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In the 1980s, East Germany granted gay people extraordinary new rights in an attempt to neutralize them as a threat to the communist regime. Within this context of change, though, the East Berlin municipal government refused gay activists permission to form a state-sanctioned club for homosexuals. Speaking to the place of civic life in the country and the history of everyday life of East German lesbians and gay men, this article has two goals. First, it builds on existing historiography by illustrating the precise dynamics of the interactions between gay activists and East German authorities, revealing a familiar modern bureaucratic landscape. Second, this article seeks to explain why municipal officials who demonstrated sympathy toward these activists nevertheless denied this group the right to form a club. This analysis argues that the denial of a club was ironically driven by authorities' conviction that gay East Germans indeed faced discrimination. Officials believed discrimination in the German Democratic Republic had isolated its gay citizens, rendering them targets of Western enemies of the state and potential fifth columnists as the West could galvanize their resentment into antistate action. To officials, the activists' attempts to overcome such isolation via a state-sanctioned club actually promised to reinforce isolation and make Western infiltration and subversion more likely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to understand why attitudes towards homosexuality in Latvia appear to be more intolerant than in all other EU member states. It argues that, while the impact of religion, the legacy of communism and post-communist transition have all played a role in shaping attitudes towards homosexuality in Central and Eastern Europe, these factors do not explain sufficiently the divergence among post-communist states and, in particular, do not account for Latvia's extreme position. While acknowledging that intolerance towards non-heteronormative sexuality cannot be explained by a single factor but is the cumulative effect of a range of social influences, this study argues that homosexuality is particularly reviled in Latvia because it has been constructed discursively as a threat to the continued existence of the nation in its desired ethnic form and to the core values defining Latvian national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the history of homosexuality and government-led social control within the Cuban Revolution between 1965 and 1970. Details are given outlining how the government's efforts to police gender within Cuban society were enacted, including internment in labor camps and ideological re-education programs for gay citizens. Connections and extensions are then made to the broader movements of social ideology within Cuban society, including engagement with patriarchy, youth culture and the formation of a distinct Communist culture.

This paper refutes the dominant assumption that Taiwan, unlike Mainland China, has developed a greater degree of tolerance for non-normative sexual expressions as a result of its democratization. Recent legal and cultural changes indicate that Taiwan's democratization consists of tendencies and repressive countertendencies. At the same time, this contradictory development has uniquely enabled a body of indigenous Marxist writings that mobilizes different senses of 'queerness' to demonstrate that the official celebration of diversity and human rights has actually further alienated and disempowered sex workers, promiscuous homosexuals, gay drug-users, and other social subjects that are considered to be a threat to the liberal-democratic order. I offer a reading of the critical writings of Josephine Ho, Yin-bin Ning, Ding Naifei, and Wang Ping since the 1990s to explain why Queer Marxism in Taiwan is founded on a strong a-statist discourse. I argue that a Queer Marxist intellectual practice emerged in Taiwan because liberal pluralism, institutionalized in what these critics call 'state feminism,' has failed to redress effects of social exclusion that (1) persist not despite of, but precisely because of, post-martial law liberal reforms, and that (2) diverge in significant ways from individual experiences as members of officially defined minority groups (women, aborigines, migrant workers, or homosexuals). If social structuration is not always synchronic or isomorphic with state-engineered legal changes, this difference also provides the occasion for Queer Marxists to interrogate the intellectual division of labor between feminism, assumed to be the analysis of gender as a non-pluralizable category, and queer theory, assumed to be the analysis of sexuality as a non-singular but personifiable category. Only by distinguishing between social relations and social identity can we comprehend how the rise of the Taiwanese Independence Movement played a key role in the naturalization of homosexuality as a fictive ethnicity, to which Queer Marxism developed as a historical response. As a geopolitically specific analysis of the aporia of substantive personhood, the Queer Marxism in Taiwan I re-historicize is also a significant contribution to Marxist critique of liberal formalism that is of use to readers across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying the theories of Guy Hocquenghem, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Louis Althusser, this essay identifies Robert Coover's novel The Public Burning and Norman Mailer's novels of the sixties, An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?, as cold war critical national narratives. The essay discusses the crises of masculinity provoked in the American fifties and sixties by anticommunist discourse, which rhetorically linked communism and homosexuality (and thus, in the psychiatric and popular imaginary, effeminacy) as "perversions." These novels critique the way homosociality functions to consolidate patriarchal power, and the resulting institutional homophobia, homosexual panic, and violence. These concerns center on the anus and anality, a trope signifying male homosexuality, and subverting the dominant discourse. The essay also discusses Mailer's and critic Leslie Fiedler's homophobia and concludes that Coover, with his use of subversive Bakhtinian carnival laughter, presents a more devastating, comprehensive critique of cold war rhetoric than Mailer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how allegations of vice intersected with late 1930s anxieties about communism and sexual deviance to mobilize the first successful recall of a major urban mayor. The article challenges the traditional narratives of the recall and their narrow focus on politicians. Instead, it offers an analysis that dwells on the impact of Los Angeles' wider political culture on the recall election and beyond. Ultimately, it argues that the new cultural system lay the foundation both for massive waves of antihomosexual policing and for the start of a gay political movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the relation between queer theory and lesbian and gay social history. Importance of queer theory for historical studies on gay people; Role of empirical historical research in queer studies; Relationship of materialism and Marxism with the queer theory.

Criticizes the political writing of Patrick Anderson in Canada during World War II. Sexuality and political writing; Attempts of integrating homosexuality and communism; Expression to a sense of personal division.