Biography of Daniel Guérin - Part Two: Be gay, do crime.
Rhys Maxsted completes his overview of the life and politics of French communist Daniel Guérin. First published in May 2023 for volume three of The Commonweal. Part two of two.
Part one of this article can be read here.
"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives" (Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60s, 1982)
In Part 1 of my article on Guerin I talked exclusively about his political life but here I will focus on how his identity as a bisexual man affected his experience within leftist circles as well as his involvement with the queer movement within France.
To say that socialist countries throughout history have failed to extend their solidarity to queer issues would be a gross understatement. From the USSR's 1934 Article 121, which recriminalised male homosexuality throughout the Soviet Union and which could result in up to five years imprisonment with hard labour, to other socialist countries, like Cuba in its early post-revolutionary days, associating homosexuality with US imperialism and perceiving it as ‘bourgeois’, socialists and socialist states have ignored or opposed the struggle for gay rights. Fighting this discrimination was one of Daniel Guérin’s other major goals in life.
At first, Guérin separated his personal and political lives for obvious reasons and only ever wrote about issues of capitalist inequality. But in 1954 he wrote an article in the well-known left journal France-Observateur about the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Guérin took issue with two main points in Kinsey’s study. The first issue was the idea of the Kinsey scale, which was a way to describe a person's sexual orientation based on one’s experience or response at a given time. The scale typically ranges from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual, to 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. Guérin’s issue with the scale was that it was far too binary in its understanding of sexuality and he objected to the way it placed you into a rigid category based on a series of questions Kinsey asked, which were solely based on behavior rather than one’s emotional or psychological thoughts and feelings.
Guérin’s other issue was with the way Kinsey and his team collected data from paedophiles, which is a demographic of outliers in terms of sexual activity. Unintentionally or not, linking paedophilia to homosexuality has been an insidious theme throughout modern history.
Guérin also published a book called Shakespeare and Gide in the Magistrate’s Court (1959), where he argued that some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were love poems addressed to a man. After publishing these works Guérin faced severe criticism from his peers on the left. He later wrote, ‘The harshest (criticism) came from Marxists, who tend seriously to underestimate the form of oppression which is anti-sexual terrorism. I expected it, of course, and I knew that in publishing my book I risked being attacked by those to whom I feel closest on a political level.’
At this time Guérin started to move away from communism to a more anarchist framework, although he did not use it as a means to attack Marxism. On the contrary he strongly believed that ‘anarchism is nothing but one of the branches of socialist thought.’ He hoped that solidarity between Marxism and anarchism could be achieved. Unfortunately for Guérin there was no solidarity for himself. After coming out in 1965 he was abandoned by his peers on the Left, and his papers on sexual liberation were censored or refused publication in left-wing journals that he had previously written for.
Queer activists and many others were influenced both by the May 1968 general strike in France and significant queer world events like the Stonewall Riots (June-July 1969). This created a snowball effect in France and led to the formation of several radical national groups that tied gay rights to other social causes and sought not tolerance but revolutionary social change. The gay liberation movement in France is said to have begun publicly on March 10, 1971. On that day, gay and lesbian activists hijacked a radio talk show to forcibly demand equal rights for queer people throughout France. Guerin was involved in the uprising of 1968 and became part of the French Gay Liberation Movement that emerged after it. Frederic Martel later described him as ‘the grandfather of the French homosexual movement.’
Until these events, the most political gay organisation in France was Arcadie. Fortunately for Guérin their journal, which sold tens of thousands of copies each month, provided him with another outlet for his writings. Arcadie organised dances, lectures, and other social and educational events, with the group at its peak having hundreds of thousands of members - predominantly men. In the early 1970s, seeing Arcadie as only focusing on gay men's issues, a group of young feminists approached the organization about setting up a women's group within it. Arcadie's leaders rejected their proposal saying it was too political. By the following year the women were no longer asking permission and strove to create a new group.
Guérin helped found a new national group, Le Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (The Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action-FHAR). It was created to focus on solidarity with all queer people not just gay men, as well as calling for political change and the destruction of ‘fascist sexual normality.’ Hundreds of leftist queers began attending FHAR meetings but it wasn’t long before the group began to fracture, with Guérin leaving soon after as it did not align with his personal revolutionary beliefs. An anarchistic offshoot called Les Gazolines was created by a group of trans men. Additionally, many radical lesbians, such as Marie-Jo Bonnet and Anne-Marie Grélois, disgusted by the sexism and the invisibility of lesbian issues within FHAR, left to form a women's group, Gouines Rouges (Red Dykes). Some leftists still criticised the gay movement, the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière group dismissing it as seeking ‘socialism in one bed.’ This reflects the notion which we can still see today among class reductionists which minimises all non-class-based forms of oppression. Such groups, said Guerin, bore much responsibility for fostering homophobic attitudes amongst the working class. Guérin and I fundamentally disagree with this take and I believe that it is not only possible but necessary to address the harm caused by non-class-based oppression while striving toward revolution.
Guérin spent most of the rest of his life continuing to oppose colonialism and racism wherever they appeared along with his support for queer rights. He was enthused by the emergence of the Black Power movement in the United States and spoke in its support. But he also became involved in the struggle against racism in France, and in particular supported the emerging struggles of immigrant workers there. Before he died, in 1988, he was able to see the 1985 legislation outlawing employment discrimination against queer people, but it wasn't until 2013 that France passed the same sex marriage law.
To conclude, Guérin said that he felt more solidarity with marginalised people as he was marginalised himself. He thought members of the working class should similarly be able to draw from their own experience of class oppression to embrace solidarity with people that experience marginalisation in other ways.
While the left has come a long way since Guérin's time, I can say from first-hand experience that the left still has issues with acknowledging the struggles of communities who are marginalised in multiple ways. However, there is a blueprint we can follow as leftists, which is modern day Cuba. Cuba has come a long way from its early post-revolutionary days, as we can see today through its significant efforts to educate its citizens from a young age about the broad spectrum of sexuality and gender, and its incredibly progressive health care including its gender- affirming services and its enlightened view on family and marriage laws. It is a country that we can see has grown to become a beacon of queer rights and is the realisation of Guérin’s hope for solidarity.