Abstract What is the relation between sexuality and the international? The literature on sexuality within international studies demonstrates that a full appreciation of contemporary transformations of sexuality across the globe requires an interrogation of the divisions—West/non-West, North/South, or core/periphery—that characterize our view of the international. While many have studied how the transnational circulation of sexual discourses troubles such divisions, fewer have asked how they came about in the first place. Historical materialism is uniquely instructive in this regard. This methodology expounds the division of the international into distinct spheres as historically constituted and founded on capitalist social relations. Such a methodology can be found within the intellectual writings of the gay liberation movement. Through their fraught relationship with the Cuban government, which represented them as a cultural imperialist offensive against the newly formed Communist state, the gay liberationists developed a dialectical conception of the international that acknowledged the differential constitution of sexual life within specific contexts, yet sought to reveal the international systems of power that produce and regulate those seemingly distinct sexual formations across international divides. Gay liberationism, this article argues, offers us a rich tradition for developing accounts of sexuality within a stratified capitalist world order.