This piece was very difficult for Libri to write. We applaud her courage and her continuing hope for the communist movement. Some things in our history make us celebrate. Others make us grieve.



“I want to talk about what it was like to be attracted to the dream of revolution – and then be told that my lesbian feelings were ideologically part of a corrupt and oppressive world order, and that I force myself to have sexual relationships with men in an effort to develop the sexual feelings I was told I was supposed to have, as part of being a revolutionary. “

“I was pushed into the closet as a price for being considered a revolutionary by those I respected. And this was doubly painful: I was forced to deny my own feelings in public self-criticism, and I was being trained to confront my continuing feelings as reactionary in the privacy of my own mind.”

by Libri Devrim

Much has been written about the Revolutionary Communist Party and its ban on gay people within its ranks. Some of us are familiar with the specific anti-gay rationalizations the RCP promoted for thirty years – including its notorious argument that same-sex attractions are a politically reactionary, personal-ideological choice.

But what was going on within the RCP was not just a stubborn and arrogant “error of line”– it was also an actual practice that had an impact on real people and real struggle. That is what I want to write about, including what it was like to live “in the closet” inside a communist organization.

I want to talk about what it was like to be attracted to the dream of revolution – and then be told that my lesbian feelings were ideologically part of a corrupt and oppressive world order, and that I force myself to have sexual relationships with men in an effort to develop the sexual feelings I was told I was supposed to have, as part of being a revolutionary. I want to talk about the way decent but incredibly ignorant communist comrades were instructed to correct me, my feelings, and my behaviors. And how, within a movement hoping to carry out liberation, the awful arguments and pressures of anti-gay bigotry were reproduced and enforced.

RCP cadre and leaders looked people like me in the eyes and told us to change, conform and be silent — or else get out. At the height of the AIDS crisis, they knowingly opened a horrible split between communist activists and those fighting rightwing attacks on gay people. They reproduced within revolutionary ranks (and using “communist” rhetoric) the prejudices, arguments and repressive practices of rightwing religious nuts – and they tried to promote such views more broadly within the left.

It seems that most queer revolutionaries were attracted to what the RCP was putting out. That they’d go take out the RCP’s newspaper, the Revolutionary Worker, get involved, and then someone would meet with them to have serious talk about “the Homosexuality Question,” and then they would disappear.

In that respect, I was a bit different. I got involved before I came out.

After meeting the revolutionaries of the RCP, I joined the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCYB), really throwing myself into it. I was convinced that a possible revolutionary situation might be just around the corner (remember that slogan, “Revolution in the ‘80s – Go for it!”?).

All my free time was spent building for the work this party was doing in my area: I was going to demonstrations, taking the paper out, talking to everyone about Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM), postering a couple times a week, going to meetings. It was my whole life.

Falling in love

Then I started feeling attracted to another girl who was hanging around the RCYB. She was really funny and cute and smart. I thought was she was great and I really respected her, especially the way she stood up for what she believed at school, how she would face off the cops at a demonstration without fear, the way she was always ready to take the paper out even when the rest of us got discouraged by all the rejection. I wanted to be around her all the time and I thought about her constantly.

Everyone else could see I had it bad, but I never noticed! She gave me her green kaffyah and I wore it all the time, even when I went to bed. I always wanted to ride in the same car with her when we went someplace. Her high school was across town from mine but I’d always try to find a reason to go to her side of town to take the paper out in the afternoons so that I could be with her.

Finally, one of the other guys in the RCYB said something about me acting like I was in love with her. They were all teasing me about it. I realized that I had had feelings for girls for a while and I started to come to terms with the fact that I was a lesbian.

A family’s anger…

When I came out, everyone at home was upset. I was prepared for their reactions, I’d heard other stories from teenagers who had come out about how they were rejected or kicked out of the house, so I was ready to face that from my family.

My family was upset and angry. They were disappointed in me and wanted me to just “get over” whatever young adult phase I was going through that made me “think” I was gay.

I was so depressed that they couldn’t accept me, their daughter, for who I was. But knowing my family’s conservative background, I had expected them to have a negative reaction so it didn’t surprise me.

….then the rejection by comrades

What really shocked me was how leaders in the RCYB and the RCP reacted when I told them I was gay.

I have to say that none of the other Youth Brigade members had a problem with it except one guy. He was a little immature and made a joke about how he didn’t mind if a girl was gay but there’s no way in hell he’d sleep in the same room with a guy who was gay. (We’d just stayed at a motel when we traveled to another city for an event and all of us had shared a room). But really most young communists of my generation never thought that being gay was wrong – it was something that had to be imposed on us from without, and was done without ever really hearing or respecting our insights.

But while the comrades in the Youth Brigade were fine with it I was really shocked by how hostile the RCYB leaders were. I was immediately separated from the rest of brigade – they stopped having me there for meetings and paper discussions, I wasn’t invited to take out the paper or go running in the mornings, and when I showed up at the bookstore for an event I was told to leave.

Being educated

I didn’t understand the reaction.

Finally, after several months of being excluded from everything and with virtually no communication from Youth Brigade leaders, I received a phone call telling me to show up for a meeting at a coffee shop across town the next weekend. Several Youth Brigade leaders were there as well as two RCP leaders (one of whom had never spoken to me before but was clearly in charge).

Everyone was very serious. I was pretty intimidated and scared.

They were there to explain to me what reality was, and what a communist view supposedly was: Why being a lesbian arose from unjustified hostilities toward men as a whole, how it was like being a feminist-separatist, and how in the new society, men wouldn’t hurt women and so women would no longer respond to their oppression by becoming gay. Their argument was that lesbianism was a form of reformism – because it sought relief from oppression by developing a lifestyle within capitalism.

They made a series of deductive arguments – very divorced from reality and my own situation – that lesbianism was an ideological choice that embodied a reformist political program and that was therefore not compatible with being a communist revolutionary. Let me remind you that all of this was happening to me when I was a high school student – just barely starting to sort out life, love and sexuality.

Looking back it seems clearer they had reproduced within revolutionary ranks (and using “communist” rhetoric) prejudices, arguments and repressive practices that were not far removed from rightwing religious nuts and homophobes.

I was very young and pretty naïve I guess – I took what I was told at face value as the communist verdict on gay people, and on me.

But at a gut level I couldn’t reconcile the idea that my feelings for other girls meant that I was being bourgeois. I still was attracted to other girls, even when I berated myself for feeling that way. I was told that I was viewing the girl in the RCYB that I liked as a sex object, that I was objectifying her because I had sexual thoughts about her.

In one painful meeting (at a Burger King – I never wanted to eat there again after this!) I admitted tearfully that, yes, I had imagined seeing her naked while masturbating.

I felt really guilty. I was pushed into the closet as a price for being considered a revolutionary by those I respected. And this was doubly painful: I was forced to deny my own feelings in public self-criticism, and I was being trained to confront my continuing feelings as reactionary in the privacy of my own mind.

Under watch

Once I started being allowed back to Brigade activities I apologized to this girl for objectifying her; but she just laughed and gave me a hug and said not to worry about it.

Local RCP leaders and the Youth Brigade coordinator kept me away from her though, and talked about sending me to live in a Brigade house in another city for the summer. That idea was dropped after I failed geometry and had to go to summer school, but for the next year or so, I was closely watched.

However, I was spouting the party line, so I was “welcomed” back in the fold. But part of me wondered, what would happen if I didn’t accept what I had been told to believe.

A few years later there was another change in the division of labor, I was sent to go work in another area with a new group of people. I had left high school and gotten my GED so I was anxious to start working full time and not having to depend on my family. When I was told to apply for a particular kind of job and live in a shared apartment with some other party folks, I complied. I didn’t really have any reason not to, even though I knew that living with people would be like being at the brigade house full-time; I would never be away from people who could scrutinize my actions and “tell on me” to my leadership.

This whole time I had been repressing my feelings, trying to just pretend that they didn’t exist.

My leadership brought up homosexuality during a paper discussion and I started defending a group of gay activists and one of their slogans. I was criticized by everyone but this time I didn’t back down, I kept on saying that I didn’t understand the RCP’s position on homosexuality. (Actually, I did understand, but I didn’t feel like I could say that I didn’t agree, it felt safer to just say I didn’t understand).

Isolated and out-gunned

Again I was separated from the group and started meeting with my direct leadership and two other people that I had never met before. We had discussions on a regular basis, a few times a week, for months. I wasn’t an idiot, but when it came to complex discussions about theory, I just couldn’t argue hard and fast enough.

Each meeting was a battle; we weren’t studying and discussing and criticizing, we were fighting with words and quotes and sources. I was totally outgunned.

I had gone to a crappy public school and never graduated from college, unlike my leadership, who were well educated and had apparently memorized the entire canon of MLM theory. I was a slow reader and had difficulty with understanding what I read. Every time they struggled with me, I felt stupider. I couldn’t keep up; much less argue for what I believed.

But inside, I always knew that I was gay and that it wasn’t in reaction to men’s oppression. It wasn’t because I had had bad experiences with men or wanted to promote bourgeois ideals.

In fact, I wanted to accept being gay. I wanted to celebrate it because, in the end, being a lesbian was an integral part of what made me human and made me the person I was. I wanted to embrace it and be honest about how I really thought and felt.

I wanted to openly have a relationship with another girl my age, to experience building a relationship together and growing together and having that strong bond that can exist between two people who know each other in such an intimate and complete way.

To conform in love

Instead, I started dating a guy who sold the paper. I was never told I had to start dating a guy, but I felt immense pressure to prove that I wasn’t a bourgeois feminist-separatist, that I was a revolutionary communist who was fully committed to bringing out change in this world. In so many ways, the guy I dated was a wonderfully loving and supportive. We were good friends; he was fun and knew how to make me laugh. I was tired of being alone. And a part of me thought that a relationship with a guy would allay their fears about me. That if I dated a guy they would finally just leave me alone.

I tried, but I just didn’t have feeling for him that I would have towards other women. We moved in together and I hoped that eventually I would develop feelings for him, but it didn’t happen. I liked him a lot and loved spending time with him. But I dreaded having sex with him.

Eventually we stopped having sex; he was very supportive and caring, but still very hurt that I didn’t find him attractive sexually.

He was one of the first people who told me that he thought the RCP’s position on homosexuality was bullshit; when he said that we were in the the RCP’s Revolution bookstore and I shushed him. I didn’t want either of us to get in trouble.

We broke up and soon after I was moved to a different area. I couldn’t work up the same enthusiasm for building the RCP and I became very depressed. I stopped returning phone calls and just drifted away.

For the RCP it was important that, if you left, the summation had to be that you were the one with some fatal flaw. They argued that being a lesbian was a form of backwardness and reformism – and then when someone like me drops out of political life it was taken as a confirmation of the individual’s ignorant prejudices and their own revolutionary character.

Slippery change without a real accounting

When, around 2002, the RCP started having discussions about changing the stance on homosexuality, I couldn’t believe it. Why couldn’t this have happened sooner, before my life and the lives of so many other people were adversely affected?

I thought things had changed so I started getting involved again. I was criticized for having disappeared for so long, but the local leadership felt like now that that “issue” was dealt with we could just move on. And I tried to do just that.

But I never saw any real self-criticism from the RCP’s leadership – I never heard anyone say “Hey, we totally fucked up and this adversely affected people in the party, people were pushed back into the closet, and shit, we’re sorry about that. We bought into these homophobic lines being pushed by the religious right and we contributed to oppressing GLBT people and that was wrong. Let’s examine how and why we embraced a fucked-up line. How had this been possible? What does it mean that this was done for decades with a “scientific” pretense? Let’s evaluate what its impact was to our members, our supporters, gay people generally and our cause.”

Instead it was just like, okay, you can be in the party and be openly gay now.

There was no honest self-criticism or accountability happening. So I guess for the RCP it was all over and done with, but for me it wasn’t. At that point I just couldn’t live with myself if I had stayed, so I left.

One reason I need to write all of this for all of you is that the RCP has still (to this day) not acknowledged that they banned gay people from their ranks, or that their party had a “closet” within its ranks, or publicly accounted for the cost of this to people like me and to the movement for radical change.

This long history of mistreatment and backwardness by the RCP (and by communists movements preceding them by decades) was compounded by the RCP’s stubborn refusal to make a real accounting. That too is something we cannot allow to go uncriticized, and that too is something we cannot ourselves allow around future problems and mistakes in our next communist movement.

I’m also writing this because I feel it is a cautionary story for our common future – because in the grip of dogmatism, ignorance and arrogance even revolutionaries can do awful things. We should be aware of how much we often remain ensnared in the views of the very system we seek to overthrow. We need to see how easily we sometimes set ourselves up as the arbiters of right and wrong – often with little investigation or serious analysis – posturing perhaps as revolutionary or scientific, but in reality merely reflecting backward views that are quite common in the society around us.