This interview looks at the development, history, politics, and legacy of the Lavender and Red Union, an early gay communist political organization that was based in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1977. M., of Black Rose / Rosa Negra, sat down with a former member of the Lavender and Red Union, also briefly known as the Red Flag Union, named Walt Senterfitt in his Boyle Heights home in Los Angeles to see what today’s revolutionaries can learn from their legacy.
We see Lavender and Red’s specific politics as a product of their time and of their relationship to the larger mid-70s US left. While we have important disagreements with the politics of the group, especially the Leninist model of vanguard parties, we do think we can gain from studying the experiences of Lavender and Red Union during their brief life before merger with the Spartacist League in 1977.
One of the points that came up in the interview multiple times was the perspective that queer people will not be able to win alone: If we want liberation then we will need to fight together in the same struggles as all the other oppressed groups that make up the working class with us. We cannot only focus on building organizations that just address our own concerns or our own narrow community (which the Lavender and Red Union called ‘sectoralism’). This lesson and many of the other points discussed in this interview continue to be of importance for those of us who struggle with pushing back against the liberal, reformist, and class collaborationist tendencies in our movements.
The interview was done for the Turkish queer magazine Kaos GL Dergisi, and was first published in Turkish in September 2016 under the title “Gay Liberation Through Socialist Revolution! A Political History of the Lavender and Red Union’s Gay Communism.”
M: You grew up in the south?
Walt: I grew up in the south, mostly in northern Florida in the era of de jure Jim Crow racial segregation. Being in an officially legally segregated society – schools, public facilities, neighborhoods – and my reaction against it, which was based largely on a religious impulse initially, was what initially propelled my political awakening. However, it was kind of stunted because I was a white kid in a fairly backward small Southern town without any allies or anybody much to learn from even. So I would follow things through the news, like the awakening civil rights movement of the late ’50s and early ’60s. When I began to try to reach out to young black people on the other side of town, I quickly got squelched rather vigorously by the town fathers coming down on my parents and threatening to fire them from their jobs if they didn’t shut up their noisy and traitorous kid. So we worked out a compromise that I would cool it for six months in exchange for leaving home early and going to college in the north, which I thought would be a decisive act of liberation and freedom because I would get away from a small Southern town.
M: And go to someplace where everything was enlightened….
Walt: Where everything was enlightened, non-racist, and kind! Well of course that also led to my political awakening at the next stage. Oh! It’s not just the south! Racism is not simply a southern problem. It just has a different accent up here, and different forms. But my political activity was still within the confines largely of liberalism, but inspired by the Southern black civil rights movement and I was in fact organizing fellow university students from the north to support it, and to travel down south and participate in voter registration, and Freedom Summer, and liberation schools and things like that. And then increasingly also turning to community organizing in poor communities in northern cities. I dropped out of university without finishing. Partly over conflict over feeling impulses towards being gay but not being able to accept that yet, or not having a context, or not knowing anybody else.
M: You weren’t in contact with any gay community?
Walt: No. Now remember this period was pre-Stonewall, we’re talking early-to-middle ’60s. I worked with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and a group called the Northern Student Movement in Philadelphia after I dropped out and then moved to Washington D.C., worked for the National Student Association, which was basically a confederation of student governments. Unbeknownst to me until later it turned out to have been substantially secretly funded by the CIA together with thirty or forty other cultural and educational and artistic organizations in the US as a Cold War tactic because of the US government knowing that it wanted to be able to operate in third world and left movements internationally but wouldn’t be able to get any traction if it were doing that in the government’s own name.
M: So the whole story of the Lavender and Red Union goes back to the CIA.
Walt: No, but my own history does! So I ended up accidentally coming across this information and helping to expose it, in 1966, 1967. The government was at first going to deny it, but we had enough inside information that could corroborate it. So I got a call in the middle of the night from the controller of the NSA, the person who oversaw the relationship and the funding from the CIA, and he put this guy on the phone who at least said – and this was at three o’clock in the morning – that he was Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and he told me “Young man, you’ve betrayed your country…”
M: Congratulations!
Walt: “…we have ways to do deal with people, like drafting you and sending you to the front lines of Vietnam.” I did stuff like write up the story and put it in a safe deposit box and write stuff telling my parents that if something happens to me…. But fortunately it became a big enough story with national press, and then they started unraveling all these different other organizations…. So I was an embarrassment but it also gave us some protection. Anyway, not too long after that I left the NSA and moved to – I got married – moved to San Francisco, started an alternative school, was involved in the counterculture. And other ways of, you know, the whole mid-late ’60s stuff that we were going to…
M: So you were kind of generically political. You didn’t have a particular direction.
Walt: I knew that I was committed to social justice, to building a new society, but I was not primarily political in any organized way. Then in the course of that I also began to realize that I was queer, and that ultimately my marriage was not going to be sustainable in that context, so I came out, but fairly late, in my late 20s. This was two or three years after Stonewall. Stonewall helped me come out ’cause all of a sudden – OK, here are people that I can identify with, at least the radical wing of gay liberation was something that I could identify with. So I got involved in that a little bit late. Particularly since I moved back to Washington which was a bit late, since Washington D.C. has tended to be politically behind other parts of the country. For example, when I moved back to D.C. in ’72 and the next year ’73, I hooked up with a group of people and we wanted to propose the first gay pride in Washington, and we got shot down violently by the nascent gay community – “Oh no! You’ll turn everybody against us! It will set us back for two years!” – just to have an open gay pride, which was already happening in New York, San Francisco, LA. So Washington was a few years later.
M: Had you been to a gay pride march before then?
Walt: No. I left San Francisco and I came out, and had been dealing with it pretty much on a personal level. So when I got to D.C. I was involved at the gay community level in terms of institution building, like helped to start a counseling center that was peer-based and sort of liberatory-based, not psychologically-based, started an alternative to bars for people that didn’t drink or didn’t like the atmosphere of bars to have social dances and interaction, started a VD clinic which later grew into a health clinic for gay men and ultimately for lesbian women.
M: That’s a lot of things to start. Seems like you were very active.
Walt: Yeah, I was active. I was politically involved with what was left of the Gay Activist Alliance, which had already kind of gone rapidly up and down in DC. We fought things like the discriminatory and racist behavior of the gay bars. They would triple card black gay men in the city, or they would have a quota that when a bar got up to more than 10 or 15 percent black patrons, then they would start discouraging any more coming in on the theory that too many black people would discourage white patrons from coming. So we were fighting racism within the gay community, or within the institutions that serve the gay community. And with the people I was organizing with and with my own experience, looking back over the last few years, we became unhappy with this community building counterculture method of social change, and also with liberal pressure group politics for democratic rights.
M: Why were you unhappy with this? What did you see was limiting yourselves?
Walt: We weren’t getting anywhere. Except short-term and limited demands. And the more you got involved and the more you opened your eyes, you saw that it was an interconnected system of exploitation and oppression, not just a question of a bad policy of the government, or incomplete or imperfect democracy, or not giving enough rights or equality to one group or another. It was a little inchoate but it was largely frustration with a lack of vision. I also personally felt frustrated with the New Left. We were basically informed by the New Left, and one of the things that was typical of the New Left is the old left is bad. They were wrong. That’s associated with the Soviet Union. Nobody wants anything to do with them. At best they’re stodgy, conservative, bureaucratic…. But the part that was frustrating me about this was that we didn’t have anything to learn from the people who came before us. So frustration, or the New Left running its course, led to a number of people who were looking for a chance to study history and a chance to find theory that made sense, that would help explain the world, system, capitalism. At the same time there were beginning to be these generally Maoist pre-party formations, they called themselves – collectives that were aspiring to become part of the new communist movement, towards building a new party.
M: You mean like Revolutionary Union?
Walt: Yeah. Revolutionary Union, October League. Some of them had been around before, like the Progressive Labor Party. The Communist Workers’ Party. And then some of the Trotskyist movement, which had been pretty much off to the side, but present, started coming in and intervening with the New Left in one way or another. So anyways, we found a woman who is now identified as a Maoist, who was a former Communist Party leader who had come down from New York to D.C. in the late ’30s, early ’40s. She agreed to teach the rest of us Marxism. So we collectively studied. We had a study group complex, as we called it, and there were 125 of us in 10 different groups of 12. So I got involved, while continuing the kind of the things that I’ve described before, in studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought – MLM-T3. On the one hand it was very exciting and it was like the first time I had read or study Marxism, other than reading the Communist Manifesto when I was a college freshman. This was like turning on the lights in a tunnel. It was like, Wow! Oh, yeah! OK! Class struggle! Working class! Capital! Fundamental contradiction! Exploitation! Class struggle driving motor force of history! Having that framework, rather belatedly, you know, because I was thirty years old or something coming to this, was exciting. We started having this trouble though, because I brought up homosexuality in the study group complex, and this woman said “No, we can discuss it, but the line’s going to be unless you can show me different, unless you can show me the material basis for homosexuality and it’s theoretical contribution to revolutionary struggle or the working class, you just basically need to know what’s wrong with it. That it’s like bourgeois….”
M: Bourgeois decadence?
Walt: Yeah… a symptom of bourgeois decadence. She wasn’t so overtly homophobic. It was polite and soft in the language, but that was basically the line. It basically was the Chinese Communist Party’s line. That this is one of the many deviations of human behavior that will disappear with socialism. I essentially got marginalized by this MLM-T3 study group complex. They didn’t kick me out because I had some friends who respected me and who would have refused to allow that. But I saw that I was an uncomfortable minority. It made me think back to when I was a twelve year old boy in segregation Florida and there was nobody else there. So I started questioning. These people may have turned on the lights in the tunnel, but they sure do put blinders on. There’s something wrong with this Stalinist-Maoist version of Marxism. And also, I wanted to be queer. A queer communist. A queer Marxist.
M: So through that study group you became Marxist.
Walt: Yes.
M: But you realized, “I am Marxist, but not this Marxism.”
Walt: Yeah. So I started looking around and I found this little ad in a national gay paper that was about two lines at the bottom that said “Gay Liberation through socialist revolution!” I said, “What! Did I read that right? They sound like my kind of people!” So I wrote them from DC. They had just gotten founded about this time, ’74 or early ’75. In between my two years of nursing school, which is what I was doing my last few years in DC, I drove out here to LA to meet them to see what they were like. So I met them and was reasonably impressed, although they were awfully small. There were three to five of them total. I had discussions, and then I went back to DC and I started a little DC gay socialist study group that was using a kind of edited version of that same curriculum of this other study group complex, a little of the Mao and adding in a little Trotsky. Basically it was an introduction to Marxism. I wanted to recruit some other queers to Marxism so that I wouldn’t be the only one. I also tried horizontal recruitment, as they called it – from the straight ones. So that went OK. One person ended up later moving with me to LA to join the L&RU and a couple others remained sympathizers. But I stayed in touch by correspondence with the people out here, the L&RU, and invited them to come to DC. We did a forum for this left milieu called ‘Gay liberation through socialist revolution’. Later through struggle with the Spartacist League we dropped that slogan, but at the time it was cutting edge; it was the main slogan of the L&RU and of course it drove most people in the liberal and sectoralist queer community crazy – “What are you talking about socialist revolution, we just want equal rights”. But we got 125 people to come out to that in DC, including some of the Maoists who spoke up and gave their line, but…. Since I got my nursing degree I came out here to join them.
M: So how did those three or five people in L.A come together?
Walt: I don’t know exactly because I wasn’t here and I don’t remember the stories. I know they were all in the Maoist milieu and so they all had similar kind of rejection experiences to me. Because the Maoist milieu dominated the new left decomposition products of that time, and if you were a radical revolutionary anti-capitalist, that was the main game in town, with the Trotskyists having a little left field pocket, and then the anarchists – I don’t know about LA, but they weren’t a factor in DC. So then in ’76 when I came to LA to join we expanded to 11. So we had brought in more people, including people that were less politically experienced. But there were some core politics, like we believed in a working class orientation, including implantation of cadre in industry and work in trade unions.
M: Can you explain what the implantation of cadre in industry means?
Walt: It’s that you want to recruit people from the working class, but you also wanted to send people who became won to communism into industry or into strategic places where they could help organize other workers or recruit from working class struggles and to work in the trade union movement. So out of our 11 we had two in communications, who were telephone workers and in the communication workers union, and me in health care, joining the health care workers union. We actually talked about that within the L&RU – you notice we weren’t just talking queer politics, we were also trying to do our bit to help build a revolutionary working class movement. That’s a part of the problem that we began to see here pretty soon. First of all, 11 is awful small, being out queer. And so being a gay liberation communist organization was not particularly helpful in organizing a revolutionary caucus within the communication workers union, or the nurses.
M: Did the organization actually send people into these workplaces to organize? You said that was a strategy.
Walt: Yeah. At least one of the communication workers was sent in. The other may have been their to start with, but he was there in part with the idea of being an organizer within. And before we later moved on into the Spartacist League, we were training a couple or three other people for jobs for implantation. Apprenticeships, and skilled trades for example, and electrician, transport workers. We were aiming for somebody in the ports. Didn’t get that far, though.
M: So the goal then in doing this workplace organizing, would not be to, say, organize a queer caucus in the health care workers union.
Walt: No. It wasn’t. Not at that time. And it was also contrary to our politics.
M: Why was that?
Walt: Well, we were saying that the role of queers in the maintenance of American capitalism is not strategic in the same way that black people – and later other people of color – and women is. That American capitalism and the domination of the American ruling class is integrally dependent on maintaining the special oppression of blacks, in particular, and also increasingly Latinos and other immigrant forces, and women. And that gay people are probably not going to find, or likely to find, full democratic rights without the leadership of a radical or revolutionary movement. But it’s conceivable that they could. And I think that in the outcome of the last few years you can kind of see that it’s conceivable that the nominal granting of democratic rights can happen within the structure of capitalism. So we were saying that we wanted to organize around the things that were strategic and fundamental while we also fought for women’s liberation – and we sort of saw the queer question as in some ways integrally related to that – and for full democratic rights for everybody, that we have to make a point of fighting for everybody, even unpopular or small minorities, whether strategic or not. Though we didn’t organize gay caucuses in our trade union work, we did raise the demand that unions should support full democratic rights and oppose discrimination against LGBT people. That way, we established a track record of the importance of the unions and the working class fighting to defend gay people when under attack, as with all marginalized groups. So we were in a position to quickly mobilize support when pogrom-type attacks came, as later happened during the hysteria around AIDS.
M: Earlier you were talking about whether it was possible to realize full democratic rights under capitalism. I think you were saying that at least for the United States –
Walt: It’s theoretically possible to do that.
M: But it’s not possible to do that for, say, black people, because capitalism, in the US, is formulated on the foundation of racism. But you said that for queer people, it’s more of an… open question?
Walt: Yeah. I would say, once again I personally don’t see it fully, but it’s possible to extend democratic rights more and more and more on things like marriage, on things like serving in the military. They could also do, although they haven’t yet, on nondiscrimination in the workplace, or nondiscrimination in housing. All these are aspects of full democratic rights. They can grant that without threatening hegemony, rule, power, including power to exploit the working class as a whole.
M: In some of Lavender and Red’s writing about their goals or demands for sexuality and for queer struggle, they talked about a vision of being able to actually move beyond gender distinctions entirely, and not have – obviously – straight, gay, bisexual; not have masculine/feminine gender roles, not being assigned male and female. Is that something beyond democratic rights, are those things that you think can be achieved under capitalism?
Walt: No, that’s beyond democratic rights. I think that’s part of what ultimately needs the socialist revolution. But I think that’s integrally related to, and you can contextualize it within, the “woman question”, in the traditional Marxist terminology. In terms of the elimination of patriarchy. I think retrospectively we could have gone beyond this to expand the potential contribution of queerness. But it’s still a terrain that was opened up. I mean we want to be able to, for example, socialize reproduction of labor to create freedom from those traditional sex roles, including forms of sexual partnering. So I would say that’s tied to to the original liberatory vision of Marxism. And we were certainly into extrapolating on that, and talking about that, and envisioning and imagining, but on the other hand we’re not utopians. We’re saying you don’t get these things just by imagining them, you get them by working to change the material bases and the structure of capitalism and class rule.
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