The Very Quintessence of Persecution

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that a uniquely queer anti-fascism emerged in the early 1970s led by transgender and gender-nonconforming people and cisgender lesbians against postwar fascism in western Europe. In Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, queer anti-fascists drew on influences from Black Power, Women’s Liberation, and Marxism to connect fascism to everyday oppression under capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Using oral histories, private collections, and against-the-grain archival research, this article is the first transnational study of queer anti-fascism and the first to view it as a discrete phenomenon. Queer anti-fascists showed what a radical and inclusive anti-fascism should look like, while their structural analysis of everyday fascism demonstrated why anti-fascism must mean social revolution. For them, queerness was necessarily antifascist: queer people’s common experience of oppression enabled them to understand and overthrow fascism and the existing order. Although they never disappeared, their marginalization by cisgender-heterosexual antifascists should warn antifascists today.