The forward march of queerness halted

It’s hard to be an optimist right now. In the USA hard won victories around trans and queer rights have been removed at a strke of the presidential pen. The protection of abortion rights via Roe vs Wade has been swept away by a Supreme Court so ruthlessly gerrymandered that the weaknesses of constitutional democracy are painfully exposed. In the UK, similarly, faith in the presumed decency of a Labour Party rooted in methodism rather than Marx lies shattered as the farce that is the Cass report and the capture of the leading seats of power by those who oppose the idea of gender set out a picture of a future in which there will be less rights, not more for the GSRD community.

The tensions and fault lines are increasingly evident. Stonewall, one of the leading GSRD charities in the UK, has put its staff on notice that significant job losses are likely to follow from a collapse of government sector funding both in the UK and, for its overseas work, from the USA. The spectre of a persistent stream of well funded and long lasting employment tribunal cases is making NHS and local government human resources departments fearful of being the next targets for cases seemingly supported by the Labour government’s health secretary. Access to affirmative health care for trans people is becoming harder, not easier, and a return to the 1970s model of transition being only available to those who can afford it looms behind every pronouncement from the government.

As a practitioner who works with members of the GSRD community of which I am myself a member it’s important to pose the two sided question; has the forward march of queerness halted? If it has, what is to be done? Below those questions is a third one. Why me? What can I bring to the conversation that might explain the way I’ve framed the questions, or which has led me to my solutions?

A significant part of my early experience around the labour movement, progressive politics and activism was spent in debates around the idea that the forward march of labour had somehow been halted. It’s probably important to set out some details around what I mean, and what I was experiencing at the time.

I left school aged 16 in 1977, and began work in an area of work that has radically changed. In a typical High Street bank like the one I worked in in 1978, there were 33 staff, three computers and four telephone lines. The bulk of the thirty three staff were back office, doing jobs as different as assessing loan applications, processing payments and personalizing chequebooks. Yes, the predominant way that money was paid from one person to another other than cash, was by cheque, and the personal details on those chequebooks were added in branch, by young staff operating a small press that was a health and safety nightmare. This was the peak period for employment in the UK, when the rise of unemployment to 1,000,000 was regarded as some kind of national catastrophe, and the emrgence of long term unemployment that was resistant to government intervention was a novel and troubling issue. By the time I last worked in high street banking, in 2002, a typical branch like the one I ran had five staff, most of them part time, more computers than people, and we didn’t answer the phone because that was done by a call centre in India. I lived through a transformation of work that required a re-setting of both how government and industry viewed employment rights and it wasn’t fun.

I was a youthful activist; thinking back my lapels were covered in badges declaring that I was part of the Anti Nazi league, a trades unionist (both as a local rep and as a branch official) a Young Socialist, and an anti apartheid campaigner. On weekends I might add in some badges outing myself as a gay rights activist too, although, even on some of the more ‘progressive’ demonstrations, there were those who regarded what we’d now call identity politics with disdain. The correct socialist position, apparently, was to wait for the workers revolution after which bourgeois deviations like homosexuality would become irrelevant, or non-existent.

The phrase “the forward march of labour halted” generally signalled a significant shift in the labour movement, in the last third of the 20th century. After World War II, unionized workers in some global minority countries experienced strong growth in their political influence and sense of social security, driven by economic prosperity, the expansion of the welfare state, and the increasing power of industrial workers. The flipside of this, such as the gap between unionized and non-unionized labour, and the intersectional differences between the privileged white male working class and other groups such as women and those of the global majority, were not immediately evident to many who enjoyed the same privileges as me.

A second factor that wasn’t as apparent in 1977 as it is now was that the progressive changes that we thought we enshrined in law were neither set in stone nor as progressive as some of us thought. Sex between consenting males over the age of 21 was decriminalized in parts of the UK in 1967, but the change was typical of the time — it was limited, grudging and rooted not in a belief in a fundamental right of self expression and bodily autonomy but rather in a view that those who ‘suffered’ from homosexuality would not be helped or deterred by criminal action. A small example of privilege in action comes to mind — Leo Abse, who introduced the 1967 bill was my parents’ MP, and debated these issues with me in a way that squirmed between condescension and pragmatism. The form Leo’s advocacy for limited gay rights took paved the way, in many senses, for the restrictions on the promotion or acceptance of gay rights that followed in the 1980s. The same political parties that grudgingly accepted the 1967 partial decriminalization were hopelessly conflicted, or worse still, on the side of the bigots when homophobia was ruthlessly used against people like Peter Tatchell in the 1980s. Achille Mbembe’s iade that democracy is a pharmakon, both medicine and poison, wasn’t on our agenda then, but it’s hard to escape it now. The AIDS crisis reified much of the latent homophobia that had been dignified by the limited changes of the 1960s and 1970s, in a way that was both terrifying and yet entirely predictable, and which happened through parliamentary and constitutional democracy, not despite it.

I could go on, but this is an essay about now, not then, and bearing in mind that I was around then and made the same mistakes as many others of my generation, there’s only so much self flagellation a reader should have to observe. In summary though, the “halt” of the forward march of labour signified a dramatic reversal in the power and influence that trades unions and progressive politics had gained in the mid-20th century, and reflected broader economic, political, and societal changes. If that doesn’t make you stop and think about what’s happening now, and what that means for rights that may be contingent upon a less secure idea of prosperity for the global minority then, in my opinion, it should.

I’m not going to wholeheartedly side with Lenin on the limits of trades union consciousness, but it’s easy to understand that faced with the experiences of the early 1980s, in the USA and the UK, Kimberle Crenshaw and others were pushing at an open door with the idea of intersectionality as an explanation of how power was exercised and experienced that filled in some of the gaps. We needed an alternative to what had gone before, because the evidence that it was an inadequate explanation of how power worked was painfully obvious in front of us. Judith Butler’s weaving together of intersectionality and gender, and the juxtaposition of gender and sex assigned at birth, went with Crenshaw’s mapping of intersectionality to provide a new intellectual system of thought linked with a culture that already existed but which lacked a voice.

The culture I grew up in accepted othernesss not as a way of being, but as an occasion for the majority to feel charitable. I knew that trans people like Jan Morris and April Ashley both existed and deserved a clearer place in society than we gave them. That they didn’t exist where I lived, or if they did were concealed from me by the culture I grew up in was brilliantly brought home to me only much later, not least when I read people like Juno Roche. I absorbed within myself a sense of otherness as being who and what I was, and I used the self closeting tendency to enable myself to move within structures and places where otherness was as likely to occasion bigotry and violence as charity.

Around the emerging frameworks of culture and ideas that could be seen as resistance to the new liberalism of the late 1970s emerged the body of understanding otherness that became queerness. It helped me understand some of the literature that I consider to be part of the pre-history of the queerness of the last 35 years; authors as different as Kathy Acker and Michael Moorcock became, in retrospect, part of my understanding of queerness. The synthesis of queer activism, especially around AIDS, queer culture and queer theory seemed to suggest to some that in an era when neo liberalism was the dominant world view of all the major political tendencies in the UK and the USA, queerness could contest the remaining space and try to achieve the position of being the opposition. Right now, with Trump practicing a kind of inverted situationism in the service of fascism in the USA, and Starmer proving that Labour is entirely rootless and oriented only in the service of the USA in the UK, it’s hard not to ask if that forward march of queerness has been halted.

Why is this in my mind now? Mainly because I remember what too many of us on the left did, back in the late 1970s. Eric Hobsbawm, or rather his response to the gathering crisis, sums the problem up for me. As Labour dithered and failed in the late 1970s, Hobsbawm was one of the leading lights of the left, someone who too many of us believed must be a great political strategist because he was such a great historian (although, as is often the case, his reputation has waned in the intervening years). Hobsbawm said, in a lecture in 1978

“[W]e, as marxists, must do what Marx would certainly have done: to recognise the novel situation in which we find ourselves, to analyse it realistically and concretely, to analyse the reasons, historical and otherwise, for the failures as well as the successes of the labour movement, and to formulate not only what we would want to do, but what can be done.”

I’m not sure Arthur Ashe would call himself a marxist, but as a great sportsman he described what results from Hobsbawm’s prescription as paralysis by analysis. Shakespeare certainly couldn’t be a marxist, unless he was also a time traveller, but he described something similar when he said “Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.” Hobsbawm knew something bad was coming our way, but his prescription sent us to the libraries, not the barricades.

Has the forward march of queerness halted? Quoting Hobsbawm may be both unfair and unsafe, not least because he was part of a bolshevik tradition that has a chequered past. The Russian revolution of 1917 may have been won in the committees and debates of international communism, but, to paraphrase Orwell, all the subsequent revolutions of the twentieth century were lost or overlooked there. Seeking to analyse the situation in the way Hobsbawm sets out is to create another lost opportunity where millions of words are produced and no actions undertaken. The communist parties and marxist traditions that Hobsbawm upheld as an example of what is to be done in the 1970s passed out of history by the early 1990s, except as a peculiar form of cos play. By 2015 Hobsbawm was telling an interviewer

“…most people in this country are aware that the world and the country in which they live are changing at a dizzying pace, and not for the better. Much of this seems to be happening outside and beyond the control of politics and the governments of nation states, at least in the western world. What is more, for most people in this country I suspect the nature of the fundamental transformations they once expected from governments has changed.” (https://www.ippr.org/articles/the-forward-march-eric-hobsbawm-in-conversation-with-jonathan-rutherford)

What, as a queer, do I think needs to be done? Let me add a significant caveat. As someone who worked or was active within the Labour movement for much of my adult life I am not able to hold myself out as a reliable or successful guide. Nor am I possessed of very much foresight — even though I resigned from the Labour Party in 2021 over its position on trans issues that didn’t reallly require a great deal of vision, just an acknowledgement of reality.

My first suggestion would be a simple one; accept all the definitions of otherness in this new reality, and seek to listen to others. The second would be to remember that progress hasn’t been a steady journey — much of what we thought of as better was simply more convenient for those who held power at the time. In listening, and talking, let’s get back to the ideas that emerged with Crenshaw and Kosofsky Sedgwick, about how power operates and what it serves, and let’s be aware of all the potential intersections.

There’s a whole essay that could and should be written about how where we are now is so resonant with Erich Fromm’s ideas around conformity, authoritarianism and destructiveness as behaviours in response to the very ral circumstances that people experience. One thing I am sure of though. If the desire to accept those ideas and behaviours is shaped by the pressures of the world we live in, the future may belong to those willing to listen, and to help others understand what it is they feel, and why, rather than to seek to persuade them that they are wrong without hearing what they feel. Fromm may have been right to urge us to adopt biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom as guiding principles. My instinct is that to do so we need to acknowledge our own othering of those who disagree with us, and listen, acknowledging their truths, before speaking ours.