The RCP's Anti-Gay Line: A Failed Effort At Rectification

[Lately, interest in the history of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP) and its predecessor organization the Revolutionary Union (RU) seems to have had a slight bump up, for good reasons and bad. Good: efforts to reassess and reclaim some of the important organizing work and promotion of revolutionary line done by these groups, and by the New Communist Movement more broadly in the 1970s. Bad: the watching-a-train-wreck fascination as the sorry, tattered remnants of the RCP settle deeper into the swamp of a bizarre cult of personality around its glorious leader Bob Avakian. 

One topic of discussion invariably triggered by such interest is the RCP's notorious longtime line condemning homosexuality as bourgeois decadence and LGBTQ  people as incapable of being communists. I have therefore decided to post this paper, written over a decade ago, which contains some thoughts on that line and its history, drawing on personal experience. 

It was written during a most unusual period in RCP history. In 2001, the group issued a draft for a new party programme, and accompanying programmatic documents on homosexuality and on the Chicana/o National Question (spoiler alert: there's no nation). Then they invited members and others to comment on it on a website called changetheworld.info. The ensuing discussion, though kept under close scrutiny by minders from the RCP leadership, was often lively and thoughtful, especially around gender issues. My contribution was posted there, and stirred some interest and discussion. In a little over a year, the website was

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Missing Sully, Part 4--A Commie In-Joke

For Christmas of 1980, I sent Sully (the late David Irish Sullivan) a paperback book on the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra, the Soviet spy ring in Nazi-occupied Europe. He responded with the best thank-you note I have ever received.

[Those FotM readers who may, by some quirk of fate, not have found themselves in the vanguard party of the US working class in the 1970s--and there were many to chose from at the time--will probably find what follows a bit difficult to connect with. For you, there is a brief explanatory note below the two images.]

[Click on images to view full size.]

Okay, as promised, a few points of orientation for those who weren't there or have spent the better part of the last four decades trying to forget that they were.

1. The group we were both in at the time, the unfortunately-named Revolutionary Workers Headquarters, had a couple hundred members and nalmost no leadership structure to speak of, let alone a Central Control Commission.

2. This snarky set of "letters" reflects Dave's (and the RWHq's) developing break with the kneejerk public defense of Stalin that had characterized the group we had split from, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and a broader break with the deeply dogmatic style of many of the organizations in the New Communist Movement.

3. Requests for further clarification requested will be addressed. Incidentally, Sully incorporated one literary and one historical reference into the piece

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