring masses.

But even back then, there were also thriving queer club scenes, neighborhoods, and celebrities. The depictions range from sweet—two men offering each other flowers— to, in Zhu’s words, the “totally inappropriate.” (Zhu cites an image from the event of a mostly naked Soviet man hiding his genitals behind a large boat. To understand this dynamic and the fundamental and ideological incompatibility between LGBT rights and communism, we need to look no further than the Soviet Union.

In 1989, the Soviet Union — and European communism itself — was on the verge of total collapse.

“Yes, all the posters look like the happiest gay couple in the world to us, but they wouldn’t have been seen as such at the time.” 

Lippert explains that the concept of fraternity, especially between countries fighting the pre-established system of capitalism, often drove these intimate portraits, adding that when Stalin came to power, the only acceptable style of art became Socialist Realism.