The gay movement in Australia is in such a state of disarray that it is doubtful whether the word ‘movement’ can be used at all. In Melbourne, for instance, after discounting the social support groups (like Gay Rap and Lynx), the discussion groups and the task groups (like the Gay Community News and Lesbian News collectives), there is very little left. Gay activism in Melbourne has suffered a sharp decline and the situation is hardly nay better in the other cities.

The sources of this disarray are complex but an essential component of the failure of the movement in the failure of even its most clear-sighted and articulate elements to offer leadership.

It is a fact that many of the gays mobilised during the last ten years saw liberation primarily in personal terms and have settled comfortably into the ghetto and bar scene. Others have burnt out or reassessed their priorities and gone into unions or parties.

Meanwhile, that part of the movement that maintains its commitment to autonomy now finds itself adrift and isolated, reliving its past glories and debating its present failures with itself.

In all this confusion certain fundamentals have been forgotten. The most important of these is that gay oppression is an adjunct of women’s oppression and that women’s oppression springs from the demands of class society. Without the abolition of classes there can be no liberation for women or gays.

It is upon this basic fact that the whole question of the correct strategy for the gay liberation movement hinges. There are areas of disagreement within the movement that cannot be submerged. Unlike the Sydney CPA Gay Collective in its ‘Collective Statement to the Socialism and Homosexuality Conference’ we in the International Socialists do not want to play down these significant differences. We believe that there are "distinct political lines", that they must be acknowledged and fought out.

It is clear, after all, that the strategy for the movement is not an academic question; the consequences of our taking a wrong turn at this point in our development would be horrendous with the right gearing up to force women back into the Home and Family role, gays face a period of sustained repression in support of this attack. We must decide and decide now, who will defend gays and lead the counter attack against the right and against the capitalist system. In our opinion only the working class has the strength and will to fight and win. It is to the working class that gay socialists must direct their energies.

As a final point we note that we are aware that we are frequently accused of sectarianism because we assert our politics forcefully and without apology. We deny the charge absolutely. In the particular case of this conference, members of the International Socialists have actively participated in the organising collective precisely because we believe that it is necessary to discuss together the question of the way forward for gays.

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By Alison Thorne (Note: now a member of the Freedom Socialist Party).

Early this year the Hamer government’s Sexual Offences Act became law in Victoria. While some gays celebrated the fact that the new law degendered sexual acts and abolished the ‘abominable crime of buggery’; others saw it as a hollow victory. For lesbians the much-heralded act was a step backward as lesbianism is now recognised by the law giving the cops an even greater opportunity to harass and charge lesbian women. Of course, the real acid test of a law is how it is applied and Hamer’s hollow illusion has done little to end gay oppression.

Gay men are still harassed by cops while doing the beat, lesbians and male homosexuals are bashed and terrorised by poofter-bashers and gay people are still discriminated against in employment. In February this year Colin Briton was not re-appointed to his job as Community Education Officer at Sunshine High School. Colin had held the job for three years. During the job selection interview the panel asked him questions about his sexual preferences. I myself have recently started teaching at Glenroy Technical School. Starting work has made me realise that nothing has changed. I am forced to be closetted at work. Constant questions about my boyfriends or even having students call me Mrs, are just so oppressive and make me want to scream.

For the last four years I was a student. I existed quite happily in a rather artificial situation. Coming out was easy. Coming out was fun. By the beginning of 1980 I realised that I had become ghettoised, not liberated. Going out into a school made it clear to me once and for all that the ghetto is no solution. The oppression of gays at work cannot be ignored and there have been few real gains.

Gay oppression, like women’s oppression cannot be legislated out of existence. Gay people are oppressed by the ideology of the nuclear family and by the capitalist system which produced this ideology and now props it up.

The capitalist nuclear family is not a unit of production (as the family in feudal or tribal societies was) but despite this its existence is central to capitalism. Like the family in all class societies, the capitalist family is the means by which the next generation of producers can be raised and socialised but the capitalist system provides specific problems. Since it is only those who sell their labour who receive the means to live and since there is no domestic production to speak of, an alternative arrangement is necessary to provide for child bearing women and children. The nuclear family ‘solves’ this by providing rigid sex and age roles. Men became responsible for supporting women who produced a new generation of wage slaves. Men are ‘breadwiners’ who receive a wage sufficient to support ‘their’ dependents; women are wives and mothers providing emotional support, domestic labour and basic socialisation; children are the passive recipients of all this, being moulded according to their parents’ whims.

The family is a powerful socialising agent that, along with the other important means of ideological control such as education and the media, propagates the ideology of the nuclear family. Being part of the nuclear family is seen as the valid form of existence. Anti-gay sentiment is part of this drive to reinforce the current form of male-female relations and the family.

One of the difficulties facing socialists intent on confronting the family is that (within the context of an irrational society) there is a certain logic to it. If women are to be as grossly underpaid as they are, then they might as well stay home; if workplaces are intolerable then the compensatory aspects of the family - emotional support in particular - assume real importance in workers’ lives. The family survives partly because the working class has been led to perceive its advantages.

But these ‘advantages’ do not alter nor even disguise for socialists the fact that the family remains one of the most oppressive institutions within our society. It is central to the oppression of women and gays and it must be overthrown.

The idea of an autonomous gay movement (that is, a movement that excludes heterosexuals and includes all gays regardless of their political orientation) has been a central assumption of gay politics for the last 10 years.

In the early 1970s the autonomous gay movement played a vital role in advancing the struggle for gay liberation. It contributed to the growth of gay pride as both a personal and a public phenomenon and it explored and advanced the understanding of sexual politics, especially of the relationship between gay liberation and socialism.

However, it is clear that currently the movement is in sharp decline. It has lost direction and become isolated and inward-looking. A major source of this decline has been the idea that gays must always and everywhere work autonomously. The elevations of the autonomy of the movement from a tactic (to be used whenever necessary or desirable) to a strategy or inviolable principle has meant that many new avenues of development have been closed off.

Given the current world situation, gays need to be ready to defend themselves. New attacks on gays are happening around the world. With Reagan as the US President gays are in for a hard time. His victory has given a boost to the anti0gay, anti-women Moral Majority who have already allocated a million dollars to ‘foster anti-gay values’ in San Francisco. In Canada, in February this year, police raided four saunas and 300 people were arrested. In London the recent Paedophile Information Exchange trial attracted a lot of publicity which could lead to a huge rise in anti-gay activity. These world wide attacks will flow on to Australia. The current attack on sex education in Victorian schools is just one example of the constant anti-gay attacks to maintain the criminal status of consensual homosexuality, complete with the 14 year jail penalties.

In the past the Australian gay movement has adopted the strategy of building the united front and has had some success with this especially in the Campaign Against Repression. It must be made clear that what is at issue is united front work - that is, campaigns waged by various groups around socialist demands. The current emphasis on popular frontism - or worse still, gay fronts - can only lead to the swamping of socialist politics and the ever tighter cooption of gays within capitalism.

Where there is a movement around specific struggles then socialists must try to build it. This is how gays are won to socialist politics. We must not commit ourselves to trying to build an autonomous movement; all we would be building is a hollow shell.

Gays are oppressed by capitalism, so to achieve gay liberation we must end the system that is causing so much misery - the capitalist system. To smash the capitalist system we must build a mass revolutionary party of the working class. Women, workers and gays must unite because a class that is divided against itself will not have the energy or inclination to fight the system that oppresses it.

The International Socialists are trying to build a mass revolutionary party that can overthrow the capitalist system. We believe that the capitalist system cannot be patched up or gradually changed; there is no parliamentary road to socialism. The International Socialists are committed to full equality and liberation for all people. We believe that racism, sexism, the oppression of and discrimination against gays, blacks, women and migrants are the pillars of the capitalist system. These pillars must be smashed. Only the organised working class has the power to create a society free of oppression and exploitation.

Any oppressed group that is fighting back will find the International Socialists fighting alongside them

Gay people cannot afford to retreat into lifestyle politics. Sometimes we will be tolerated but when we are weak and unprepared we will be smashed. A gay movement based around struggle is a way to win people to socialist politics but it is only when women, workers and gays unite together in a mass revolutionary party to overthrow capitalism that gay liberation can ever be won.

Discussion paper from IS Gay Fraction.

This paper will attempt to provide a brief outline of the basis of the oppression of lesbians and male homosexuals. Its central argument is that our oppression as gays arises specifically out of the nature of the society we live in - capitalism. This oppression cannot be separated from the exploitation of the working class and is based on the need for the capitalist class to maintain one of their central institutions - the family.

To come to any understanding of gay oppression we must start with the role of the family in capitalist society.

The precise origins of the family are unclear (and for that matter controversial among Marxists), but what is clear is that hand in hand with the development of early class society came increasing restrictions on the sexual freedom of women in order to protect the descent of property down the male line. Eventually the entire life of women was restricted and controlled by the consolidation of patrilineal descent and the monogamous family.

Associated with the development of the monogamous, patrilineal family, occurred the development of private property and the state. The reproduction of human beings (and future labour power) within the family was separated off from social production generally and women were subordinated and oppressed within this sphere - reproduction. This is not to say that women were simply confined to the family. They also participated in and were oppressed and exploited within social production (the nature of their participation in social production varied from one particular class society to another and in different periods within the same class society), but it was the family which provided the basis of their oppression.

The family then is not some natural system of reproduction, but a specific development of class society. Women’s oppression is neither biological or natural and can be abolished with the abolition of class society.

The origins of the oppression of lesbians should be fairly clear - women’s sexuality had to be totally controlled and subordinated to the production of future labour power. Any independent sexuality of women was a clear threat to the structure of the family.

To the extent that male homosexuality represented a threat to the family it was also proscribed. However because male homosexuality was not as clear a threat as women controlling their own sexuality, it was possible in early class societies for it to be tolerated or even approved within certain limits. Thus, for example, in Greek society it was acceptable for male members of the ruling class to have young male ‘lovers’ provided they still maintained a family.

All class societies have maintained some form of the family as their basic means of reproducing labour power, but that is not to say that there is some timeless patriarchy which is responsible for the oppression of women and gays. In each type of class society the form of the family has been historically specific: the rise of capitalism for example, witnessed the destruction of the peasant household and the freeing of women from the direct domination of the male patriarch. And by driving women out to work, capitalism provided the basis for its own destruction and liberation of women.

The basis of the capitalist system is the process of accumulation of capital; the source of this accumulation of capital is surplus value. But surplus value can only be created if the capitalist can buy a commodity that has the potential of generating more value than it itself was bought for. There is only one such active commodity - labour power. Only the labourer can create more value than his/her wage.

The essential precondition for the development of capitalism then is the existence of a class of "free" wage labourers. The only way that a workers’ capacity to labour could become a commodity was if he or she was free to sell it to any boss and if he or she was free from the ownership of any means of production.

Because the class of "free" wage labourers is the essential pre-condition for capitalism, all capitalists have sought to intervene in the reproduction of this class. The family system is one of the first and more important areas of state intervention. As early as 1753 the formless common law marriage of England (established purely by consent) was "reformed" into a stipulated ceremony.

The value of labour power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer and for the reproduction of labour power (ie the labourer’s children). The wage system of capitalism is based upon the premise that all individuals in society actually live in family units. The wage system itself imposes its own requirements of "normal" life within a family upon the "free" wage labourer, as well as all the ideological pressures of our society.

The family still represents the cheapest means for capitalists to reproduce labour power - some estimates are that the family system reproduces the labour of a child four times as cheaply as state institutions. The family also plays an important role in terms of the training of the child to adapt to capitalist industry. As well the family indoctrinates the child in the social values of capitalism.

However capitalism is a society based on contradictions and as well as propping up the family the process of capitalist development also serves to undermine it. The expansion of capitalist industry has resulted in the need for increased state intervention in the reproduction of labour power. The family could not provide the necessary education and health care to produce a more skilled labour force. If capitalism was an ever expanding system it would be possible to imagine that the family would be abolished completely as it would eventually be cheaper to socialise reproduction totally and draw all women out of the home onto the labour market.

But of course capitalism is a system plagued by recurring crises which make in unprofitable for capitalists to invest the massive amounts needed to fully socialise child care, education and health services. Instead in a crisis the capitalist class places the burden on the backs of the working class family and cuts back the pre-existing social services, etc. In a period of crisis like the one which began in the early seventies, the state plays an increasing role in the maintenance of the system of capitalist production and of the family; and necessarily then in the oppression of women and gays.

To summarise: in capitalist society the private family is the essential structure for the reproduction of "free" workers who own their own labour power. The family is part of the necessary base of capitalist society. But that does not only mean the oppression of women (and indirectly of male homosexuals), it also means bringing women into production outside the household system.

Because production and reproduction are torn apart in capitalist society the immediate control of women in the family is no longer the essential structure of women’s oppression. The control of women shifts from the individual patriarchal household to the capitalist state with its infinite battery of laws and to the capitalist market.

Thus the family is in a constant contradictory relationship to capitalism. Production is based on the assumption of a male and female workforce; but the reproduction of capitalist society, as coordinated by the capitalist state through the family propped up by the "welfare" services, is based on the assumption of women as mothers.

From this analysis we would argue that the oppression of lesbians under capitalism flows directly from the oppression of women generally in this society. The oppression is accentuated because lesbians have rejected the sexual behavioural norms for women.

In the case of male homosexuality the situation is more ambiguous. In sections of society, eg. the ruling class or upper middle class, male homosexuality in itself does not represent a direct challenge to class rule or the family. It is only the generalisation of male homosexuality to all layers of society, in particular the working class and the non-exploiting elements of the middle class which would represent such a threat. It is no accident in this regard that while a whole layer of male homosexual capitalists and petty exploiters has developed, there is no comparable development of lesbian capitalism.

Strategically this fact is of some importance. It means that lesbians and in particular lesbian workers, who have the power to act to change society, will in the long term be in the forefront of the struggle for gay liberation and socialism and that the interests of lesbians and working class male homosexuals are sharply counterposed to the interests of gay petty capitalists, who exist with the support/toleration of the big bourgeoisie who oppress us all.

Another factor which should be touched on when examining gay oppression under capitalism is the historical fluctuations between brutal repression (eg. in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia) and periods of at least limited toleration.

In periods of capitalist prosperity such as the long boom of the fifties and sixties, it is possible for the ruling class to grant limited concessions to the working class and to movements of the oppressed. However in periods of crisis in the system, the ruling class is compelled to attack the working class and the oppressed and force down their living standards. As "deviant" behaviour which can be tolerated to some extent when the system is relatively healthy is more of a threat when the system is in crisis.

In times of crisis the capitalist class will mount an ideological defence of traditional moral, sexual and religious values to cohere the petty bourgeoisie and sections of the exploited in the defence of "classless" (ie pro-capitalist) national interests, and also as a means of disciplining society. It is no coincidence that fascist movements have linked their ultra-nationalist and pro-imperialist sentiments with defence of the family and anti-gay prejudice.

It is to be expected, with world capitalism now in a long and drawn out economic and social crisis, that attacks on gays as well as attacks on the working class generally will increase. Even the extremely limited gains that have been made over the last ten years will be taken from us unless we fight back.