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Welcome back to the new books network. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. The last several decades have seen tremendous political and cultural strides forward for the LGBTQ plus community, with both the legislative and cultural recognition helping many secure a more safe and open lifestyle than possible just a short while ago. However, these advances have raised a number of criticisms and qualifications and not just from stuffy conservatives either.
Many on the radical left have argued that the advances of gay, trans, and queer persons is part of a broader attempt by the powers of capital to present an increasingly brutal economic society with a friendlier face, one of diversity and inclusion. This critique has led to a counter-critique of class reductionism, the treatment of every issue and person from a very basic class perspective. Diving right into this debate is my guest today, Peter Drucker, here to discuss his book Warped, Gay Normality, and Queer Anti-Capitalism. Published as part of the Historical Materialism book series, Drucker's book is on apologetically Marxist in its orientation and presents a massive history of sexual orientations and identity throughout much of human history with particular focus on gender formations under colonialism, industrialization, and the more recent phases of fortist and neoliberal capitalism.
However, Drucker also sees things that Marxists could learn from contemporary queer theory and practice as they tried to navigate a world that was not designed for them, and as they tried to build a better one. Rich in information and attentive to historical detail, this book is a fascinating combination of history, queer theory, and political science. That will be helpful to everyone who hopes to someday see a world where we all belong. Peter Drucker received his PhD in Political Science at Columbia University, a lifelong activist on the radical left.
He has published widely on socialist theory and history and has also written extensively on LGBTQ plus issues. Peter Drucker, welcome to the New Books Network. Hi, thanks for having me. Yes, so we always like to have guests introduce themselves at the beginning of these episodes.
So could you maybe tell us a bit about yourself and what your background is and what your research and work tends to focus on? Okay, I'm from the United States originally, different parts of the States, but I moved to the Netherlands in 1993, so that's 28 years ago now, but my interests have stayed pretty much the same in the US and in the Netherlands. I've been a Marxist and organized Marxist since I was 19, I guess, and I'm 62 now, so it's been a while. I was, besides my work on in the socialist movement and work on socialist history, I wrote a biography of Max Schachman, and also was active in anti-militarist movements for years, and I've written a bit about international affairs, but in the past couple of decades, I've really focused on queer issues and particularly writing on queer issues, and that's the focus of the book worked that I think we're going to talk about today.
Yeah, so that kind of goes right into my first question. So the overarching argument of the book that I saw you making was mainly about how late capitalism or neoliberalism has managed to co-opt a number of issues related to LGBT politics. This basic narrative I think is pretty well known in most left circles. I don't think that is necessarily kind of a headline for most people with radical sympathies, but what really kind of surprised me was how far back you take the history, you really go back hundreds and even thousands of years, you scour the globe for all these different sexual orientations and identities to kind of set the stage or understand more deeply the relationship between sexual identity political economy, and that puts the more recent like less several decades in this much broader context.
So I'm wondering if you can tell us a bit about the overarching argument of the book and why telling this story for you meant going so much further back than just say the 1950s or even the advent of capitalism. Why goes to all the trouble of doing all this history for this? I think it's essential to go back into history in order to challenge and question the kind of naturalizing and essentializing of gay identity that's so common out there in the world, common out there in politics, and common in a lot of ordinary LGBTIQ people's heads. It's something that's startling or unsettling I think to lots of historians, but millions of LGBTIQ people out there buy into the basic story that homosexuality is something that's fundamental to our identity as people and we were either born that way or developed this identity at a very young age and we're a community and there have always been people like us and that's the essential story.
Most historians understand that that's a fundamentally wrong story that lesbian and gay identity in particular as we've known it in recent decades is a very recent specific phenomenon and a very culturally determined phenomenon. Most in most times in human history and in most places that human beings have lived, there were same-sex relations, people seen as male and people seen as female having sex and having emotional, deep emotional relationships with one another, but they weren't at all constructed the way that lesbian and gay relationships and identity are constructed today. And that's a surprise to a lot of people and you have to go into the history and go into the global picture I think in order to help people understand that. Yeah, so kind of to develop this overarching argument you're making, I want to add kind of the other core pillar to the book which is for you Marxism or kind of a broadly anti-capitalist critique.
And within that you get a theory of history, a theory of society, and you can kind of infer into that certain ideas about subjectivity and identity. So I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit about what Marxism as a method helps you unpack in terms of the history of sexual identity and orientation. Okay. Now when I just laid out an answer to your last question, it's pretty much a broad consensus among most LGBTI Q scholars, but when you bring in Marxism, that's not a consensus Marxism had a certain influence in movement and among scholars, particularly in the 70s and into the 80s, but since then it's been much less.
And that's strange to me, it's hard for me to step outside a Marxist framework, because that's the framework I've been in for over 40 years it's how I think. So it's sort of difficult for me to understand the people who don't think that way. Some obvious basic things is are that human beings are social beings, I think most historians and scholars would agree with that. And that sexuality is part of that.
Obviously sexuality is mostly between two or more people, even masturbation, at least, usually involves fantasies about other people. It's not a purely individual isolated thing. And then it's important to understand that the social relations sexuality is embedded in our particularly gender relations, what makes people masculine, what makes people feminine, what see how they see themselves in those ways. And what's really specifically Marxist, of course, is to understand that gender relations and the family are very much linked up to depend on the way societies reproduce themselves.
That's what families are for, basically, to keep society going to produce new subjects in society, we're going to play the social roles that society thinks it needs. And that involves includes producing the means that allow human beings to survive. That's the part that most LGBT Iq scholars, historians, have most trouble with today. The idea of linking sexuality to production immediately seems very crude, very materialist obviously.
But I don't see how you can imagine human life without seeing that people lead to survive and everything they do is bound up with their efforts to survive. And I said that the Marxism I've been working with more and more, particularly since I've been focusing more and more on queer issues, isn't a Marxism that's turned in on itself, that only draws from the Marxist tradition. I'm very much influenced by other paradigms that people in queer studies work in, been influenced by the work of Michelle Foucault, psychoanalysis, queer theory, somebody like Judith Butler. And that's all part of the kind of Marx feminism, very much so.
Marxist feminism has a rich tradition going back many decades that I think you can't understand sexuality without that tradition. And today, more and more politically and theoretically, I think anti-racism has to be a crucial part of the picture too. And anti-racist scholars, I think, are in an important dialogue with Marxism and this is not Marxist, understand the importance of that as well. So it's a big picture, I think, the kind of Marxism I work with.
Yeah, absolutely. So to start picking the book, picking the book apart in a bit more detail, central to your books argument is what you call a same-sex formation, which you define as quote, a specific hierarchy of different same-sex patterns in which one pattern is culturally dominant. Each same-sex formation occupies a specific place in a particular mode of production or capitalist regime of accumulation, end quote. So can you unpack this term for us a bit and how it allows you to draw connections between questions of family relationships, sex, gender, and political economy?
I can try, just hearing that definition brings it home to me, how much I pass into this concept and how much explaining it requires. But as I said before, I don't think you can understand sexuality and isolation. Sexuality is part of society. So that means understanding how sexuality fits into a global system, fits into racist systems, fits into gender systems.
So the concept of same-sex formation is a way of situating sexuality and specifically LGBTIQ sexuality as part of all these things. And understanding that all these things are part of a single totality. They fit together, it's not harmonious totality, it's a whole with lots of contradictions and tensions, conflicts, but all the different parts fit together and can only be understood, can only be made sense of, fitting them together. So the way I use the term particularly looks at the history of capitalism, particularly over the past century and a half, because gay historians particularly look at the end of the 19th century as the time when same-sex sexual identities really started developing, and this is clearly already at that point in a capitalist world.
So the kind of society that these sexualities are developing in is very much the capitalist society. And within that, I try to point out that you get very different forms of same-sex sexuality, even in this fairly recent period of capitalist history. And I focus on three. During the period that Marxists usually refer to as the period of classic imperialism from the late 19th century up to about the Second World War, you have the same-sex formation that I call invert dominant, that this is the time, as Jonathan Ned Katz said, where you have the invention of heterosexuality, which is a new term in that period, about the same time that the term homosexuality was introduced.
And so romance and love between men and women become central in this period in a way it hadn't been for marriage in the family through most of human history, and that created new problems for people who experienced intense sexual attraction and emotional connection with people in the same sex. In ancient Greece, or in medieval Baghdad, it was no problem for a man who had a wife and children to also be passionately attracted to say, male youth and have intense relationships with them, because those societies didn't distinguish between heterosexual people and homosexual people in the way that's become common under capitalism. But in the invert dominant, same-sex formation, that became central, and therefore, attraction to people in the same sex became central to people's identity in a new way. But something that made the invert dominant formation very different from what we know today is that inverts generally weren't expected to have sex with one another.
And so that's a change in the transition to the next same-sex formation I discuss, which I call the gay dominant formation, basically developing mostly after the Second World War. And this is the period where you get the concept of homosexuals, that is, everybody who experiences a strong central sexual attraction and emotional connection to people in the same sex. And these people are seen as being potential sexual and emotional partners with one another and as part of a single lesbian gay community. So that's a different kind of formation, a different kind of identity.
And finally, starting about in the 1990s under neoliberalism, you have yet a third same-sex formation, I say, which I call a homo-normative dominant formation. And in that, we have same-sex marriage, we have same-sex adoption, we have lesbian women and gay men fitting into neoliberal society more integrally than gay people had ever done before. And as part of a reaction against that, you have queer scenes, queer people, queer politics that reject that kind of integration and that kind of assimilationism, under neoliberalism. So that's yet a third kind of picture.
Let's try to explain an awful lot with one concept, but I think it helps. Yeah, absolutely. Moving right along, one thing that surprised me about the book, you talk a lot about the relationship between colonialism and gender and sexuality. And it probably won't surprise most people to find out that colonialism had a huge impact on the sexual identity of the colonized, but it also affected the identities of the colonizers as well.
There's a way in which colonialism and sexual identity have this very kind of dialectical relationship with one another. So I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about some of the main ways in which they've impacted each other. Right. That's a key way for me.
I think it's a key way for me of trying to give an LGBTIQ story. That's not just a European story or an North American story but try to make it a genuinely global story. But it's complicated. Because throughout the history of capitalism that I'm talking about is you get the development of these different same sex formations and different same sex identities.
Europe particularly is conquering and dominating a lot of the world. And Europe is conquering and dominating continents, large regions, which don't have necessarily the kind of identities and structures that have been developing in Europe. So the European identities or later North American identities are very much shaped in interaction with these other identities and these other patterns that exist in other parts of the world. What's very peculiar and Rahul Rao who works in London has pointed this out I think very well is how Europeans managed to do this in every period in a way that asserts the superiority of the European way of organizing sexuality.
And that is the proof of the right of Europeans to rule the world or at least to guide the world towards a better way. But Europeans and North Americans have done this in totally opposite ways in different periods. So the sense of superiority has stayed constant. But what makes Europeans and North Americans superior has totally flipped around.
So in the 19th century, classic period of European conquest of Africa, for example, what makes European superior is that they're heterosexual and that they have loving relationships between men and women that found stable productive families. And Europe is going to guide the rest of the world into adopting this pattern. And you have, for example, a French naval doctor in North Africa in 1893 who says, well, Arabs or is everybody knows in veteran pedarasts. But France is going to bring the benefits of civilization to them and change this.
Today, it's totally flipped around because in the eyes of lots of European leaders, ideologues, particularly Africans and particularly Muslims are in veteran bigots. People who don't understand that homosexuality has already always existed and it's just as natural as heterosexuality. And so they're intolerant and they persecute gay people, which is wrong. And we Europeans and North Americans are going to take these poor persecuted homosexuality in the rest of the world under our wing and free them or give them aid that will help them to be free.
So this is, it's an inheritance of colonialism, but because we're in a post colonial or neo colonial period since warps came out I've coined a different word for this well I didn't point it. In a very important book called terrorist assemblages talking about homo nationalism, which looks at the ways in which lesbian gay rights in particular are used in abuse as an instrument of imperialist domination and she looks in very chilling ways at how this was the case, for example, when the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth. The little twist I've added to this since warps came out in work I talk about homophobia in the place of homophobia in the soul story. Today I would use a different word for it, taking off from poor's word homo nationalism I would call it hetero nationalism.
And you have the paradox that lots of governments, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Arab region, very much part of the neo liberal world system, very often completely subordinated economically to European and North American dominated capitalism, but to assert their distinctiveness and to have a populist rhetoric they turn around and say yes but we defend our own culture and the way we defend our own culture is by rejecting this alien import of homosexuality, which is un-African or un-Islamic or in the case of Eastern Europe in fact since the fall of the East Bloc, un-Christian. So in that case you have the development of a really colonial sort of identity, this totally invariance of history because the Arab region, for example, has an incredibly rich history of same-sex love and same-sex relationships going back to the time in Europeans were burning sodomites with the sake. But you have this heteronationalist ideology that fits into neo-liberalism but attempts to mask its integration into neo-liberalism by asserting a distinctive popular national un-European identity. So it's a complicated story.
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Moving right along, turning to what I think you called the second period of capitalism you explore, Fordism. With that there was the growth of consumerism and with that the change towards a kind of consumerist form of identity and citizenship. And with that you bring up the way in which for sexual identity and sexual practice, there was an increasing prevalence of pleasure in that. It was no longer simply how one kind of reproduced society but a way one enjoyed their place in society.
So I'm wondering if you can talk about the way you see sexual pleasure taking kind of an increasingly center stage in our identities in our in our practices and how that fit with this kind of growing consumer identity. Yeah. Yeah. The for this period is a period where the basic wellspring of economic growth changes in the previous periods of capitalism.
The people who did the basic work of production of working class were mostly paid really low wages and were very often not able to buy the things they produce themselves. Cars, for example, were originally produced for the wealthy or at least for middle class you weren't expected as a working class person to be able to buy a car. But under Fordism and the name is going because of Henry Ford and and his innovations. You get a period where working class wages keep pace more with the rise of productivity.
And that makes it possible to expand the market enormously. So it becomes possible in growing parts of the world for working class people to buy cars, for example, and this makes it possible to sell a lot more cars and this applies to all sorts of markets. So with the spread of markets, mass markets, mass consumerism, you have the need, if you want to make profits, to sell all these products to more and more people. So advertising becomes crucial.
And the stimulation of desire becomes crucial. And the desire in general is very much linked to sexual desire. A man wants to have a fancy car because that's going to impress a woman and he's going to get the woman he wants and found the family he wants. And so you get this linking up initially of heterosexuality with consumption and consumer societies.
And eventually that sort of trickles down to lesbian and gay people as well. The paradox here. And for this I lean very much on Herbert Marcuse who was in my eyes the main pioneer of linking marks with Freud and looking at capitalist societies in a way that draws on psychoanalysis. What he points out is this kind of stimulation of desire and this kind of sexualization of society is at the same time an extreme compartmentalization of sexuality.
Because workers still have to produce and they're not going to produce enough if they're fucking around on the job. So you have this combination in society of still a fairly rigid, disciplined workplace ethos and consumption oriented, hedonistic kind of leisure ethos. Very much walled off from one another. And in a way, the gay male scene of the 1970s was a sort of extreme expression of that, because you had people who particularly in the United States moved to New York or San Francisco to be gay.
They escaped their high bound families and the church and small towns came to the big city and had fun and an enormous way, which meant they tried to limit their work lives at that point. And so they were to the smallest part of the day is possible, so that mostly after midnight they could go out and dance and find people and have sex. There was a certain kind of liberation in that but also a certain kind of replication of this extreme separation in the four disc period between production and consumption. Yeah, moving right along.
So in this period of fordism there was an emerging tension and sexual identity. There was this increasing emphasis on personal freedom and expression and pleasure that we've been talking about, but on the other hand there were still social needs which demanded a family that could reproduce and maintain itself for the sake of continued economic reproduction and expansion. And this led to what Herbert Markuse referred to as repressive de-sublimation, which is quote the uneasy combination of sexual freedom with the channeling of sexuality into forms compatible with the productive and reproductive order and quote so can you unpack this emerging tension here and how it would set the stage for much LGBT politics in the coming decades. Well, as we're talking about this we're talking about a period of a few decades when things were changing and in many ways changing for the worse.
One thing that in the 1960s and 70s in the United States and Canada and Europe Western Europe. One thing that made more sexual freedom relatively easier was the growth of the welfare state in this same period. If you became unemployed, if you became sick, you really depended on your family to see you through that. And that meant that you had to think twice about risking alienating your family, your parents, because if you needed them, you had to be able to turn to them.
Now in the 60s and 70s as capitalism was in this tremendous period of expansion, the welfare state built in cushions to sustain consumption even in economic downturns. So you have much more unemployment insurance pensions, sick pay, all these things. So that made it easier to be openly lesbian or gay. It weren't as dependent on your parents.
But in the early 1970s already, this whole model of capitalistic accumulation starts going into crisis. And then you start getting some from neoconservatives and neoliberals saying, whoa, this has gotten out of control. Government is too big, taxes are too high, business can't keep going this way. So we got to tighten the screws some.
Parents who have been neglecting their responsibility, welfare queens to pick up the term that that welfare that Reagan picked up and ran with, have been letting hardworking taxpayers support their kids when they should be going out to work and supporting their kids themselves. So this starts quitting a lot of responsibility back on the shoulders of nuclear families. And that means that under neoliberalism, you get austerity and you get a certain kind of social conservatism, at least initially, that goes with that kind of neoliberal austerity. What changes eventually is, by the 21st century, you have a trend of saying, okay, lesbian and gay people can form stable couples too, can have professional careers.
If they're middle class people and there's a cultural focus on middle class lesbian and gay people as opposed to working class people, of whom there are more, of course. And they have the right to get married. And this begins to be one. So you get same sex couples forming stable families, raising the kids they had by previous heterosexual relationships or adopting kids.
So this pressure to replace the welfare state with family based support is something that comes to include lesbian gay people more. And in this sense, lesbian gay people also become much more of an integral part of this neoliberal picture. So moving along in the wake of fortism and through the neoliberal offense, if they're emerged a new figure, what Dennis Altman has referred to as the global gay and others have drawn attention to the recent development of what we might call a home global orientation. So on the surface, this had a lot of emancipatory elements for the LGBTQ community, but it has also brought with it certain tensions as well, particularly by connecting LGBTQ identities to certain forms of consumerism, which has created a history of uneven development within the LGBTQ community.
So can you unpack some of these changes? Sure, I can try. The world of neoliberalism has been for decades now an increasingly unequal world with a lot more wealth concentrated at the top of the economic period and a lot more wealth concentrated. And this particularly has been the case in the countries dominated by imperialism, particularly starting in the 19 early 1980s with the explosion of the debt crisis.
You had structural adjustment policies in Latin America, you had what was called the lost decade of stagnation through most of the 1980s, you had countries indebted countries being forced by the World Bank in the IMF to drastically cut social spending, and to open up their economies to the European and North American investment and trade products. So what happened in this situation is within poorer countries, you have growing inequality, so you have the growth of a middle class that is able to buy consumer products more than had been the case before. But overwhelmingly, of course, you have millions and millions of poor people in poor countries who are not able to buy these consumer products. So among people experiencing same-sex attraction, you begin to have the growth of lesbian and gay communities inside the middle class, what's called the middle class, even in countries like India or the Philippines or across Latin America.
And in these largely middle class lesbian gay communities, you have a certain degree of cultural orientation with limits to New York and London in Paris. So you have the growth of bars and clubs and magazines that are sort of imitating the kind of bars and clubs and magazines you would have in New Yorkers, San Francisco or London. And with that, a certain kind of lesbian identity that looks something like the kind of lesbian gay identity that had grown up under Fordism. But you also have millions and millions of people without those kinds of incomes who are less able to buy into all that culture, all those scenes, all those identities.
And so more traditional identities, for example trans identities, which have existed in human history in all parts of the world much longer than the world. And more longer than lesbian gay identities narrowly defined. Trans identities have continued to be somewhat more characteristic of same-sex relationships among poor people in large parts of the world, usually very often called by the terms that are used in the national languages in people's own country, you know, coutoys in Thailand and in the Philippines and so forth. So you have these tensions in communities that have, to some extent, grown up and become more public, but have been divided by these kinds of class and cultural dynamics.
Yeah, to expand our focus a little bit, even within more hetero-normative families, neoliberalism has produced something of a mixed bag of results due to pulling people in a few different directions at once. On the one hand, there's this emphasis on personal responsibility and fluidity in response to market needs, which pulls against family values. On the other hand, the increasing precarity into funding of various social safety nets leaves people in need of families to do the work the state is no longer willing or unable to do. So can you unpack this tension and how it has led to new understandings of personal and sexual identities, not just in the LGBTQ community that we've been developing, but also in more hetero-normative communities and families as well.
I think you sum up the dynamic pretty well, actually. And it's very hard for people. I think in a country like the United States, where the welfare state has historically, particularly since the Second World War, been weaker than in a lot of Western European countries, I think this helps explain the enduring strength and even increasing strength of churches, particularly evangelical Christian churches. Because you can't count on the state again to help you when things get bad.
So you have to count on your family. And to some extent, you count on your church. It's funny, I have friends who moved from Brooklyn, where I knew them, to a fairly small town in Pennsylvania. And the first question you're asked, they told me, when you meet people in a town like that is what church have you joined.
And the idea that you might not join the church is totally alien to people, partly because how else do you survive? How else do you have a social network? And with Trump, with the far right, which is paradoxical because Trump himself, I think, was never much of a deeply devoted Christian. But he has had gay followers, including gay for a right follower, somebody like Richard Grinnell, who was ambassador to Germany and played a role in homeland security and so forth.
But at the same time, evangelicals were a crucial part of Trump's space. So he courted them with his attacks on trans people in the military, with his defense of so-called religious freedoms, all these things. And so I think this shows the importance in many people's lives, and it goes beyond evangelicals, of family as a tool for survival. And yet, you know, that families are very imperfect.
Families are full of conflict. Families can't bear all the pressure that's put on them, can't fill all the roles that they're supposedly required to fill. So this wreaks havoc with people's lives. And so remember, you know, this goes back decades now.
But I remember somebody telling me a story with a strong feminist woman talking to her colleagues at work, and the everyday conversation was full of stories about messy divorces, abuse and violence within the family. And at a certain point, she turned on her colleagues, these other women and said, you know, you paint such an awful picture of all your families, and yet supposedly you're so pro-family. How do you put this together? And the response was, well, what else is there?
And so, you know, there's a tragic reality that for lots of people, there is no substitute in a way around. Yeah, so to switch gears a little bit, in the final chapters of the book, you try and take a hard look at the challenges facing both queer activists and radical left and anti-capitalist activists and try reanimating so very specific approaches to Lenin's famous question, what is to be done? So to kick things off here, you argue that developing a queer politics means not only rejecting isolationist and anarchist politics, but also challenging the division between public and private politics. So how do you see queer theory challenging the public private economy, and what is its importance for political engagement?
Another big question. Yeah, and a complicated one, because on the one hand, the queer scene, queer politics is very much a minority scene and a minority current in the broader LGBTIQ world today. It's pretty much everywhere where it exists. But at the same time, it's extremely diverse.
Queers are extremely diverse, and their self understanding is extremely diverse. I think that's inevitable, and I think building a strong radical queer political current means living with that diversity. So in that sense, now on the Marxist, I'm not an anarchist, I don't want to bad mouth anarchist too much, because in the queer scene and in queer politics, I have to say, anarchists are probably more numerous and stronger. As a current, then Marxist are today.
So I think it's important to try to find ways where we can align with one another and fight together. I think that is possible often to a large extent, but their attentions. And in particular, there are attentions with the kind of anarchism that's most prevalent among young radicalized people today, and particularly young queers. Anarchism historically, of course, had a very strong working class, collectivist, even disciplined component.
You look at the anarchist, cynicalist in Spain. These were people whose attitude was not as they say today, DIY. You know, everybody go off and do their own thing privately. No, they built unions, they built movements, they built the anarchist federation, and they fought together.
Today, for most young radicals, anarchism means something different from that, something much more individual and freeform. And I think, now I'm a believer in diversity and pluralism and individual free choice. But if you're trying to build a radical current, I think there comes, it's important that times come when you work together and build communities, structures, movements together. And in particular, community structures and movements that can act politically.
Anarchists, too, have always been aware that the state is there and has to be challenged. There's a certain kind of queer anarchist attitude today. I think that implicitly assumes that it's possible to found our own households, our own communes, our own relationships in ways that just do an end run around the state. Okay, so we don't get married because we don't believe in it.
We just do our own things, support one another, and that's enough. And in fact, that side steps, the problem, the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of resources in society are in the hands of major corporations and of the state. And you're not going to be able to transform life for millions and billions of people, unless you find a way ultimately to rest those resources away from the capitalist and the capitalist state that controls them now. And so we need to find ways to talk about this and to strategize about this, to the extent we can.
Yeah, kind of moving along very similar lines. Another area you argue there's work to be done is in queering family structures and intimate relationships. But you argue that, as you've been saying, this needs to go beyond simply setting up isolated communes and other safe places. It needs to involve connecting these new modes relating to one another to broader movements, such as those for say housing or healthcare access.
And we could go on anti war activism, for example. So can you unpack some of the connections you see that need to be developed here. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. One one concept I discussed in the book that I think has a certain ambiguity around it is the concept of polyamory. I think for lots of radical queers, polyamory implies something fundamentally social and collective going beyond the diet of the couple to build more broadly to see that friendship is crucial, as opposed to just narrowly sexual relationships. And to see that that polyamorous relationships can ultimately fit into something broader into communities into movements.
But as the media pay more and more attention and throw a word like polyamory around, it increasingly become just a way of referring to a personal lifestyle choice. You know, I personally am non monotonous and therefore I call myself polyamorous well, polyamory was supposed to mean a lot more than that. And again, even the most loving circle of polyamorous friends, I think, are going to run up against on terrible pressures from the fact that the attempt to survive from day to day involves having jobs, changing jobs, moving from city to city. Putting food on the table for kids, whoever kids may are.
And I think even loving polyamorous households face really big limits and being able to face all those challenges on their own. You need social support, you need political support. So I think that's why the way we transform our relationships has to be part of transforming the world and organizing socially and politically. Moving along early in the book, you look at the political importance of the word queer, which in Judith Butler's words is quote, never fully owned, but always an only redeployed twisted, queered from a prior usage, and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes and quote.
So I want to bring this up here to ask the question of how the left can learn from this element of queerness and how it can inform other political orientations, particularly in the Marxist London as tradition. So in other words, in closing, how should Marxists not only be allies and comrades to queer activists and theorists but students of them as well. Yeah. I do talk about queering a lot of things.
I talk about queering the left. I talk about queering movements. It's not just a question in my mind of having a queer movement that the left can be in solidarity with and support, because there is no other movement and there is no form of politics that shouldn't be influenced and transformed by a queer conception of the world. And I go through a whole series of issues, a whole series of movements.
Health care is obvious because that goes back to act up and the origin of queer nation, which was the earliest wave of queer politics, radical queer politics. I think people understand broadly today that you can't look at organizing around healthcare without drawing on the legacy of act up and the kind of queer creativity and approaches that came out of that. And that goes right on to challenging intellectual property on a global scale. Gary Kinsman, Canadian historian and activist, has looked in particular at the current COVID-19 pandemic and what activism against the pandemic today has to learn.
And I think you can make analogies with all kinds of movements that way around housing. The book talks about queer youth organizing in New York City, homeless youth, or youth struggling to survive once they've moved out from their parents' homes. And I think you can look at democracy more generally. And you can look at the left.
I think the left today has still not become, and I'm talking about all tendencies across the left, really, from from DSA to Marxist, more revolutionary Marxist groups to anarchists, whoever. And I think there are not many parts of the left where queer culture, queer relationships, queer way of being in the world, is really fully welcome, fully integrated. And I think that's necessary. I think the left is perceived more broadly in much of society, as in this particularly the white left, I guess, as sort of cold and narrow and sterile.
And I think that's a very important thing to be learned from queer communities and queer organizing in challenging and changing that. That is not to say that queer people or queer currents have the answers, because there are a lot of contradictions. And as that Judith Butler quote you used shows, even the meaning of queer is never uncontested. It means a lot of different things to different people.
It's a kind of anti-identity or non-identity identity. So the question of who exactly is queer, who comes very complicated, wants people who don't necessarily identify sexually as queer, one who will create this word. And queer has politically become very linked to anti-racism, to Palestine solidarity, to a whole series of things, which makes it broader than just a sexual concept, but also in a way can sometimes sort of distract from its sexual content and its sexual identity. So all that is stuff that needs to be handled sensitively and with a feeling for nuance.
Excellent. So that brings us to the end of my questions about the book. So as a final sign off question, what if anything are you working on now? Well, I have been running with different things that came out of the book.
As I said, in the book, I hadn't yet developed the concept of heteronationalism. So I've been writing different things in recent years that look at heteronationalism and homo-nationalism, that look at Eastern Europe, that look at Ireland with the incredible transformation you had in Ireland with the referendum around marriage, looking at Islamophobia in Europe and how these issues interact with queer issues. So that's something I continue to work on. I, at the same time, I'm starting to strike out in new directions.
For example, the journal historical materialism is preparing a special issue on anti-Semitism, the fight against anti-Semitism, the far right Jewish identity. And I'm working on an article for that special issue on queer identity and Jewish identity and how those two kinds of identity, in very strange ways, parallel each other and are linked in the fight against the far right. Despite the existence of homo-nationalism, even on the far right, despite the existence of a very strong Zionist component on the far right. So all that's incredibly complicated and I think fascinating to obscure, to explore.
And at the same time, I haven't abandoned my interest in socialist history. So I mentioned when I introduced myself an hour ago, my biography of Max Jackman, and I think there are lots of issues around the Democratic Party, for example, that are very timely today, but that need to be updated to fit into today. So historical materialism book series, which published, worked, has also expressed interest in publishing a new edition of the Jackman biography with a new introduction, trying to raise all these issues. So lots of different directions I'm looking at.
You've got a lot to work with, I'm sure. So Peter Drucker, this has been a fascinating hour. The book was really thought for looking for me, so I appreciate you coming on to talk about it. Well, thanks so much for inviting me.
It's been a great chance.