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

Abstract

In Love's Next Meeting, Aaron S. Lecklider presents an impressive range of examples of how sexual dissidents participated in, contributed to, and often thrived within the U.S. Left from the 1930s through the beginnings of the Cold War. His goal is to challenge how “much of the prevailing scholarship on queer history discounts the Old Left due to its perceived homophobia, suggesting that emerging gay subcultures were more historically significant than movements that did not centralize Lgbt identities” (p. 6). Going beyond noting the individual lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (Lgbt) Communists and fellow travelers, Lecklider considers their plays, poetry, novels, and autobiographies, as well as other art forms that depicted queer life alongside proletarian themes. The author sets the stage in the first chapters, using various life stories and documents to illustrate the range of representations, views, and analyses of homosexuality among socialists, Communists, and other radicals. The next three chapters focus on workers, women, and the urban poor, examining the visibility of gay men in labor unions such as the Marine Cooks and Stewards union and analyzing sex work as labor.