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

Abstract

I am thrilled to be reviewing a work of queer history in this journal. Too often the queer and labor movements seem separate, and this division is blamed on their historical emergence. Aaron Lecklider asserts otherwise. Love's Next Meeting turns to the archive and to literature to explore how sex, class, perversion, labor organizing, and antiracism interpenetrate.I'll focus here on the first half of the book, which has the most to say about workers. While acknowledging “the failures of the left to build a cultural movement centralizing sexual dissidence as a political concern,” Lecklider also locates and analyzes how queer people, queer desires, and queer concerns shaped leftist thought and activism (6). He implies that the failure to center sexual dissidence had the effect not of prohibiting queer engagement but, rather, of nurturing it, since queerness operates better as a campy style of critique than as a “political concern.”Chapter 4 focuses specifically on labor in part via the example, made famous by Alan Bérubé, of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. As more gay men were drawn to this work, they felt increasingly comfortable being identifiable and using the union to fight for their rights as gay workers. Lecklider points out that the union also challenged the homo/hetero binary by virtue of its class and labor alliances (122). Because the union embraced dissidence and militancy, it resisted the pull of middle-class assimilation. At least for a while.When workers seek to advance class ranks (to enter the middle class, usually) either by joining or by resisting a union, they do so by adopting middle-class sexual styles. Ultimately, these middle-class sexual styles—restraint, monogamy, separation between domestic and work spheres—come to define what gets read as gay, lesbian, queer.Lecklider devotes an entire chapter to the workplace. Often sexuality is understood as separate from work, and even from class, and this book brings them back together by examining archival and literary contexts in which “sex and labor were intertwined” (143). He finds numerous instances in which the radical nature of labor activism both feeds and draws from sexual deviance.As people without class privilege who occupied stigmatized (often racialized or feminized) jobs and risked association with the despised Communist Party, workers could forge queer and interracial alliances, since they essentially had nothing left to lose. During the 1940s, the Marine Cooks and Stewards went beyond enabling this radicalism to embracing it. “The tendency of members to associate with the dispossessed, rather than aspiring to respectability, suggests how tightly deviant politics was stitched into the fabric of the union culture” (121).This embrace of deviance as an organizing strategy has the potential to radicalize union efforts today, and this book's valuable lesson is that it's not new—it has a very long history. Labor historians Michael Goldfield and Toni Gilpin have documented this past practice, and Lecklider adds the crucial perspective of queer history. If “labor is a highly sexed enterprise” and if “leftists imagined labor as a site of queer possibility,” then Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse pickers, and the adjunct faculty and janitors in my own local are adding a new chapter to an existing practice (143, 145). Solidarity appeals to workers whose conditions of labor isolate and stigmatize them, and the workplace brings all kinds of people together and provides them with a common experience, which can mute bigotry and foster community.So, history doesn't corroborate a division between queer and worker politics and activism, yet Lecklider acknowledges that recently they have swum in separate streams. Anti-fascism and the Cold War elevated consumerism and domesticity. When the left erased its earlier overlap with homosexuality, it “was not an unintended consequence of building a gay rights movement. It was a strategy born out of a commitment to rejecting a broader revolutionary struggle” (295). Separately, each could embrace capitalism, linked to middle-class sexual and social norms and to the myth of American exceptionalism. Love's Next Meeting offers an alternative history—labor's historic embrace of deviance—which serves as warning, as model, and as pure campy fun.