I wonder what kind of structures lead to the liberation of queer people.
Certainly, socialism hasn't significantly outpaced capitalism. You can point to pockets like east Germany, but overall the socialist block hasn't been great on the issue. For the examples that look good, (Cuba, and China's improving) I think the factor has to be time rather than socialism.
Even in pre-colonial times, things weren't good. I'm reminded of the goddess Ishtar who represents (what we perceive now as) queer people, but the myth acknowledges that queer people were cursed to live on the fringes of society. So, while they weren't demonized, it seems to acknowledge that they weren't really welcome in mainstream society either.
Queer liberation in bourgeois democracies has largely been thanks to grassroots movements that had a big societal impact owed to to queer communities being at the cutting edge of pop culture and queer activism being loud, radical and relentless. These movements until this day struggle against the opposition of well-funded, deeply entrenched, officially endorsed reactionary forces. Due to this materially powerful, hostile forces, advances were often restricted to select legal fields like gay marriage, while areas that have an economic impact like protection from workplace and housing discrimination or encompassing trans healthcare are in many nations lackluster and incomplete until today.
Queer liberation in AES was in many ways the opposite of that, being enacted top-down by decree. There was input by party members from queer communities, by clinical experts ect., but ultimately anything hinged on whether the party wanted to support this cause or not. At the same time, tho, reactionary forces (the churches, activist billionaires) were actively suppressed and did not have any political influence, removing a major factor for state-endorsed and institutional queerphobia.
This lead to drastically different outcomes in practice. In many western countries, queer acceptance among the populace has vastly outpaced our legal (and in many cases where it is relevant) medical acceptance. The people are ahead of the reactionary insitutions here. In many AES countries like Eastern Germany or Czechoslovakian SSR, the institutions were ahead of the people, legalizing homosexuality before western countries did while the public was less accepting of gay people than in the bourgeois states were gay sex was still treated as a crime and fought with police raids on gay bars. A tightly regulated public life led to less cultural impact of queer subculture in many places, with few exceptions like Slovenia (which still under Tito hosted Europe's first queer film festival and until this day is the most gay-friendly country in Eastern Europe).
These are fundamentally different situations stemming from fundamentally different institutional frameworks for activism. East Germany outpaced West Germany when it came to the legalization of gay sex and the legal recognition of trans people. The "reunification", or rather: the annexation of the DDR by hostile capitalist and reactionary forces, led to tangible legal setbacks for East German queers - the DDR legalized homosexuality a year earlier and unlike the West, did not retain different ages of consent for gay and straight sex, for example. So when the wall came down, there were suddenly teenage gay couples that were at least in theory threatened with persecution because the West German legal system still operated under the idea that homosexuality spread as a form of social contagion, through seduction of youths by older men. This reactionary and unscientific view lead to a higher age of consent for gay sex until 1994. Trans people were able to change their papers and access treatment on a case by case basis in the DDR, which often led to easier transitions than in the West, were either bottom surgery or sterilization was required until 2011 if you wanted to change your name and gender marker. But East Germany's public was measurably less accepting of queer people than the public in the west, and outside Berlin is less welcoming to queer people until this day. Where every major West German city had a bustling and open gay nightlife in the early 1970s, East Berlin had its first official gay bar in the late 1980s. Yes, it was a state-run gay bar, i get how cool that sounds, but having a lively, vibrant queer scene requires a kind of organizing that is ... difficult if all has to happen within your country's socialist unity party.
It is overly simplistic to draw statements like "gay people were better off in country x than in country y" from this, such comparisons even today disregard the complexity of the opression we face. How do you rank the fact that Thailand is socially more accepting of trans people than most Western countries, but makes it flat out impossible to have our actual gender legally recognized, meaning that trans women in Thailand routinely and automatically end up in men's prisons? You can't put a number on that and say "Thailand ranks as place number so and so on trans rights and Canada ranks as place number so and so." It doesn't work. The details aren't comensurable. And this also goes for comparing gay rights in AES and Western countries.
I know this is a thorny and complicated topic, we're all used to libs using 1950s soviet laws as an example to hallucinate a supposed inherent homophobia of communism when the UK at the same time chemically castrated Alan Turing and drove him to suicide, or when the US routinely raided gay bars back then and did human experimentation on conversion therapy. It is infuriating how liberals completely memory hole the brutality of our opression in the West due to them having suddenyl forgotten about their own homophobia ten years ago. I hate to see that kind of person act all smug. Fuck that. But let's not paint a nostalgic and idealized idea of the DDR's gay bars, this will not enable us to take a Marxist, scientific approach and learn and do better than earlier socialists.
What we see in examples like Cuba can be seen as a learning from other AES states' history. They did not just pass their new family code, they accompanied it with a widespread agitprop campaign, they ensured that they got the public on board with their plans. And then they backed it up with tangible, material benefits where needed, such as in trans healthcare, were they are training more surgeons than required for the Cuban trans population so they will help trans people from all over LatAm lead a dignified, happy life. And they make sure that queer culture is adequately represented in Havanna's nightlife, that there's pride parades etc. This is a good approach under socialism, and it requires a lot of acceptance and openness from the upper ranks of the party to work out.
Certainly, socialism hasn't significantly outpaced capitalism. You can point to pockets like east Germany, but overall the socialist block hasn't been great on the issue. For the examples that look good, (Cuba, and China's improving) I think the factor has to be time rather than socialism.
I have to disagree with the framing of this.
While it's much easier to measure economic gains made by socialist countries, it's far harder to quantify progress on queer liberation. There's the obvious elements like policy but policy is usually representative of an undercurrent of cultural and governmental attitudes towards queer people, but to quantify the progress made on societal values, acceptance, and inclusion as well as healthcare outcomes, crime statistics, rates of unemployment and homelessness and addiction etc. is very difficult as gender studies is still a frontier of social research even in the west today let alone the Eastern bloc countries or East Asia.
It's also important to keep in mind that a socialist government inherits the cultural and societal values of its predecessor state; these attitudes don't start from a default position or a blank slate. With that said, it's also worth keeping in mind that to argue that socialist countries haven't outpaced capitalist countries is to give most capitalist countries a headstart of at least a century but often far more than that.
We can look to countries like Poland, Hungary, and even the United States to see that queer liberation is also liable to backsliding so I also think it's a bit unfair in looking at "the west" because it's very easy to cherry-pick the most advanced countries while ignoring other countries that are backwards or even retrogressing.
Last thought - this is also complicated by factors like advances in gender care in countries like Czechoslovakia; while it's undeniable that Czechoslovakia was extremely advanced in matters of gender care it came coupled with inherent heterosexism which is easy enough to argue as being a backwards step but I think it's better understood as representative of an uneven development towards queer liberation. (See the work of Appeltova for more on this.)
I think the factor has to be time rather than socialism
It's material development which wipes away religious prejudice by doing away with oppression by nature (in the West's case, there is also the interest of exploitation of the globe, and so this acceptance is granted only to the "herrenvolk").
Regarding China's improvement:
"For member[s] of the Chinese LGBT community, the greatest source of pressure to conform to societal norms of sexuality and identity comes from family members—particularly parents[...] a higher level of economic development in provinces was associated with a decrease in discrimination, and we identified that every 100 thousand RMB increase in per capita GDP lead to a 6.4% decrease in discriminatory events perpetrated by heterosexuals[...] The prevalence of this discrimination is associated with the economic development of the province in which it occurs" (BMC Public Health 2020).
I wonder what kind of structures lead to the liberation of queer people.
Certainly, socialism hasn't significantly outpaced capitalism. You can point to pockets like east Germany, but overall the socialist block hasn't been great on the issue. For the examples that look good, (Cuba, and China's improving) I think the factor has to be time rather than socialism.
Even in pre-colonial times, things weren't good. I'm reminded of the goddess Ishtar who represents (what we perceive now as) queer people, but the myth acknowledges that queer people were cursed to live on the fringes of society. So, while they weren't demonized, it seems to acknowledge that they weren't really welcome in mainstream society either.
China practically invented gay hookup apps. Have a little respect 😤
Queer liberation in bourgeois democracies has largely been thanks to grassroots movements that had a big societal impact owed to to queer communities being at the cutting edge of pop culture and queer activism being loud, radical and relentless. These movements until this day struggle against the opposition of well-funded, deeply entrenched, officially endorsed reactionary forces. Due to this materially powerful, hostile forces, advances were often restricted to select legal fields like gay marriage, while areas that have an economic impact like protection from workplace and housing discrimination or encompassing trans healthcare are in many nations lackluster and incomplete until today.
Queer liberation in AES was in many ways the opposite of that, being enacted top-down by decree. There was input by party members from queer communities, by clinical experts ect., but ultimately anything hinged on whether the party wanted to support this cause or not. At the same time, tho, reactionary forces (the churches, activist billionaires) were actively suppressed and did not have any political influence, removing a major factor for state-endorsed and institutional queerphobia.
This lead to drastically different outcomes in practice. In many western countries, queer acceptance among the populace has vastly outpaced our legal (and in many cases where it is relevant) medical acceptance. The people are ahead of the reactionary insitutions here. In many AES countries like Eastern Germany or Czechoslovakian SSR, the institutions were ahead of the people, legalizing homosexuality before western countries did while the public was less accepting of gay people than in the bourgeois states were gay sex was still treated as a crime and fought with police raids on gay bars. A tightly regulated public life led to less cultural impact of queer subculture in many places, with few exceptions like Slovenia (which still under Tito hosted Europe's first queer film festival and until this day is the most gay-friendly country in Eastern Europe).
These are fundamentally different situations stemming from fundamentally different institutional frameworks for activism. East Germany outpaced West Germany when it came to the legalization of gay sex and the legal recognition of trans people. The "reunification", or rather: the annexation of the DDR by hostile capitalist and reactionary forces, led to tangible legal setbacks for East German queers - the DDR legalized homosexuality a year earlier and unlike the West, did not retain different ages of consent for gay and straight sex, for example. So when the wall came down, there were suddenly teenage gay couples that were at least in theory threatened with persecution because the West German legal system still operated under the idea that homosexuality spread as a form of social contagion, through seduction of youths by older men. This reactionary and unscientific view lead to a higher age of consent for gay sex until 1994. Trans people were able to change their papers and access treatment on a case by case basis in the DDR, which often led to easier transitions than in the West, were either bottom surgery or sterilization was required until 2011 if you wanted to change your name and gender marker. But East Germany's public was measurably less accepting of queer people than the public in the west, and outside Berlin is less welcoming to queer people until this day. Where every major West German city had a bustling and open gay nightlife in the early 1970s, East Berlin had its first official gay bar in the late 1980s. Yes, it was a state-run gay bar, i get how cool that sounds, but having a lively, vibrant queer scene requires a kind of organizing that is ... difficult if all has to happen within your country's socialist unity party.
It is overly simplistic to draw statements like "gay people were better off in country x than in country y" from this, such comparisons even today disregard the complexity of the opression we face. How do you rank the fact that Thailand is socially more accepting of trans people than most Western countries, but makes it flat out impossible to have our actual gender legally recognized, meaning that trans women in Thailand routinely and automatically end up in men's prisons? You can't put a number on that and say "Thailand ranks as place number so and so on trans rights and Canada ranks as place number so and so." It doesn't work. The details aren't comensurable. And this also goes for comparing gay rights in AES and Western countries.
I know this is a thorny and complicated topic, we're all used to libs using 1950s soviet laws as an example to hallucinate a supposed inherent homophobia of communism when the UK at the same time chemically castrated Alan Turing and drove him to suicide, or when the US routinely raided gay bars back then and did human experimentation on conversion therapy. It is infuriating how liberals completely memory hole the brutality of our opression in the West due to them having suddenyl forgotten about their own homophobia ten years ago. I hate to see that kind of person act all smug. Fuck that. But let's not paint a nostalgic and idealized idea of the DDR's gay bars, this will not enable us to take a Marxist, scientific approach and learn and do better than earlier socialists.
What we see in examples like Cuba can be seen as a learning from other AES states' history. They did not just pass their new family code, they accompanied it with a widespread agitprop campaign, they ensured that they got the public on board with their plans. And then they backed it up with tangible, material benefits where needed, such as in trans healthcare, were they are training more surgeons than required for the Cuban trans population so they will help trans people from all over LatAm lead a dignified, happy life. And they make sure that queer culture is adequately represented in Havanna's nightlife, that there's pride parades etc. This is a good approach under socialism, and it requires a lot of acceptance and openness from the upper ranks of the party to work out.
Very well said
I have to disagree with the framing of this.
While it's much easier to measure economic gains made by socialist countries, it's far harder to quantify progress on queer liberation. There's the obvious elements like policy but policy is usually representative of an undercurrent of cultural and governmental attitudes towards queer people, but to quantify the progress made on societal values, acceptance, and inclusion as well as healthcare outcomes, crime statistics, rates of unemployment and homelessness and addiction etc. is very difficult as gender studies is still a frontier of social research even in the west today let alone the Eastern bloc countries or East Asia.
It's also important to keep in mind that a socialist government inherits the cultural and societal values of its predecessor state; these attitudes don't start from a default position or a blank slate. With that said, it's also worth keeping in mind that to argue that socialist countries haven't outpaced capitalist countries is to give most capitalist countries a headstart of at least a century but often far more than that.
We can look to countries like Poland, Hungary, and even the United States to see that queer liberation is also liable to backsliding so I also think it's a bit unfair in looking at "the west" because it's very easy to cherry-pick the most advanced countries while ignoring other countries that are backwards or even retrogressing.
Last thought - this is also complicated by factors like advances in gender care in countries like Czechoslovakia; while it's undeniable that Czechoslovakia was extremely advanced in matters of gender care it came coupled with inherent heterosexism which is easy enough to argue as being a backwards step but I think it's better understood as representative of an uneven development towards queer liberation. (See the work of Appeltova for more on this.)
Bourgeois capitalism: 250+ years in power = Florida, TERF Island
Proletarian socialism time in power 20-40 years = German Democratic Republic
GDR = emerged from industrialized educated capitalist Weimar Germany
China and RSFSR: emerged from widespread illiteracy, extremely little industrialization, barely reached capitalist development stage
I think you're right and the common factor was time, the USSR today would probably be ahead of America on LGBTQ+ rights if they weren't already
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It's material development which wipes away religious prejudice by doing away with oppression by nature (in the West's case, there is also the interest of exploitation of the globe, and so this acceptance is granted only to the "herrenvolk").
Regarding China's improvement: