A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

Anderson suggested that, as historian Margaret Marsh puts it, “homosexuality might be a more normal form of sexual behavior than heterosexuality” and that “she and her friends represented the link between the anarchist-feminist idea of sexual liberation as one component . . . of a society of freely cooperating individuals.”17 These anarchist writings about homosexuality are a radical break from most thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They argue that sexuality is natural and positive, that sex can be solely about pleasure and, if consensual, should not be the subject of any laws. These basic precepts about sexuality, and homosexuality, that are present today in the LGBT movement—both its liberatory and civil rights sides—find their roots in anarchist thinking. The labor movement profoundly influenced the LGBT movement by conceptualizing workers not as individuals, but as a class of people who are treated unjustly. The early labor organizations—in particular the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, which had over one million members in 1923—conceptualized a worldwide movement based on identity and group status. This concept is the historical basis for the thinking of Harry Hay (whose membership in the Wobblies was formative to his political education) when he founded the Mattachine Society, an early homosexual rights group, in 1950. Comparisons of other political movements to the LGBT movement are always inexact. Homosexual...