Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture

by Aaron Lecklider

How queerness and radical politics intersected—earlier than you thought.

Well before Stonewall, a broad cross section of sexual dissidents took advantage of their space on the margins of American society to throw themselves into leftist campaigns. Sensitive already to sexual marginalization, they also saw how class inequality was exacerbated by the Great Depression, witnessing the terrible bread lines and bread riots of the era. They participated in radical labor organizing, sympathized like many with the early prewar Soviet Union, contributed to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, opposed US police and state harassment, fought racial discrimination, and aligned themselves with the dispossessed. Whether they were themselves straight, gay, or otherwise queer, they brought sexual dissidence and radicalism into conversation at the height of the Left's influence on American culture.
 
Combining rich archival research with inventive analysis of art and literature, Love’s Next Meeting explores the relationship between homosexuality and the Left in American culture between 1920 and 1960. Aaron S. Lecklider uncovers a lively cast of individuals and dynamic expressive works, revealing remarkably progressive engagement with homosexuality among radicals, workers, and the poor. Leftists connected sexual dissidence with radical gender politics, antiracism, and challenges to censorship and obscenity laws through the 1920s and 1930s. In the process, a wide array of activists, organizers, artists, and writers laid the foundation for a radical movement through which homosexual lives and experiences were given shape and new political identities were forged. Love's Next Meeting cuts to the heart of some of the biggest questions in American questions about socialism, about sexuality, about the supposed clash still making headlines today between leftist politics and identity politics. What emerges is a dramatic, sexually vibrant story of the shared struggles for liberation across the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, American History, Gay, Social Justice

373 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2021

Reviews

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aaron Lecklider's Love's Next Meeting is a less-history more literary-criticism recounting of the interweavings of the American Left and homosexuality.

The 1920s and 30s saw an exponential rise in American Leftist politics as workers, racial minorities, women, and - yes - queers, coalesced around a shared set of principles challenging the world that had led to the Great Depression. Many gay and lesbian writers wrote proletarian novels spotlighting life in urban slums and arguing for economic revolution. Willard Motley, H.T. Tsiang, and even such famous writers as James Baldwin and Gertrude Stein dabbled with leftist politics and this left lasting marks on their art and writings. Lecklider recounts various publications to support an argument that prior to the subsequent Red and Velvet Scares in the 1950s - which forced the Left and Homosexuals into divorce - the two camps were united in much of their political work.

Lecklider fails to prove his thesis, though, because his approach to arguing for this conclusion is not to give a historical recounting but, instead, to engage in traditional, poststructural literary critique of novels that peppered the 1920s, 30s, and 50s. Because so much of Love's Next Meeting involves pages of discussions on a handful of books, I walked away feeling less like homosexuality and the Left were truly working in tandem and feeling more like Lecklider just happened to find a few examples of gays writing communist books. As a result, Love's Next Meeting was not the work of history I was expecting and for that reason I finished it very underwhelmed.

[Dasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Love’s Next Meeting (2021), Lecklider examines the relationship between radical leftist politics and sexuality in the early twentieth century, between 1920 and 1960, and explores the complex and often contradictory relationship queer people held with the radical left. While the radical left is often associated with advocates of gay liberation in the 1960s, Lecklider extends this analysis back through time to expose queer people’s longer relationship with the left. Lecklider demonstrates that the relationship between queerness and sexual liberation and the left, particularly the Communist Party, was never easy. While the Communist Party was far from sexually repressed, queer people remained marginalized within the organization despite their continued efforts to gain sexual liberation through leftist organizations.
Lecklider highlights how sexual dissidents engaged with the left, often intertwining their beliefs around sexuality with Leftist political ideas. Newspapers and periodicals published by sexual dissidents in leftist organizations addressed issues of gender and sexuality while challenging censorship laws. Although not all fellow leftists agreed with such work, sometimes readers noted that the smut and obscenity of such papers took away from the message. Indeed, at many points throughout this book, Lecklider reminds us that the left often reproduced the homophobic beliefs so strongly imbued in mainstream politics and culture. Nonetheless, because “the impossibility of assimilating into mainstream American society primed many gay women and men to reject mainstream politics” they found the left more ready to receive their radical messages (p. 9).

The first few chapters feel a bit repetitive but the second half of the book picks up greatly.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lecklider's book looks at the relationship between sexual dissidence & the Left in the United States in the early 20th-century. Prior to the Cold War, Lecklider argues that those who lived on the margins of bourgeoise society understand the connections between class, race & gender in ways that were more modern than previously understood.

Between July 1954 and June 1955, the New York City Police Department swept through Times Square in a series of carefully orchestrated rays design to read the area of its undesirables. As the action unfolded, Edward Melcarth, a radical artist who had exhibited paintings at New York's left-leaning ACA Gallery, drafted an essay voicing his objection to the police’s efforts to crack down on drug users, gamblers, sex workers, homosexuals, and other dissidents. [1] Titled ‘Guerilla Warfare,’ Melcarth’s essay attacked the ‘latest ‘Search and Kill-joy’ operation in the Times Square zone,’ which, he complained, had recently ‘netted 50 bodies.’…[2. Edward Melcarth, “Guerilla Warfare,” n.D., EMC, box 1, folder “personal correspondence undated.] 1

Whether they were themselves straight, gay, or otherwise queer, many leftists, like Melcarth, brought sexual dissidence and the Left into conversation.
That Conversation is the subject for this book. Love’s Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture reconsider the relationship between radical anti-capitalism and homosexuality in the United States. 6

The act of joining a revolutionary party seeking to overthrow the government of the United States pushed against the boundaries of respectability, morality, and decency that governed American life. It also threatened the dominance Bourgeois values. Homosexuality was associated with a similar refusal to submit to American norms, creating overlap between sexual dissidents and leftists blurred the line separating one group from the other. “Doctor, I'm a gay fellow, so what do I care about social position?” Wrote a homosexual to the sexologist David O. Cauldwell in 1949. “I don't want to go to any tea parties.” [17. David O. Cauldwell and E. Haldeman Julius, eds., Private Letters from Homosexuals to a Doctor (Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1949), 16] 8

Just as the policing of homosexual behaviour produced Spaces for homosexual contact in working class neighbourhoods, prisons, and other places that were already considered outside the bounds of respectable middle-class life, the Left emerge from within industrial workplaces, working class communities, and public spaces similarly located on the periphery of polite society. 9

The organization of modern urban spaces segregated by class produced vice districts in poor and working class neighbourhoods that fell between the cracks of the law and attracted radicals seeking to organize-and sometimes rub against-lawless. 9-10

Kepner’s discussion of Central Park suggest how public parks could become spaces accommodating, constructing, and uniting sexual practises and political communities.
Whether in parks or nightclubs or wandering city streets, leftists found one another in spaces where they interacted with, and sometimes sought out, sexual dissidents. 22

In the space of a bookstore, Brinnin was able to explore radical politics, obscenity, modernism, and sexual dissidence. [56.] 27

Though his most direct articulation of sexual politics, the Corydon dialogues, did not appear in an English translation until 1950, they were published and attributed to Gide in France as early as 1924, and they were eminently accessible to the artistic types for whom knowledge of French was the price of entry into rarefied cultural circles. [70.] 29

‘It takes two revolutions to make a new world: one in the sphere of economics and one in the sphere of erotics,” wrote Samuel D. Schmalhausen that same year [1927] in the Modern Quarterly, radical journal he did that was especially inclined to take up sexual matters. 50

Ford, who edited the literary magazine Blues, had written a queer modernness proletarian novel with Parker Tyler, a gay film critic, titled The Young and Evil in 1933.” 98

“Just Boys” details are sour love triangle between ‘a white boy,’ Baby Face; his Black ex lover, Kenneth; and Sammy, a Black man whom Baby Face meeting in Washington Park and bring to a party to make Kenneth jealous. The story is set in urban Chicago, carefully mapped by Farrell [James T. Farrell, Calico Shoes]…” 104-105

In Ralph Werther’s 1918 book Autobiography of an Androgyne, a meticulously detailed recounting of the author’s ‘sexual abnormality’, class struggle appeared at least as often as sex, and sex work was positioned as work as much as sex. 137

[Ginger Mae Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I really enjoy histories that prioritize their analysis through literary text, whether that be fiction or nonfiction. Unfortunately, there is a staggering lack of intersectional analysis and clarity of definition and concepts that make the fantastic literary analysis hard to imagine as an effective whole. Sexual dissidence, homosexuality, and queerness all seem to be key vectors of analysis; but it's all too clear that in this book centers that meaning on white, cis, gay men, and all other definitions of dissidence and queerness exist on the margins. I generally disagree with the scholarly application of modern queer labels to historical subjects, but I can appreciate when it's done with good intention and careful consideration; depicting Pauli Murray as a trans man is far from that. A single chapter dedicated to women that seems to qualify their relevance to the thesis through their rejection of femininity is...a choice.

The level of research and literary engagement is truly praiseworthy. An attempt at intersectionality was there, I guess.

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a most difficult book to read because of the author's prolix writing style with long run-on sentences. I had to read some of the sentences a couple of times to actually determine what he meant. This is a shame because he did outstanding research and I learned a lot about unfamiliar authors, books etc. The title would indicate a jolly literary romp through left wing pre-Stonewall times but the text was dry and academic and anything but!

[Mills College Library]

306.76609 L461 2021