It’s one I’ve heard more than a few times before from liberal “allies” who love to talk down to any queer people that don’t debase themselves to whatever local liberal party that pretends to care about us and our rights while doing nothing to actually help us or even fight those trying to actively destroy us.
Like, I don’t know what gay or trans people had to go through under Stalin and it probably wasn’t good given this was the early 20th century and communist movements weren’t very good on queer rights back then but even if Stalin was personally ordering the execution of gay & trans people what does that even matter? How is that some kind of stunning rebuke of communism? One communist does some bad stuff and somehow all of communism is responsible as if Karl Marx himself wrote “kill them removed lmao” in the Manifesto or something?
Why is Stalin and Stalin alone the arbitrator of what is and isn’t communism? Do these people think he’s the only communist to have ever existed? What about all the gay & trans communists that were contemporaries of him? Do they just not matter? I don’t know, maybe this belongs more in the “Shit Reactionaries Say” community.
Stalin could’ve been the most queerphobic person in history for all I care. That doesn’t have any impact on whether or not queer people belong in the communist movement. It’s just an intellectually lazy argument. Like, I don’t care? Why would I care what Stalin would’ve done to me? I don’t live under Stalin. Stalin is dead. Stalin isn’t the only communist to exist, much less to lead a country. I don’t worship Stalin the way liberals worship Obama.
Castro had gay people tortured, later realized & admitted he was wrong to do so, and worked to expand queer rights in Cuba. Perfect? Not at all, but at least he was willing to grow and change things for the better even in old age.
Obama ran on a campaign of anti-gay marriage until Biden told him it was popular and he changed his stance so he could win, let the Supreme Court do all the work for him, then promptly did fuck all to improve the conditions of gays in the US. His party has since abandoned trans people and is now trying to abandon gays too.
It’s almost like communists have actual moral compasses and can change their views when presented with new information while liberals are self-serving ghouls that only care about what’s popular or financially beneficial to them.
Yet you point out that queer rights are only being taken seriously by Left-wing movements these days and libs cry about how it’s just commies trying to manipulate or deceive people. Pure fucking projection.
Sorry for the rant this ended up being longer than I intended.
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.