When the west liberated the concentration camps in Germany many of the gay survivors were either not released at all, and just kept in there, or they were re-arrested soon after.

The man who solved the enigma code, Alan Turing, was a gay man. His reward for contributing more to the war effort than any other British person was that they chemically castrated him. He took his own life soon after.

Nowhere was good for gay people in 1945. Atleast in the USSR you had womens rights. Arguably better than the ones modern women in the USA have almost 100 years later.

It’s the same argument as the incredibly common, “Why do you support Palestinians, they would kill you for being gay” as if that justified the genocide. It really has nothing to do with queer people, rather it has everything to do with justifying their support for something heinous

For what it’s worth, communists were actually leading on queer rights in many parts of the 20th century. In the German Empire and Weimar Republic eras, the KPD and SPD (back when they were still nominally socialist) were the only parties to back Magnus Hirschfeld (a pioneer in sexology and queer rights activism) and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaflich-humanitäres Komitee) in their attempts to repeal the infamous anti-sodomy statute inherited from the Prussian law code, Paragraph 175. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) even housed members of the Comintern from time to time.

After the war, the first Germany to repeal the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 that both had inhereited was the GDR. The FRG quickly followed suit in order to save face. In the latter half of the 1980s, the GDR underwent a series of reforms granting queer people a number of rights in response to public pressure. The Stasi was actually the institution that pushed for the reforms, because they began to understand that if you have a marginalized population in your country, like queer people were, it opens them up to blackmail by foreign agents who then can use them against the state. (The zionists do exactly this to Palestinians, by the way.) It’s certainly an odd route for reforms to come from and it wasn’t queer liberation by any means, but gay couples could live together, legal discrimination outside the army was illegal, medical transition was covered by the state, and the state launched a very wide and comprehensive education campaign in an attempt to reduce the stigma against queer people. (This resulted in the only queer GDR film, made by the state, called Coming Out.) Unfortunately, this all happened in the last 5 years of the GDR’s existence. Had the Soviet Union and European socialist states survived, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to believe that such reforms would’ve promulgated throughout the Eastern Bloc, especially given the reasoning that these were undertaken to mitigate Western subversion.

Meanwhile, the Western world was just letting HIV/AIDS socially murder their queer populations. Part of what helped to radicalize me almost a decade ago now was seeing that the only people taking queer rights seriously in the age of reactionary backlash were people who were calling themselves socialists and communists. Socialist states do not have a fantastic record on queer rights, but neither do liberal ones. Had things gone a little bit differently, liberalism would not be able to style itself as having a monopoly on queer rights.

It’s very simple: there are no LGBTQ rights without marxists and the Cuban Family Code puts the liberal world to shame. These perfomative liberals have the malignant privilege to dismiss the communists who they owe their lives to (in more ways than one). They are the compradors of the western culture wars.

And they owe their lives to Stalin:

https://redsails.org/concessions/

I try not to take liberals seriously when they open up questions like that because in the same breath they’ll venerate slave owners like Thomas Jefferson, or brutal colonizers like Winston Churchill. Liberals praise Benjamin Franklin, who was so racist he wanted Germans banned from immigration for not being white enough.

So I don’t think liberals get to accuse communists of admiring historical figures who may have had incongruent values. And furthermore I admire Stalin because he saved the world from fascism, although now I’m starting to believe he should have kept going. Fascism keeps peeking its head back into our world.

There is zero chance that someone who tries using this as an argument against communism is engaging in good faith. We’re talking about a person who was born in 1878 for fuck’s sake!

And let’s not pretend like the state of LGBT rights in western countries was any better in the 1940s than it was in the USSR. In many ways it was significantly worse.

It was socialist states that have historically always been at the forefront of social progress. The USSR pioneered women’s rights and women’s equality. The GDR (East Germany) during its time was one of the most progressive countries on the planet with respect to LGBT rights and sexual education.

Just because today’s liberals have superficially co-opted some of these movements in order to pinkwash capitalism (and there is a massive difference between actually materially improving the lives of LGBT people and pretending to be on their side to score electoral points) does not invalidate any of the historical achievements of communism, or the need for communism in order to actually materially liberate all working class people, including those of the LGBT community.

Not only are Stalin’s views on this issue entirely irrelevant to the correctness of communist ideas, but it is also utterly ridiculous to demand that a communist who was literally born in the 19th century and raised in a religiously conservative feudal-agrarian society should have conformed to the social views of 21st century Western societies, especially when your own country is far from perfect on this issue and when millions of your own compatriots still hold far less progressive views.

I think this kind of question reveals an important difference in how liberal ideology, and liberal ideological hegemony, works and how dialectical materialist or otherwise counter-hegemonic thought works.

If I’m having a conversation with someone and they tell me something like this, which happens pretty often, I counter by trying to get at the person to see what they believe in and criticize the failures of the figures of that ideology. “Oh, you’re a liberal? I bet you support Churchill’s racism, then, or otherwise you can’t be a liberal.”

But that gets something backwards: For a socialist or communist, Stalin represents a (flawed) positive figure whose writing and action can inform how we should act. The reason criticising Stalin works as a criticism of socialism is that socialists have to either live in Stalin’s shadow, or actively work to distance themselves from it by distinguishing themselves from the bad socialists (see: DemSocs).

Meanwhile, criticising Churchill, FDR, Keynes, or some other equally relevant contemporary liberal is not a biting criticism of liberalism, because liberal ideological hegemony is a negative hegemony. It’s not made up of a series of values, mores, schools of thought, or models of the world that its adherents must defend. It’s made up of values, mores, schools of thought, and models of the world that its adherents know are bad. It’s just “what’s left” instead of “what’s right.” You tell the liberal “if you think Stalin is bad, you haven’t read Truman’s private thoughts” and they’ll just reply back “Why should I care about Truman? You’re the one who believes in what Stalin believed.” They don’t have to defend their beliefs because they don’t have any.

it’s not just a rant, it’s pink washing and you’re right to point it out, even if you’re preaching to the choir on 'grad.

the isrealis tried pink washing the gaza situation due to the resounding success of the republican’s mastery over it to both stoke the culture wars within the older segments of their base while simultaneously using it as an aesthetics dog whistle to make their younger part of their base feel that they’re more “evolved” than the rest of maga.

it all goes to prove how much the democrats have lost touch since they were the ones to originally wield pink washing as a political cudgel against the republicans whenever it suited their needs and as recently as obama, as you pointed out.

the equal rights amendment would have protected lgbt+ people from things like project 2025 and it also goes to prove how democrats like to use pink washing to their benefit. most americans were unaware that the equal rights amendment existed, but were VERY aware that project 2025 was a thing; all despite the equal rights amendment pre-dating it by almost a decade and the IMMENSE amount of effort, time, money and poltical capital it took to push it through congress multiple times; 2/3rds of all the states voting on it; and the presidency for about 50 years.

the democrats used it like they did w abortion; pretending to fight for it to generate donations and dog whistle liberals, but doing so little in reality that it was easily overturned and liberals fought to maintain their ignorance about it, as they do now with pink washing.

There’s a lot of that recently with the “You support Palestine? You’d get stoned to death over there” to justify what is going on there.

Identity politics brainrot in a nutshell. Oh so you’re trans? You now have to dislike every person ever that isn’t/wasn’t trans, also you have to worship contrapoints.

I just tell them we’d be living under the 1,000 year Reich if it weren’t for Stalin.

liberals’ favorite rhetorical trick is the double standard. it’s the easiest way to wokeify all sorts of reactionary shit. capitalist countries can execute a million gay and black and indigenous people and it’s okay because it’s a “different time” but if an arab or communist or non-western country is accused of the same (off what buildings?) it’s because they’re genetically backwards or whatever.

Many leftist political figures were also pro-eugenics in their day. The idea that communists view all historical communist figures as perfect is stupid.

It was wrong to persecute ““deviant”” people, we should all be learning from history.

Your feelings mirror mine exactly. It’s something that has bothered me too. But don’t let them get to you, they never had your best interests at heart and it shows that they say this instead of genuinely trying to understand how you came to your conclusions. They never say it as a sincere attempt at communication. What troubles me the most is that I even hear other queer people say it. But these people believe that the liberals will help them in the end and that they just have to keep pushing, hoping, and voting hard enough. This is their greatest mistake and it’s quite clear just by how many times our rights have been dropped by these people across the globe as soon as it is no longer convenient.

But even if it were true that Stalin would personally murder us with his giant spoon, they talk as if capitalist nations would have treated us much better during that same time period. When it comes to their own personal figures they require nuance and careful examination, to judge them as a product of their time, but this same gesture is not allowed to communists.

‘Homosexuality is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America.’