Recovering the Entangled History of Political and Sexual Radicalism Zifeng Liu (bio) Aaron S. Lecklider's Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture, Oakland: University of California Press, 2021 Many historical accounts of the U.S. gay and lesbian liberation struggle date the beginning of radical sexual politics to the late 1960s, when activist groups such as the Gay Liberation Front linked the attainment of sexual freedom to the eradication of racial capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy. According to such studies, the possibility of an alliance between leftists and sexual dissidents before that decade of worldwide revolutionary fervor was precluded by the former's inability to incorporate sexuality into their analyses and visions of liberatory social transformation, if not their outright homophobia. While not downplaying the Old Left's contradictions and ambivalence in its attitude toward nonnormative sexualities, Aaron S. Lecklider's Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture recounts a pre-1960 history of queer advocacy that reveals the intimate imbrication of anti-capitalist politics and gay visibility, recognition, and liberation. These little-known queer-Left intersections helped shape the contours of later sexual activism. As with other scholars exploring political and sexual formations that fall out of the boundaries of the permissible, Lecklider mitigates the archival lack around the intimacy between leftist politics and queer life—due to long-standing anti-communism and sexual conservatism—through examining the representational, the aesthetic, and the pleasurable as sites where the engagement between political and sexual dissidents was most visible. He focuses particularly on leftist literary and cultural circles that offered space for radical, alternative representations and discussions of nonnormative sexualities. In tracing this underexamined relationship, Lecklider assembles an impressive multiracial cast of writers, artists, and thinkers, some better known than others, who intentionally [End Page 215] and at times unknowingly drew gay men and women into the fold of radical politics and united the movement for sexual diversity with the struggle against the ravages of capitalism and white supremacy. Lecklider convincingly explains the intertwining of political and sexual radicalism. Leftists and gay women and men were united by their shared geographical spaces, similar experiences of marginalization and exclusion from mainstream U.S. society, and comparable commitments to transgressing the confines of the acceptable and the normative. In particular, the entanglement of anti-Blackness, heterosexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-radicalism and the resistance to it blurred the lines between political radicalism and sexual deviance. Organized both chronologically and topically, Love's Next Meeting's exploration of the intersection between the Left and homosexuality unfolds in three sections. The first part, consisting of the first three chapters, shows that political radicals, and in particular those who were sexually dissident, supported sexual liberation as an inseparable part of the fundamental political and economic transformation of the United States. They articulated that position in the pages of leftist literature and the leftist press. In agitating for radical social change, queer leftists in many instances were able to link their desire for same-sex intimacy to their commitment to anti-capitalist activism. These sexual radicals, at times, also struggled to balance the fulfillment of their affective and sexual needs with the waging of struggles against racial capitalism and imperialism. Within leftist networks, whose advocacy work around the issue of sexuality was often constrained by political and cultural rigidity as well as by heterosexism, gay women and men repurposed the language and conventions of leftist and anti-racist politics to explore sexual nonnormativities. For them, the repression of obscenity served the interests of the ruling class, and the embrace of sexual diversity was a hallmark of a classless society. Radical print culture thus abounded with discussions of nonnormative sexualities. Radicals also drew on narratives of Black solidarity with sexual dissidents against state repression, as well as leftist analyses of sexual deviants as members of the proletariat, in order to link the Left's anti-racist campaigns with the struggle for sexual freedom. The second part argues that leftist theorizations of labor, "the woman question," and proletarian fiction laid the groundwork for a radical sexual politics that emphasized the mutual constitution of...