Publisher's Synopsis
Explore the development of left-wing sexual politics from the 1830s to the present, documenting communist, socialist, and anarchist views toward homosexuality and the involvement of homosexuals with the left. Chapters in this fascinating book are authored by an array of international scholars who examine key developments in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, exploring the attitudes and policies of leftist thinkers, parties, and regimes toward homosexuality.
Chapters cover a diverse array of topics, including openness toward homosexuality of French utopian socialists in the 1830s, the hate-filled pronouncements of Marx and Engels, responses to Stalin's anti-gay policies, gays in Germany before and since the fall of the Wall, Spanish anarchists in the 1930s, gay spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, and relations between the left and gay liberation movements of France and the United States. A major addition to the growing field of gay historical studies, Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left is the first book in any language devoted to tracing the attitudes of the socialist left toward male homosexuality.
