Evan Smith & Daryl Leeworthy. Twentieth Century British History. Volume 27, Issue 4. December 2016.
The year 2014 saw the 13th anniversary of the beginning of the 1984–5 miners’ strike and the establishment of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM). The moment was used to launch the British film Pride, which tells the story of LGSM. One of the controversial points of the film’s narrative was the silence over the co-founder of LGSM Mark Ashton’s membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). As Hywel Francis observes, despite Ashton’s ‘political affiliation and motivation’ being central to the formation of LGSM and its relationship with the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valleys’ Miners’ Support Group (of which Francis was chair), this was ‘not acknowledged, indeed [it] is obscured, in the film’. Ashton, who was only 26 years when he died of AIDS in 1987, was not just a rank-and-file member of the CPGB, but in fact was a leading figure in its youth wing, the Young Communist League (YCL), becoming its General Secretary in 1985. Diarmaid Kelliher has located LGSM, following the work of Matt Cook, in the lineage of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), as well as identifying it as a descendent of rank-and-file gay rights groups in the Labour Party and the trade unions formed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Indeed, as Kelliher acknowledges, Ashton had been a member of the YCL since 1982 and made open reference to LGSM’s relationship to the CPGB.
The relationship Ashton identified was not merely a reference to his own politics, but also a reflection of the CPGB’s adoption of gay rights as part of its civil rights and liberties platform and communist influence in LGSM’s approach to campaigning and who it connected with. Stephen Brooke has argued that there was an evolution in the languages of equality and rights for gay people between the GLF and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) in the 1970s, the struggles against AIDS and Section 28 in the 1980s and 1990s, and for equal marriage in more recent times. Key to this evolution was a shift from civil rights to the universalism of human rights. For Brooke the pivot was CHE who fashioned a vocabulary of rights and sought to change discrimination through reforming the law. The liberationist position articulated by GLF and its successor, the Gay Left, which advocated structural reform rather than rights reform, seemingly fell by the wayside since it was the vocabulary of rights that was articulated by the Labour Party in the 1980s.
The CPGB, which Brooke neglects, approached the subject along the same lines as the GLF and the Gay Left. Communists had long spoken about oppression of and liberation for workers, and about the need for complete structural change of the capitalist system. The articulation of women, black, national and gay liberation was an obvious progression in thought. Moreover, communist parties, following the Soviet Union, were generally sceptical about the language of rights that was developed and idealized by the United Nations and the 1961 European Convention. The CPGB was no exception. In common with sister parties, including the Communist Party of Australia, it readily absorbed instead the language of the civil rights movement in the United States, merging its vocabulary with that of national rights, feminism, anti-colonialism, and socialism.
To recover the CPGB’s gay rights activism is, then, not to offer a revision of Brooke’s assessment of the trajectory of change but to explore further the liberationist legacy he identifies. The 1970s and early 1980s were, as Lucy Robinson has shown, a time when much of the Left were still coming to terms with rights-based politics. There were many potential outcomes to the ‘thirty years war’, as Brooke terms it, which raged within the labour movement between materialist politics and post-material identity politics. A reformist vocabulary of rights as articulated by the CHE and eventually adopted by the Labour Party was only one of them. Although long past the heyday of their political influence, the CPGB remained an important organization within the British labour movement precisely because it continued to press for structural change and spoke about liberation.
What follows examines the ‘pre-history’ of LGSM identified by Ashton through this lens: namely the push for gay liberation by communists from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. It suggests, following Mike Waite and Geoff Andrews, that the party’s youth wing was a driving force for internal reform and was key to its promotion of post-material social movements—placing the CPGB at the forefront of the labour movement on these matters. On gay liberation, the communists initially took their cue for action from the National Union of Students (NUS). The latter, strongly influenced by the GLF, passed a resolution in favour of gay rights at their 1973 Easter Conference, held at Exeter University, the first major organization in Britain to do so. Communist support for the resolution—and for similar action—was signalled by an article published in the Morning Star, subsequent agitation by the rank-and-file at the CPGB’s National Congress in 1976, and finally a resolution drafted by the executive committee (EC) and issued in September 1976. Following this, pressure was sustained by younger members, particularly those based in London, who defended the new policy in branches, and in the party press, especially Comment.
Presenting the case to the EC in 1976 were the national organizer Dave Cook—a leading advocate of reform within the CPGB—and two guests from the GLF. This was a clear signal of the relationship between the two. Perhaps inevitably, it brought some backlash from those resistant to the reformers, whom they regarded as nihilistic, individualist and even bourgeois. Nevertheless, reformers took the 1976 policy statement as grounds for emboldening their activities, with some success. Most broad policy statements issued by the CPGB thereafter made some reference to gay rights, particularly materials produced by the YCL. Despite complaints amongst the most radical reformers that the CPGB was slow to realize the importance of gay rights and that the position it adopted was unnuanced, the communists were nevertheless the first significant left-wing political organization in Britain to place gay rights onto their platform.
Building a Gay Left
Beginning in the early 1960s, communists adopted a series of policy initiatives aimed at developing a ‘mass party’ to capitalize on a shift in popular opinion towards the Labour Party and the non-aligned Left after a decade of Conservative rule. In common with the wider Left, the CPGB was particularly anxious to attract young people—sections of the leadership were worried about how post-war youth with increasingly divergent attitudes to organized politics could be fitted into the party. A special campaign launched in 1966 called ‘The Trend—Communism’, linked the youth wing to a wide range of social movements and brought into the CPGB a generation of recruits more engaged with post-material politics. They also had a relatively significant presence. By the early 1970s, membership of the YCL stood at around 3,000, roughly a tenth of the size of the CPGB. Labour’s membership by 1970 stood officially at nearly 700,000 but its youth wing was only around 6,000 strong.
It was this generation of young communists who led the push for reform. Their key aim was ensuring the adoption of a policy platform based on post-material liberation rather than solely on what they regarded as the ‘monolith’ of class consciousness: the inter-war inheritance. Although communists had previously embraced a number of single issues, such as equal pay for women and colonial liberation, these were subsumed by the political and linguistic centrality of class struggle. The pressure for a change of vocabulary was expedient as much as generational: the surge in support for nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland at the end of the 1960s (together with byelection wins at Carmarthen in 1966 and Hamilton in 1967) had, for instance, prompted a fuller embrace of nationalism to capitalize on Labour’s perceived constitutional inarticulacy.
Moreover, despite the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and Wales in 1967 (although it remained illegal in Scotland until 1980 and in Northern Ireland until 1982), gay men and women continued to face considerable discrimination. To combat this and to fight for improved rights and greater equality, two campaign groups were established in England: the Committee for Homosexual Equality in Manchester in 1969 (in 1971 Committee was exchanged for Campaign, the organization was known widely as CHE), and the GLF at the London School of Economics in 1970. CHE has typically been regarded as the more moderate of the two, with an emphasis on the language of rights, although its secretary (and later president) Allan Horsfall was a Labour councillor and a pioneer in the move to link gay liberation with wider social and political reform. Together these organizations tapped into the cultural radicalism of the period (what Chris Harman has termed the ‘British upturn’) and helped to publicize the issues of gay rights and gay liberation, which were generally ignored, dismissed, or overlooked, by most political organizations in Britain at that time. In large urban centres, particularly in London, but equally in Cardiff, Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Belfast, those involved in the GLF and CHE were also members of other left-wing organizations and politically active across a range of issues. Writing of the GLF in London, Lisa Power reflects that the group:
attracted, amongst others, people with a background in resistance to the Vietnam War, black rights, women’s liberation, the underground press, the White Panthers (a support group to the Black Panthers), the International Marxist Group, the Communist Party, a wide variety of other leftist groups including Maoists, the drugs culture, transsexuals and rent boys—none of whom would have felt happy in (or indeed been welcome in) existing gay organizations.
The extent to which this was true elsewhere, where all of the movements were inevitably smaller and circles even closer together, is open to question, as is David Fernbach’s assertion that ‘[t]he left wouldn’t touch GLF with a barge pole’ during the early 1970s. In Cardiff, for example, the GLF, CHE, and university GaySoc all met in the same venues, had overlapping membership, and worked closely with the wider labour movement and the city’s underground cultures.
Whereas other political parties, such as Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Party, started to recognize gay rights in the 1970s, the CPGB’s progress was particularly important because it was the first organization of the British labour movement to make such a move at leadership level.
Gay groups had been established in the International Socialists in 1973 and in the Labour Party in 1975, but these were rank-and-file groups that were either castigated or ignored by the leadership at the time. In the wake of the NUS’s policy shift in 1973, and the emergence of gay groups within several white-collar trade unions, reformers within the CPGB agitated for the party to add recognition of gay liberation to its policy platform. The first attempt at a policy shift came at the party’s 34th National Congress in late 1975 when two London branches (Norwood and Clapham) together with the Birmingham Central branch proposed resolutions and advocated that the issue be taken seriously. These resolutions were placed in the conference agenda under the category of ‘Women’s Rights and Sex Discrimination’, indicative of the link in many people’s minds at the time between the women’s liberation movement and the gay liberation movement.
The proposals presented by the Birmingham Central branch were clearly framed in this way asserting that the struggle for sexual liberation was ‘an integral part of the wider struggle against bourgeois sexual ideology’. Members from the Clapham branch argued similarly that gay men and women were ‘oppressed because they do not conform to the so-called norms of our society’. The gay liberation movement was seen, then, as a potential ally of the Communist Party and their ‘broad popular alliance’ (after 1977, the ‘broad democratic alliance’), alongside the women’s liberation movement, anti-racism campaigners, and the student movement. This was referred to directly by the Birmingham Central branch: ‘many gay people can be won over to the kind of broad anti-monopoly alliance which is vital if Britain is to be out firmly on the road to socialism’. The same principles were to inform the alliance between LGSM and the miners support group in the Neath, Dulais, and Swansea Valleys during the 1984–5 miners’ strike, as Hywel Francis has recently noted.
In their proposals, CPGB members in Birmingham and London focused on two broad themes: equal rights in the public sphere and greater awareness and tolerance within the party itself. Reforms to the public sphere, including equality before the law, removal of discrimination in civilian and military employment, and the availability of sex education in schools that dealt directly with homosexuality, were broadly in line with those advocated by the GLF. In the words of Jeffrey Weeks, the CPGB’s position on gay rights, as with the GLF, was essentially that of civil rights: ‘that is, support for basic democratic rights and for law reform’. The CPGB stopped short, however, of emphasizing the right for gay people to be legally free to contact people through any means available to heterosexuals, equalizing the age of consent, and the freedom to indulge in public displays of affection. The alignment of the party’s position with the demands of the gay liberation movement is nevertheless suggestive and illustrates that the grassroots campaign within the CPGB was primarily informed by the liberation movement and its activism.
Alongside demands for greater political, social and economic rights, the two London branches made several demands, calling for greater internal tolerance and awareness of gay members, and for involvement in gay activism. As had been the case with ethnic minorities and women, there was a large degree of reluctance within the party’s structures and amongst its traditional elements to make accommodations for those who were not white, male, and heterosexual. The demands from the branches included the establishment of a Gay Advisory Committee run by gay people, encouragement of discussion about gay liberation and sexist oppression, regular articles on themes relevant to gay liberation in the Morning Star, and the formation of an environment in which all gay members could ‘come out’. Again these accorded with the agenda set by the wider gay liberation movement, as the GLF had envisioned it—coming out, coming together, and challenging the roots of oppression. These resolutions were not adopted at the 1975 National Congress, however, because the leaders were unwilling to make a decision without fuller debate. In essence, they were deferred to allow that to happen. As Beatrix Campbell, a reforming party member and later author of Wigan Pier Revisited, explained in an interview with Gay Left in 1977:
There was a real problem because it had never been aired—it had never been discussed and communists were bound to have practical sorts of attitudes. […] The resolutions were not rejected but there was an acknowledgement that it wouldn’t have made any sense to say, ‘Oh, yes, we’ll support homosexuals’, never having discussed the subject.
The terms of the debate were largely restricted to the question of civil rights and adoption of the ideas of the GLF. How capitalism itself affected sexuality (and how communists might develop a Marxian response to those affects) was off the agenda, even though other gay radicals were discussing it at the time. David Fernbach has suggested that this was because, ‘from a Marxist point of view, […] liberal acceptance of the ‘‘right to be gay’’ raise[d] more problems than it solve[d]’.
Following agitation by reformers throughout 1976, including a piece in Comment by John Gowling, a leading member of the YCL, the question of policy change was placed onto the agenda for the September meeting of the EC and materials pre-circulated members. Included in those materials was a reworded version of the Birmingham Central branch resolution presented at the National Congress the year before. Gowling’s article was one of the first discussions of gay rights printed in the CPGB press, and set out, effectively, both the need for action and the civil rights basis upon which campaigners were pitching their reforms. He began:
I think many Communist Party members are unsure as to whether we have a policy on gay civil rights or homosexual equality/law reform…I find it very difficult to discover what the attitude of Communist Party members in this country is towards homosexuality. I have yet to come across a discussion of gay civil rights in our press…
Drawing on his own experiences, Gowling described the difficulties faced by gay people in 1970s Britain and argued that the Communist Party could no longer continue to ignore what was going on. ‘The fact is’, he wrote, ‘we do exist, therefore we have a right to exist and enjoy equal civil liberties’. This was gay struggle presented as a civil right yet to be won and in closing he implored his comrades not to shelve the campaign for gay rights ‘because it is embarrassing [… they] can only be won when we all turn around and face them’.
The EC met in London on 11 and 12 September to discuss, amongst matters such as continued anti-apartheid activity, selection of parliamentary candidates, and the date for the 35th National Congress (at which a new revision of The British Road to Socialism was to be agreed), the gay rights resolution submitted by Birmingham Central via the political committee (PC). Appended to the resolution was the PC’s response, which stated that ‘the Communist Party must take a positive stand in cases of discrimination and victimisation against homosexuals’. They urged the CPGB to ‘combat sexist and anti-gay attitudes […] including among the Left in the Labour Movement, and in our own Party’. As with its campaigns against racism and sexism, the CPGB acknowledged that its push for legal and political action to combat discrimination could only achieve so much and concluded that ‘it is important to recognise that much more than legal reform is necessary to achieve homosexual liberation’. Following discussion in the EC, it was agreed to adopt the proposals, including the encouragement of party members to be openly gay—and to be active in the gay movement—and the establishment of an advisory committee. The following month, the EC’s statement was published in Comment for the information of all party members.39 The reformers had achieved their aims.
Maintaining the Momentum
The adoption of a gay rights platform in the autumn of 1976 signalled the growing strength of what became known as the Eurocommunist wing of the Communist Party. The language of its policy statement was framed by a ‘rights’ agenda and speeches from the September 1976 debate in the EC published in Comment provided further illustration. Dave Cook, the National Organizer, who had presented the policy materials in the EC meeting, argued that ‘hostile attitudes to homosexuals are essentially sexist’ and connected gay liberation with the party’s commitment to ‘fight sexist attitudes wherever they appear’. He also leant on the more traditional communist trope of oppression to demonstrate the lack of disparity between rights-based campaigns and the aims of the Communist Party.
We as Marxists are concerned with all aspects of oppression … [The Party’s] objectives will themselves be divided and held back if the oppression for example of women, of racial minorities and all other oppressed minorities, homosexuals included, is not actively opposed by the working class.
Cook urged the party to ‘declare itself totally opposed to discrimination and oppression against homosexuals’ and ‘recognise that this means we must help to oppose sexist and anti-gay attitudes wherever they occur, including in our own party’. This was not just to be a top-down decision by the EC and Cook advised that several committees (at national and district level) be established ‘to promote discussion and analysis’.
Cook was not alone in discussing gay liberation. The letters section of Comment began to feature several letters from members debating the EC statement and the issue of gay liberation, with both pro- and antigay (even openly homophobic) positions reflected. Several correspondents identified as gay and wrote to the journal to welcome the EC’s statement. Bill Thornycroft, a member since the 1940s, wrote:
I welcome the EC statement on homosexual oppression, gay civil rights and gay liberation. For far too long have we as a party remained silent in this issue and ignored the growth of the gay liberation movement…
Prejudice and ignorance is widespread throughout the party as well as elsewhere… To dispel this ignorance every branch should hold discussions either with gay comrades or by inviting along to a branch people involved in the gay movement.
Thornycroft concluded with this appeal:
Finally, I would like to appeal to all gay comrades to come out, It’s like getting into a cold bath, the first step is the worst. All the ensuing hassles are nothing compared to the strength and joy we can get from one another—and we can’t get it if we remain invisible.
This linked back to the demands made by the two London branches in 1975, which proposed making it policy to actively encourage all gay members to ‘come out’—a proposal taken up by the EC in its policy statement. For gay liberationists, ‘coming out’ and ‘pursu[ing] a distinctive lifestyle unapologetically’ was an explicitly political act. The wider liberation movement saw the ‘openness of our gayness’ and ‘gay pride’ as unifying concepts and expressions of solidarity with each other.
A note of caution was sounded by John Gowling who wrote to Comment to welcome the new position but also to caution members into thinking that because of trends in London the liberation movement was further advanced than it actually was. He explained:
The tragedy of London, as I see it, the large drift of Northern and Scottish political and apolitical gays who have left their hometowns because they cannot cope with the isolation; nothing is solved, the same oppression still exists in sizeable Northern towns. Many of these migrants are Communists. I hope the new CP policy will set a precedent, and as a result the heterosexual majority of comrades in town branches and provincial districts will help us gay comrades to fight our oppression. For I believe the gay comrades have much to offer and none of us can turn from one sort of oppression when oppression concerns us all.
Gowling had identified a challenge which would go largely unmet as the Communist Party’s increasing decline outside of London (albeit to a lesser extent Scotland) in the late-1970s and 1980s emphasized its transformation into a largely metropolitan party. The willingness of the EC to establish a National Gay Rights Committee (NGRC), built upon the same lines as other internal bodies such as the National Race Relations Committee, was never quite matched by a national membership. The NGRC was established in January 1977 with the initial aim of encouraging discussion at all levels of the party and to work towards the insertion of the policy on gay rights into The British Road to Socialism, which was being redrafted ahead of the 1977 National Congress. In June that year the NGRC held its first national day school at South Bank Polytechnic (now London South Bank University).
The 1977 edition of The British Road promoted the strategy of the broad democratic alliance, which signified the official, yet disputed, idea that the struggle for socialism needed ‘not only […] to be an association of class forces, […] but of other important forces in society which emerge out of areas of oppression not always directly connected with the relations of production’. Into this new vision of socialist struggle could be fitted the range of new social movements, including the gay rights campaign. In October 1977, Sarah Benton, NGRC chair, wrote to the redrafting committee suggesting five points where gay rights could be mentioned. These included mention of the gay liberation movement, the issue of sexism as the cause of homosexual oppression, and the right of people to freely choose to be involved in gay relationships. The final version, however, adopted only two and mention was relatively brief, particularly compared with the considerable attention paid both to the struggles of women and of people of colour. Focus remained on civil liberties and ending discrimination, nevertheless the NGRC could congratulate itself on this success having only been in existence a few months.
On the face of it, then, the NGRC achieved a good deal in its first year, but this disguised the potential to do more and a number of substantial shortcomings. Some of the blame for this failure rested on the organizational immobility of its leading members and their focus on other matters. Alongside Bill Thornycroft and another party member, John Lloyd, Sarah Benton was appointed as the inaugural chair of the NGRC. Benton was one of the CPGB’s higher profile feminist activists and had successfully worked with others, including Beatrix Campbell, to align the CPGB with the aims of women’s liberation in the 1970s. Her involvement with the NGRC, however, was less effective with one member complaining a few years later that she was ‘unhelpful and confusing’ and that her interests were still focused on the women’s liberation movement rather than on the development of a programme for gay liberation. As a consequence, the member continued, the Committee was chaotic and ineffective:
it was clear from the one national committee meeting I attended that there were various pieces of work which had been initiated but were never completed such as the preparation of speakers’ notes, contact with the industrial department and others. Given these problems, it was of little surprise that the NGRC proved to be a short-lived organization.
More successful were the parallel initiatives undertaken by members of the YCL. In April 1979, the Congress of the YCL passed a resolution on the ‘sexual rights of young people’ which insisted that ‘homosexuality [is] as valid as heterosexuality’ and that ‘our sexuality is steered and manipulated by the values of society’, and that therefore ‘we will fight any discrimination against gays, and for the complete eradication of anti-gay prejudice’. Clearly influenced by the GLF and the Gay Left, they called in particular for the following:
For an expansion of sex education in schools. Sex education must go far beyond biological explanations of how women become pregnant and have babies. It must aim to inform and initiate discussion on all forms of sexuality, in a way that is free from value judgements. It should help young people in developing their own sexuality.
A few months earlier, in January 1979, an active Gay Group had been established in London. Its formation had been approved in principle by the YCL executive 6 months earlier prompting discussion in the press. Writing in Challenge, the YCL newspaper, in the autumn of 1978, Mark Sreeves observed that ‘there’s a lot of gay people in the YCL, but up till now there’s been no organisation of gay people as such in the League’. He continued:
We hope to rectify this and begin to turn our policy into more than just a paper document by organising a YCL Gay Group, which will look at ways of helping young gays inside and outside the League organise against the problems that confront them.
The same issue contained a report from Neil Rider about a Northern Regional School on ‘sexual politics’ which had been held in Leeds. Themes discussed included the liberation of gays and women, sexual problems, contraception, and the family. Those present were encouraged to consider their own behaviour and to be aware of sexist language being used unthinkingly. Although delegates had enough time to develop a hangover and get ‘stoned’, it was agreed that the school was a positive step forward and that ‘the YCL needs more events like this, all over the shop, if we aim to put ourselves over as a youth organisation’.
The views expressed by Rider and Sreeves were not universally shared, however. In late April 1978, the Haringey YCL branch wrote to the CPGB EC complaining about the direction of the YCL and the topics raised in Challenge. The priorities of ‘campaigning on the issues of youth unemployment and racialism’, they complained, were ‘not being reflected’. The branch’s letter reserved particular criticism for the decisions of the newspaper’s new editor, Steven Munby, complaining that:
Issue no. 51 is almost completely devoted to punk rock and homosexuality. 6 out of 8 pages, or approximately 75% of the paper is devoted to these topics.
Issue no. 52 has 3 out of 8 pages on punk rock. Issue no. 52 also uses the slang term ‘Commie’ frequently (a term we are more used to hearing from the NF and the Tories, than members of the YCL).
Obscene cartoons and foul language have also become a feature of these editions of Challenge.
Munby, a 23 year old district organizer and university graduate from Leeds, had reorientated the newspaper’s focus towards the lifestyles of contemporary youth and, as Graham Stevenson has written, ‘in a conscious way, Challenge now took on the new youth cult of punk music and culture’. Haringey felt that if the paper continued ‘to give an inordinate amount of space to homosexuality and punk rock’ then the YCL would be ‘held in contempt’ by the CPGB and the wider labour movement since these were ‘not the major concerns facing the movement’. Their promotion, the branch felt, was coming at the expense of the ‘real issues confronting young people’, which they felt was ‘outrageous’. Despite these objections Challenge continued to provide valuable space to punk culture, gay liberation, Rock Against Racism, School Kids Against Nazis, and the Anti-Nazi League.
Munby’s opening up of Challenge to these themes was to prove valuable because the collapse of the NGRC had denuded the party of any substantial vehicle for the promotion of gay rights and gay liberation. Indeed, complaints from the communist student movement illustrate the extent to which Challenge was the only major communist journal engaging with the subject by the beginning of the 1980s. At the CPGB’s 1979 National Congress, the Essex University branch complained that following the flurry of coverage after the EC’s policy statement in September 1976, Comment and Marxism Today (the party’s theoretical journal) had had an ‘almost total lack of articles on gay politics’. There was a feeling, expressed openly in the Essex resolution, that ‘little seems to have been done by the Party leadership, at all levels, to establish the political case for gay rights, both outside and inside the Party’. As the CPGB entered the 1980s, its great success in having led the way in integrating sexual politics as conceived of by the gay liberation movement with the wider instincts of the labour movement, had stagnated—albeit with the exception of the YCL. With falling membership figures and fewer personnel to carry out campaigns, write articles in newspapers, and present the case on the ground, there was increasing danger that gay rights would fall off the communist agenda just as the wider left was waking up them.
Communism and Sexual Politics under Thatcher
By the early 1980s, the CPGB had ceased to be only leftist party committed to equal rights for gays and lesbians. The Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, by then committed to a socialist economic agenda and in the throes of its own New Left transformations, stated in its Aims in 1983 that ‘we oppose discrimination on any grounds’. And whereas there had been no mention of gay rights in the Labour Party’s 1979 manifesto, The Labour Way is a Better Way, it too, ahead of the 1983 General Election, had signalled moves towards integration of gay rights, albeit much less advanced than either the Communist Party or Plaid Cymru. Labour’s manifesto for 1983, The New Hope for Britain, stated that:
we are concerned that homosexuals are unfairly treated. We will take steps to ensure that they are not unfairly discriminated against— especially in employment and in the definition of privacy contained in the 1967 Act.
Despite positive moves taken at the party’s 1982 conference in Blackpool, gay rights campaigners complained that it still had a long way to go in its commitment to equality—symptomatic of this was the adoption of a policy document calling for the lowering of the age of consent from 21 to 18 for gay men, rather than equalization of the age of consent for all. Labour eventually committed themselves to gay rights in 1985—although some activists still felt that ‘the party leadership is not very happy about our new lesbian and gay rights policy and would be happy to pretend we didn’t exist’.
Aware of this momentum elsewhere in the labour movement, communists undertook a new push in the early years of the 1980s for the CPGB to take seriously its commitment to gay liberation and to stress links to wider liberationist struggles. At the 1981 National Congress, a resolution was again passed. It called for the revival of the National Committee on Gay Rights as well as stressing the ‘right to freedom from the present discrimination faced by gay men and women’. This new momentum took months to generate anything substantial and even by the time of the 1983 National Congress little seemed to have altered. Party membership had also collapsed: the YCL alone had shrunk from over 1,000 members in November 1979 to just 350 by January 1983. By 1986 it was little more than 200.
Ironically, given it saw the return of the Thatcher government with a substantial majority and pronounced weakness in the Labour Party, 1983 actually marked a turning point in the seriousness with which the labour movement took gay rights. From the perspective of YCL activists such as John Crossland, a member of the Haringey branch that had previously been so critical of gay rights coverage in Challenge, ‘gay liberation without socialism is a meaningless and reactionary concept’. Therefore, Crossland implored, ‘in the YCL […] we must take up the issue of gay liberation and see how it affects us all, gay and straight’. A few months later, at the 38th National Congress of the CPGB, a further statement was presented to delegates. This was written by Robert (Bob) Deacon and took as its starting point the lack of progress made in building a conspicuously gay socialist movement since the EC statement nearly 10 years earlier. ‘The party’s failure to implement its 1976 decision’, Deacon lamented, ‘has been almost total’. He continued by arguing that whereas it was reasonable to expect gay members to get involved in promoting gay rights, the EC statement had encouraged the entire party to get behind the liberation movement. ‘It is not acceptable’, he insisted, ‘to leave areas of Party policy wholly in the hands of those who happen to be directly affected by them’. Otherwise the present situation, he concluded, would continue:
A ‘policy and general approach on gay liberation’ which is sound, but ‘commitment, however, [which] is less than zilch’.
By December 1983, a new YCL Gay Collective had been formed and at the end of March 1984, with the miners’ strike having broken out a fortnight before, nine members met in London ‘under the auspices of the Political Committee’ to discuss the issue of gay rights and a way forward. Of the nine, seven were from London and two from Scotland (the two areas where the YCL still had a functional presence)—a comrade from the West Midlands and another from Wales had been invited but neither attended. The direct outcome of the meeting was a new organization: the Lesbian and Gay Working Collective. There was a fresh recognition too that for all the policy initiatives and aspirations, being gay in the communist movement and being a communist in the gay liberation movement was oftentimes a lonely experience. The new collective would help to overcome those feelings—and give bolster to the YCL’s activities: a separate Scottish collective formed later in the year. The Working Collective met for the first time in London on 5 July 1984 and was attended by, amongst others, Mark Ashton, who reported on efforts amongst the lesbian and gay community to raise funds to support the miners in their strike.
That initiative would coalesce 10 days later into LGSM, the first meeting of which was held at Mark Ashton’s flat in Elephant and Castle on 15 July 1984. By that point Ashton had been in the YCL for about 2 years and had already gained a name for himself as a radical activist (he was also a volunteer with the London Gay Switchboard). During the London Pride March of 1983, he had hung a large red flag out of his window on Ladbroke Grove where he was then living. During that year’s general election, on the other hand, he had displayed a large VOTE LABOUR sign. Ashton, along with his friend Mike Jackson, had taken some buckets along to the 1984 Gay Pride March in London and ‘collected something like 150 quid’, as Jackson later recalled. In the evening after the march, the two of them attended a rally organized by the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights (LCLGR) at the University of London Student Union building in Bloomsbury where a striking miner had been booked to speak. As Jackson recalled:
We were all a bit staggered by how much this man had thought about things, identifying the two struggles. We didn’t realise people did think about us that much.
Together, Ashton and Jackson resolved to support the miners with the money that they had raised (and hoped to carry on raising), ‘but’, they agreed, ‘let’s do it as lesbians and gays’: many of those who became involved in LGSM had grown fed up of having to, in Jackson’s words, ‘compromise [their] sexuality for the sake of comradeship with people who wouldn’t accept it’. In reaching out to the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valleys’ Miners’ Support Group and in meeting initially with Dai Donovan who was already entirely accepting of homosexuality, LGSM found the ideal connection to the wider labour movement.
During the course of the miners’ strike, Ashton continued to attend the Working Collective, reporting on the activities of LGSM and providing liaison with LCLGR. He remained an active member throughout 1985 and 1986 as well. After the strike, the Working Collective’s focus returned to the re-establishment of a national committee and a further attempt at reviving flagging interest in gay rights—the latter was hampered by the collective’s liaisons with the PC admitting that they were unable to commit to helping gay members develop this side of the party’s work. Efforts to form a collective in Glasgow also came to nothing. The strike, and its effects on the attitudes of the wider labour movement (including resolutions passed at the Trades Union Congress and at the Labour Party conference in 1985) gave the temporary sense of the gay rights campaign being propelled towards the top of the political agenda, with all the potential for increased activity, but it was seemingly no more than that.
At the London Working Collective’s meeting in September 1985, Ashton addressed those present on the history of lesbian and gay liberation campaigning since 1967. He focused in on several key issues likely to affect the lesbian and gay community going forward, both in London and in the country as a whole: the abolition of the Greater London Council, which had provided enormous support to lesbian and gay initiatives, the growing AIDS crisis, the chronic housing shortage, and the need to integrate the communist movement into the everyday lives of ‘the capital’s one million lesbian and gay citizens’. He pointed to the enormous success of LGSM as an indication of how to go about achieving that integration and campaigning effectively and positively against the wider threats to community cohesion in London. As he noted:
The success of this campaign (initiated by lesbian and gay Communist Party members) showed that it is possible to organise around an issue which is not essentially lesbian or gay, and how such campaigns can help radicalise lesbians and gays, especially among young people, in much the same way as the Women’s Support Groups helped radicalise women. Important lessons were learnt on how to use the media, both gay and straight, and how to organise.
The discussion that followed illustrated many of the difficulties that the CPGB had in reaching out to the wider lesbian and gay community. As the minutes record, members felt that they should be aware of ‘the dangers of incorporation into the local state of some Labour Party lesbians and gays and of the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights’. The sectionalism that had been abandoned, to a large extent, during the miners’ strike, quickly revived and presented a barrier to the CPGB’s active involvement on lesbian and gay rights. Despite this, there was a clear attempt in the second half of 1985 to move beyond the stagnation of earlier years and to reach out to the wider party through articles and materials in Marxism Today. Ashton was again the primary point of contact.
By 1986, the Working Collective had become the London Lesbian and Gay Advisory Committee and appears—chiefly through the activities of Ashton—to have developed a strong relationship with the CPGB’s London District Committee. Similarly the YCL, under Ashton’s leadership, was going through a period of reform. The guiding principle being to make the YCL relevant to lives as they were being lived by young Britons in the mid-1980s. As Ashton described in a letter to the Morning Star in March 1986:
Young people who come into contact with us, and they are many, choose not to join us partly because we don’t have our house in order yet and partly because of the minority of ‘revolutionary Marxists’ who rant on endlessly about the glories of the Soviet Union or the Bulgarian wheat harvest at YCL meetings, rather than grapple with the dilemma that feminism, lesbian and gay liberation and the black community post to the established structures, theories and practices of the YCL. The YCL must change if it is to continue in existence.
Ashton’s achievement was turning the YCL into a campaigning force for a range of social issues, particularly related to gay liberation, in the mid1980s. As one of his friends later recalled, Ashton ‘managed to get a lot of motions through the YCL […] he put a lot of energy into the YCL’. His death in 1987 robbed the communist youth wing of perhaps its most active campaigner for lesbian and gay rights. Although there was a degree of agitation against the implementation of Section 28 in 1988, the CPGB’s participation in the gay rights campaign diminished rapidly in the final years of its existence—it was simply too small to be active across the full range of policy initiatives. Nevertheless, Ashton’s legacy and that of LGSM ensured that gay liberation did not disappear from communist thought entirely. Gay rights were fully incorporated into the Facing up to the Future documents written in 1989 and in the Manifesto for New Times published in 1990. Indeed, in the original ‘Facing Up to the Future’ article published in Marxism Today in September 1988, gay rights were seen as vital part of the ‘resistance to the spread of an authoritarian social culture’ under the Thatcher government.
Conclusion
For many historians, of communism in Britain or of modern British history in general, communist activism by the mid-1980s is viewed as almost negligible, the YCL as non-existent, and only Marxism Today regarded as having any significant impact on political life. Given that membership was not much more than 15,000 and YCL membership only around 600, such a conclusion is understandable. Yet, as has been shown, communists not only took a lead in the British labour movement in linking gay liberation with the social and political instincts of the Left, they continued to articulate a liberationist rather than rights-based position. Although, in the context of declining membership and considerably reduced presence, forging a stable gay communist group proved difficult, it is nevertheless true that communist involvement with gay liberation contributed to the transformation of leftist attitudes and the post-material diversification of labour politics. The outbreak of the miners’ strike in March 1984, and the involvement of gay and lesbian activists across Britain in raising funds for the miners, also helped in this regard. The two developments came together in London in July 1984 with the foundation of LGSM.
LGSM’s ‘pre-history’, then, undoubtedly lies in the gay liberation movement, the rank-and-file articulation of gay rights with the trade union movement and the Labour Party, and in the debates within the labour movement about both. Communists helped to sustain the activism of the gay liberation movement, with its calls for structural change, even as the mainstream Left adopted the language (and legal focus) of gay rights articulated by the CHE. Although material change, notably reform of the law and the embedding of equality for gay people in it, came through the activities of others, recovering the counterpoint of liberation activism, and the communist role in it, is nevertheless important for our understanding of changing attitudes to, and recognition of, gay rights in Britain. Having emerged as an issue raised by younger members of the Party and influenced by the National Union of Students and allies in the GLF, the CPGB was the first major organization within the labour movement to address gay liberation and commit to equality. With acceptance at the party’s highest levels and with debates conducted in the communist press, gay liberation was present on the CPGB’s agenda throughout most of the last two decades of its existence. Much of this debate—and certainly most of the activism—was engaged in by the communist youth wing. Through day schools on sexual politics, the formation of several gay groups, and efforts to build the National Gay Rights Advisory Committee, young communists ensured that commitments were never abandoned.
Although the membership of LGSM included Labour Party activists, unaligned gay liberationists, and communists, there can be little doubt that it represents one of the most important achievements of British communism in its final years. While Mark Ashton is rightfully being recognized as an influential figure in the gay rights movement in the 1980s because of his work with LGSM, his communist politics ought not to be overlooked or understated. They informed his political outlook, the language that he articulated, and his approach to grassroots activism. They serve also as reminder that, although the mainstream Left in the form of the Labour Party and the blue-collar trade unions was relatively slow in taking up the question of gay rights, the matter only being settled by the National Union of Mineworkers in 1985 and the Labour Party in 1988, this was not a universal approach. Indeed it may be concluded that the CPGB, together with the YCL, for all the challenges the commitment made in 1976 presented, was ahead of its time in adopting ideas and policies that in the early twenty-first century have become mainstream.