International Viewpoint - online socialist magazine

Towards a Gay Communism

Colin Wilson — 2019-01-07T12:07:59Z

Mario Mieli's book, written in the late 70s, reveals a world lost to us now – the radicalisation of the late 60s and early 70s, which provided the context for what was then called the gay liberation movement. Huge mobilisations arose against the war in Vietnam, while black people in the US rose in rebellion in cities across America after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 – rebellions which inspired the Stonewall riot, the founding event of the gay liberation movement, the following year. In Britain, a national miners' strike brought down the Tory government in 1974. Many on the far left believed that capitalism was in its death agonies and that revolution was on the agenda of the day.

- Reviews section / LGBT, Reviews

Sexuality and capitalism: The Italian Renaissance

Colin Wilson — 2014-12-03T12:47:00Z

Revolutionary struggles against capitalism have raised, time and again, the issue of sexual liberation. Right at the start of capitalism, the English revolution of the 1640s and 1650s involved what historian Christopher Hill has called a “sexual revolution” against the old order. The more radical forces included “ranters” such as Lawrence Clarkson, who argued that “What act soever is done by thee in light and love is light and lovely, though it be that act called adultery.” [1]1 The “utopian socialists” of the early nineteenth century also challenged accepted ideas about sexuality.

- Sexual politics / Italy, Women, LGBT, Sexual politics

Dear Love of Comrades: The politics of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners

Colin Wilson, Ray Goodspeed, Terry Conway — 2014-10-08T13:03:29Z

The film Pride is an extraordinary thing – a Hollywood movie with an enormous budget telling a deeply political story about the most important strike in the second half of the twentieth century in Britain and the mutual solidarity between the strikers and the LGBT community which developed during the course of the dispute.

- Reviews section / Trade unions/workplace organizing, LGBT, Reviews