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.
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