Aaron S. Lecklider, Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021)

A peculiar dualism afflicts the history of sexuality and communism. While anti-communist propaganda has long associated leftists with sexual perversity, internal critiques fault the left for its sexual puritanism and outright hostility to same-sex sexuality in particular. Aaron S. Lecklider seeks to correct the latter misapprehension in Love’s Next Meeting, his cultural history of homosexuality, and the American left from the 1920s through the 1950s. The book takes the shape of a declension narrative. Love’s Next Meeting starts with the promise that queer leftists, especially gay men, saw in communism and ends with the double excision of homosexuals from radical organizing and radicalism from homosexual organizing, under the pressures of McCarthyism. This two-pronged repudiation explains how the left acquired its reputation for being “homophobic, misogynist, and boring.” (159)

It was not always thus. In the beginning, Lecklider argues, “a confluence of queer-left passion” (17) inspired many young idealists. He points for example to two pairs of lovers, John Malcolm Brinnin and Kimon Friar, and Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester, who each combined their love for each other with a passion for radicalism. Discussions of same-sex sexuality could also be found taking place in leftist free-speech venues like the Dill Pickle Club and the Seven Arts Club. Borrowing from Kevin Mumford, Lecklider describes these sites as “political and erotic interzones that blurred the boundaries of deviant politics.” (22) Not only did political and sexual dissidence overlap, some in the vanguard politicized sex as a strategy for “disrupting the status quo.” (45) A radical print culture emerged to express such ideas.

Lecklider is less concerned with naming names or counting gay men and women in the movement than he is with analyzing the artistic productions produced by that vanguard. Love’s Next Meeting analyzes dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and journal articles. Lecklider is especially attentive to the intersection of anti-racist, queer, and leftist politics in the works of writers like Willard Motley and H. T. Tsiang. His account of the “proletarian burlesque” in Tsiang’s wonderfully weird, self-published novel The Hanging on Union Square (1935) is eye-opening. The book includes scenes that are “so shocking, so mind-bendingly filthy, it is difficult to even decipher what is going on,” (221) all in the service of inciting readers to revolution. Other forgotten texts, like Harry Hay’s unpublished 1938 short story “Little Jew-Boy,” are probably best left forgotten.

Lecklider also analyzes the graphic productions of the queer left. The book makes great use of illustrations from journals like New Masses, The Liberator, and The Working Woman. Lecklider notes how artists’ depictions of proletarian bodies at work opened opportunities for “a wide range of erotic sexual depictions.” (118) The homoerotics of poster art celebrating manly workers may be familiar, but Paul Cadmus’s painting Herrin Massacre (1940) presents a more surprising visual expression of queer-left aesthetics. The painting memorializes the 1922 mass murder of strikebreakers by union members outside Herrin, Illinois. In Cadmus’s painting, the slaughtered strikebreakers are laid out in a line. Several are shirtless. One, still alive, has his pants unbuttoned. Another has been stripped of his pants entirely. All the strikebreakers are, in Lecklider’s words, “depicted as highly idealized specimens of the male form.” (135) In fact, he suggests, the painting “might be read as a depiction of sexual terror.” (135) Does Cadmus use the visual idiom of social realism to raise concerns about the violence directed against gay men from within the left?
While seeking to correct narratives of the left’s “unrelenting antipathy to homosexuality,” (77) Lecklider does not deny that the Communist Party was hostile to gay men (if somewhat less so to lesbians). But he points out that homophobia was so widespread that the Party’s hostility did not stand out as exceptional or even noteworthy. Gay men and lesbians who were drawn to the left ignored Party dictates. The “antigay policies of the Communist Party had little impact on the actual beliefs and practices of members.” (124) Sexual dissidents drawn to radicalism overlooked official policies and organizational hostility and persisted in bringing homosexuality and radicalism into the conversation.

Much of Love’s Next Meeting is devoted to analyses of specific texts, but Lecklider does bring in great examples of social history from the sources as well. I particularly loved a passage from a young lesbian’s diary describing her visit to a gay club in 1934, where she witnessed a floor show featuring Adolph Hitler and his stormtroopers capturing a handsome spy. This campy burlesque, which predated Mel Brooks’s The Producers by thirty-three years, illuminates the wondrous creativity of the queer left in the 1930s. Lecklider’s discussion of same-sex romances among volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade is similarly enthralling. I would have enjoyed a whole chapter on the topic.

If the queer-left passions that inspired love between comrades in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade represent the high point of Lecklider’s narrative, the low point came a little more than a decade later, ushered in by postwar anti-Communism. When McCarthyites attacked the American left as a secret homosexual cabal, both sides of that equation sought to disentangle themselves from the tarring influence of the other. The Communist Party became more assertively anti-homosexual, and the emerging gay rights movement became more assertively anti-communist. Individuals purged their personal archives, burning letters and cutting up diaries, creating the silences that would later drive historians like Lecklider to turn to published texts to tell the history of these forgotten connections.

In his final tragic chapter, Lecklider tells the story of how the communist founders of the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights organization in the United States, were thrown out of the organization by liberals who wanted to make the organization more palatable to the anti-radical mainstream. Along with its communist founders came Mattachine’s radical anti-capitalist and anti-racist principles. The homophile organization instead focused on “foregrounding homosexuality as an identity category that deserved to be woven into the American cultural fabric.” (267) Class solidarity gave way to identity politics, at least until the late 1960s, when a new radical gay rights movement would arise.

Rachel Hope Cleves

University of Victoria

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2023v91.0020.