Photo: David F. Sabadell — LGTBIQ Antifascism

Through an extensive international genealogy of the construction of normative LGBTI identities, activist and researcher Peter Drucker offers us some proposals on how to articulate a strong anticapitalist transmaricabibollo [trans-gay-lesbian-bisexual] movement.

In June 2023, the publishers Sylone and Viento Sur published the Spanish translation of Warped. Gay normality and queer anticapitalism, an enormous and exhaustive work that travels to very disparate places on the planet searching for how normative LGBTI identities—principally ’gay’—have been established in each, with capitalism and colonialism as essential elements, and how anticapitalist spaces and transmaricabibollo activism can overcome this gaynormativity through various strategies. These pass through involvement in diverse political spaces and the assumption of dissident sexual and gender struggles and identities by social movements as a whole. Its author, Peter Drucker (United States, 1958), is a long-standing queer Marxist activist and researcher, and founding member of the Network on Sexuality and Political Economy, which publishes from the London Marxist journal Historical Materialism. This is his most extensive and meticulous work to date.

The book is divided into three large blocks. In the first, the author carries out a profound genealogy of how homosexuality was constructed from the sexual identities—or non-identities—that existed previously, and on how this new category emerged and stigmatised in Western Europe more or less 150 years ago is imposed through colonialism. This, which lived its peak approximately the same years, imposed itself politically, culturally, penally and medically over populations that had completely different ideas regarding relations that from the occidental and Anglo-Saxon world would be called same-sex, that is, between people of the same sex. Put another way, these relations thus read from the global north already occurred in all contexts that suffered colonialism, and therefore with the arrival of this were subject to a conceptual change and criminalisation that was more or less foreign to them according to each context, provoking stigmatisation, illegalisation and the current discourses blaming sexual deviation on the West that some of the élites of former African colonies of France and Britain reproduce today.

Obviously same-sex communities already existed in various places in Europe prior to the 19^th century, perhaps the most notable communities being the English and Dutch, and which lived during the Second Industrial Revolution a targeting and repression of great depth, fruit of the mentioned conceptualisation of homosexuality and the consequences that it brought that a practice inserted in the new penal codes now had a name. But also arose the first movements in favour of its decriminalisation, among which the one that most distinguished itself was the German. This could not have been carried out without the support of German Marxism, both from the Social Democratic Parties as well as later from the rising Communist Party, driven largely by a Soviet Revolution that converted Russia into the first European country to decriminalise homosexuality. The assumption of the party secretariat by Stalin and his sexually reactionary policies would return to penalisation, and would oblige the rest of Moscow-aligned communism to assume homophobia, including the German. For Drucker, this plot twist would suppose a hard blow for sexual liberationism and would suppose the loss of many potentialities that could have been won already then.

Peter Drucker considers that the primacy of gay identity over the rest—lesbians, bisexuals, trans identities, etc.—begins to take shape in the heat of the global Fordist capitalist accumulation regime [the post-war economic system characterised by mass production and consumption], which develops principally between the 1940s and 1970s, coinciding with the post-war period in Europe and the necessary reconstruction of the continent and with the enormous urban and industrial developmentalism that takes place globally in those decades, also affecting the processes of controlled decolonisation by the metropolises [colonial powers] that occur in Africa and Asia and to the new radical left that emerges in the sixties. The reinforcement of capitalism, the development of sexual liberation fronts and the defeats of the revolutionary utopias of the 1960s and 1970s have as consequence the establishment of a new regime for understanding the politics of sexual and gender dissidence: this would be what he calls “homonormative-dominant”, which continues in the line of the previous, the “gay-dominant”, but framed in a different political and economic context, such as that generated by the neoliberalism of the last forty years.

Having described all this in detail, the author passes to the second block of the book: homonormativity in the neoliberal context. Here he describes how this, principally centred on gay men, develops as one more identity within the neoliberal context, provided it complies with the norms of capitalism and patriarchy: having money, linking itself in a familial and/or monogamous way, identifying ideologically with the liberal state and sexually being as close as possible to the norm. It is in this context that the transmaricabibollo identities most distant from said norm, both for departing from the forms of construction of homonormativity as well as for being working class, racialised, disabled, anticapitalist or practitioners of non-normative sexualities and forms of relating, suffer as never before within the community, now called LGBTI, discrimination by those who hold greater social rank within it, despite the fact that in not so distant times their identities were also discriminated against and marginalised at more similar levels. And it is the starting pistol for infinity of nauseating policies that we have had to witness in the most recent lustra [five-year periods]: homonationalism [nationalism that uses gay rights to justify other policies], manifest gay racism towards other cultures with long histories of oppression by the West for considering them entirely “homophobic”, alliances with the modern extreme right, support for military service, the inclusion of homosexuals in right-wing and neoliberal parties, pinkwashing [using LGBTI+ rights to distract from other issues] and gay support for the Israeli colonial genocide over Palestine, the alliance with political subjects and social establishments that are anti-homosexual to repress non-normative sexual and gender dissident expressions—trans prostitutes, trans people with little normative gender transitions, saunas, BDSM venues, pornography...—and the push towards political and social marginalisation of sectors that escape the homonorm.

Once the entire process of articulation of homosexuality and the posterior development towards the homonormative model within the current political context is related, Peter Drucker finalises his book with a third block that can serve us as valuable inspiration towards how to articulate transmaricabibollo politics in particular, and in general those that concern sexual and gender dissidence within the so-called “radical left” that is politically positioned in favour of sexual freedom. Facing inwards to the transmaricabibollo struggle, the author urges us to redefine the limits of our spaces in relation to the identities that participate in them. Taking into account that our identities can distance themselves from the norm in innumerable ways, Drucker proposes overcoming the constrictions and circumscription to the ghetto that the categories “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual” generate in favour of embracing a greater range of dissidences, being moreover a categorisation that in some non-white contexts generates even more problems than in the West that promotes them. He also proposes alliance with feminism, being part of it in many contexts or within a proposal to subvert gender itself and associated roles. He also expresses the necessity of inclusion of transmaricabibollo people marginalised by the homonorm, and of non-normative affective-sexual relationship forms, proposing to “queer” our relational intimacy. Drucker moreover severely underlines the necessity of an iron alliance between anticapitalist transmaricabibollo politics and the anti-racist struggle as a whole, which is not circumscribed uniquely to racialised non-cisheterosexual people.

Facing the rest of social movements, Drucker recalls the role that transmaricabibollo politics have had in recent movements, such as the struggle against HIV and self-organised groups, global revolts like 15-M [Spanish anti-austerity movement of 2011], Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring or the Revolt of Taksim Square in Turkey. He highlights the potentiality that the anticapitalist left be capable of making itself heard in societies in which a very important part of its population does not consider itself heterosexual and continues having problems because of it, and that therefore be capable of snatching faithful from the neoliberal homonormative creed. And he does not forget the outstanding role that sexual and gender dissidents already have in movements of obvious importance today, such as trade unionism, feminism or climate justice.

Drucker glimpses a future in which the so-called “anticapitalist queer left” be capable of addressing all these challenges, with the unequivocal support of “queerised” social movements that in turn receive a powerful impulse from the former. Said future is yet to be constructed, but for now it is easy to affirm that the proposals that Peter Drucker has made to us should be taken into consideration among those who participate in whichever of the struggles he mentions in his book, and especially among those who are militant in transmaricabibollo activism, facing how we develop our politics in the immediate future. For this reason it is more than recommendable to read this book, meditate on what he proposes to us and collectively debate its content.

Piro Subrat