Kasama

After publishing Libri Devrim’s “My Life in a Red Closet” we have received several accounts of the suppression of gay people within the revolutionary movement. Here is our fourth one.

Each recollection has added detail — but also confirmed a pattern where gay people were identified, isolated, confronted with the RCP’s position, pressured to reject their same sex attractions, and then often just shunned. As this account notes, there apparently a worked-out routine here, carried out after supporters have been sequestered and wrapped in a concealing cloud of invented security concerns.

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by Alessa Hill

I wasn’t of the same generation as either Andrew or Libri, but in some ways I had a very similar experience.

I am heterosexual and was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB) for three years. During that time I saw eager young people who were active and interested in politics become enthusiastic about what was in the pages of the Revolutionary Worker and would want to be involved in building the party. More than a handful, including one of my close friends, were GLBTQ. Some were actively discouraged from seeking to be anything more than “supporters” while others were active up until they heard the party’s line on homosexuality and then they left in disgust.

But there were also a couple of people who were committed revolutionaries and looked past the fucked up line on the HQ and still wanted to join the brigade or join the party.

My friend –I’ll call her Suzy — was one of those people.

A pattern, a routine, a policy

I think there may have been a pattern of how the RCP dealt with people in the movement and potential supporters who were gay.

Maybe this directive wasn’t publicly known by people outside of unit leaders and an inner circle from the national office, but in different cities and different times there were similar stories of how gay people were responded to by the RCP and RCYB.

Suzy joined the Youth Brigade (YB) about a year after I did. She was young, smart, and very involved in the local anti-war movement. Suzy had a difficult childhood and her parents fought a lot. Her home life wasn’t very nice. She had an aunt who was in a relationship with another woman and she went to live with them during her junior year of high school.

When Suzy came back that summer she got really involved in politics and going to demonstrations and meetings. She joined the YB and was super active in taking out the paper.

Critical thinking and questioning

At discussions Suzy was always asking questions and raising counter points. She’d ask: “How do we respond to Black nationalism and movements like that which are such a draw?” or “Why isn’t Cuba a dictatorship of the proletariat?” or “What exactly happens in the transition from socialism to communism?” While the rest of us were screwing around, she was reading Marx, Lenin, and even Hegel – trying to figure out what this body of ideas was all about, “wrangling” about how it could be a reality.

Around the time we were both about to go away to college, homosexuality came up in a bookstore discussion. It wasn’t like the party line was still putting out that the prevalence of homosexuality in the U.S. was reflective of imperialist decadence, and that ultimately, gay people needed to be educated or reformed and that they would be in a communist society, but the line was still fucked up.

And Suzy’s reaction to the discussion was something along the lines of:

What? Are you crazy? Nobody believes that anymore! I’m sure that if Bob Avakian was in the room right now he’d tell you you’re full of shit.”

That didn’t win her any friends and already I was intimidated enough by YB leadership that there was no way in hell I was going to intervene and back her up. How fucked up is that?

I was just hoping she’d shut up and let the issue go before we all got in trouble. As I think back I’m not sure why I knew that was a dangerous area to delve into, I just knew that nothing good would come of it.

The next time we (the youth brigade) met, Suzy announced to the group that she was a lesbian. The leader’s response was something like,

“Okay, well that’s news. Now let’s talk about building for the fundraising drive.”

The party spokesperson for our area (who had been speaking at that bookstore discussion) wanted to meet with Suzy for some talks about homosexuality before we left for college. But as luck would have it, we were both busy and Suzy’s mom kept her at home most of the next few weeks. That September we moved to a large Midwestern city to begin college.

Suzy, the invisible person

Suzy and I went to schools that were about an hour away from each other on public transit and I was much closer to Revolution Books than she was.

During the first month of school, a woman from the RCP visited me at my dorm to bring me the paper (and a stack of papers to sell on campus) and to invite me to various events and demonstrations. I went to some, although I was busy with school and my new work study job.

Oddly, I didn’t see Suzy at any of these events, but I just chalked it up to her farther away from the bookstore than I was. Whenever we’d message online we’d be so busy talking about other stuff that I forgot to ask her how things were going with the YB person and when she was going to come to a meeting.

Eventually I figured out that they weren’t talking to her and hadn’t even met with her yet. So the next time I was invited to an event, I brought Suzy along. Even though the YB and RCP leaders had never met her in person, they already knew who she was and they didn’t seem thrilled that I had invited her. After the event, most of the YB went out to Taco Bell to talk about what the speaker had said and have a discussion. They “forgot” to invite us.

The easy uses of security

When the YB leader visited me on campus a few days later I asked why no one was inviting Suzy to anything or talking with her like I was being met with.

Her response was to say that it wasn’t my business what other people did in or around the party, implying that Suzy was now assigned to a different unit and that my questions posed a security risk. I accepted this because I believed that my leader wouldn’t lie to me. I assumed that Suzy had not yet been put to work but that she would be soon and that I should leave it alone.

Several months later Suzy still hadn’t been contacted and she was depressed, saying that she thought people in the party didn’t like her because she was too shy and because she stuttered. She hadn’t made the connection between the bookstore discussion and her disfavored status.

Incidentally, the way the YB dealt with Suzy’s stuttering problem in the past was shameful as well; she was treated like it was a personal failure and that she should just learn to “spit it out” (as one leader said), as if stuttering expressed a lack of confidence in the political line we were putting forth.

I knew that talking to my leader wasn’t going to change things because I had already been told not to ask about Suzy, so I contacted someone from the RCP back at home. He told me “just persevere; keep trying to find someone who will listen to you. They must just be really busy and so no one has contacted Suzy but it can’t be because she’s a lesbian. There’s no rule that you can’t be in the YB or work with the party if you’re gay.”

Trying to warn the party

I figured out who my leader’s leader was; or at least, who I thought was my leader’s leader.

And I wrote a letter saying that I thought Suzy was being discriminated against because she was gay and that they weren’t inviting her to anything and that I had been told not to ask about it for security reasons but that Suzy had volunteered to me that she was being excluded and no one from the RCP was talking to her anymore. I took the letter and after a meeting, gave it to the man I thought was my leader’s leader, telling him that I needed to get this to the “party leadership.”

He was NOT happy to take it and gave it back without looking, telling me to give it to my leader. I said no, I needed this to go above her. So he took it, I think to avoid a scene more than anything else.

The next week my leader met with me. She was pissed. I was told in no uncertain terms to stop butting into other people’s business and that what was going on didn’t concern me. Again, allusions were made to party security that I was potentially violating.

The story should end there, except that I think my letter got to someone because a few weeks later the RCP sent someone to go visit Suzy. They met at a McDonald’s near campus and had a general “getting to know you” conversation. Suzy was given a copy of the paper and invited to attend a weekly newspaper discussion group nearby. She started going and for a while it seemed like old times. We’d talk about the paper and current events. I never saw her at bookstore events or demonstrations but assumed that she was now back in the groove.

It was short-lived though. The same week that Suzy was asked to take out the paper to a local Spanish-speaking neighborhood (she’s fluent in Spanish and the two guys she was paired up with don’t speak a word), she was also “invited” to a private discussion with nameless individuals. We assume they were from the party but I think they were just introduced by their first names only.

Suzy messaged me as soon as she got back from the first discussion, saying that they had talked about the emancipation of women and how sexuality could objectify women.

“I was agreeing with them and saying, ‘right on, yeah that’s right’ until one of them was like ‘and that’s why lesbian relationships mirror the fucked up sexual relations in capitalist society.’”

Suzy went to five or six more meetings like this. All were at fast food places or local cafes, all were with the same group of people (though not each person was at each meeting). In all of them, Suzy said she felt like she was clearly being targeted and that she was being bullied into agreeing with their conclusions.

After one meeting she sent me an email that I still have. It reads in part:

“I am torn. This is the only party capable of leading a revolutionary situation in the US. It’s the only party with the line, the leadership, the vision to unite those who have nothing to lose but their chains. There is no other option and I want to be part of the revolutionary struggle.

“I’m trying to grapple with this. With all of this. I don’t think their understanding of my sexuality is correct, but everything else the party does and says is correct. So what do I do?

“I can’t just leave and work for reforming the system, joining some feminist or pro-voting or ‘peacenik’ group. That would be pointless because the only real change will happen when this whole system of exploitation and oppression is torn down. So what do I do? “

Against my advice, Suzy openly shared these feelings and questions with those who were meeting with her.

And eventually as it was realized that she was not going to agree with them, one woman began to berate her in the meeting, saying that she was petty bourgeois and that she wasn’t “understanding” the party’s position because she was choosing not to and wasn’t really committed.

The last meeting she had with them, it must have been bad because she cried for hours with me over the phone. At one point she told me,

“I just wish I was into guys.”

Suzy never left or was officially kicked out. She was just “separated” and no one contacted her again. Her newspaper subscription was suspended even though she had already paid for a full year. She never tried to come to events at the bookstore so I never knew if they were planning on telling her to leave or if they were just going to freeze her out and not talk to her.