In 1972 Mario Mieli was twenty years old, a decade later he would be dead. Nowadays, he is best known in the anglosphere as the author of Towards a Gay Communism (published as Elementi di critica omosessuale in 1977), but he was as much known during his short life as a provocative and confrontational activist in Italy’s gay liberation movement. His initiation and education into this movement was as much a product of his experiences with the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF) between 1971-1974, as those with the Milan branch of Fuori! (United Front for Italian Homosexual Revolution), in whose magazine he published this and other accounts of queer London.
In that later work, Mieli is more pessimistic about the revolutionary potential of a purely spectacular, appearance driven intervention into the ‘phallocratic-capitalist’ society, recognising the processes of recuperation that have, since the development of legal recognition and its discourse of ‘permissiveness’, tended to exploit and neutralise queer gesture and performance. Yet the obvious excitement of a twenty year old who has found his tribe reverberates through this earlier text, reminding us of the importance of collaborative cultural production in social movements, as well as the energy that shared expression can bring to collectives and individuals alike. This obvious affective attachment did not make Mieli at all reluctant to later criticise his former comrades in London as ‘para-reformist’ or ‘integrationist’, and even denounce his Italian ex-compagni in Fuori! as nothing less than ‘a counter-revolutionary, reformist political line in the homosexual movement’.
To imply, however, that this text stands in opposition to the later, fleshed-out writings, would be misleading. The final section of the article – on Rachel Pollack’s role in the Transvestites and Transexuals Group – was recycled verbatim in Towards a Gay Communism. What’s more, the belief that gay liberation is inextricably bound to women’s liberation also held throughout Mieli’s life. This section – indeed the whole article – is a salutary reminder that the genesis of the women’s liberation movement is intertwined with that of the gay liberation and trans liberation movements: nor is gay or trans liberation possible unless it occurs hand in hand with women’s liberation.
The key conceptual underpinning of this shared oppression, and struggle, is ‘phallocracy’: and it is one that enabled a refreshing degree of collaboration, even intermingling, between the women’s and gay libbers. In the eleventh issue of the GLF magazine, Come Together (January 1972), written and edited by members of the autonomous Lesbians Group, an article titled ‘A Woman’s Place…’ (the ironic echo of which can be heard in the UK’s current anti-trans feminist group of the same name), two of the GLF’s women members argue that a separate squatted social centre was needed for women to meet and organise with one another. Describing the benefit of such a project, the authors explain that:
Women’s projects would develop organically out of a situation in which we could get to know each other and discover our common problems as women, particularly gay women: lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites and transexuals.
Transexual, and even transvestite, women were to be included as a matter of course in autonomous women’s spaces. Emphasising this inclusion of trans experience within the idea of womanhood, this issue of Come Together was also home to arguably the first British trans manifesto, ‘Don’t Call Me Mister, You Fucking Beast!‘ whose authors included Roz Kaveney and Rachel Pollack. ‘Don’t Call Me Mister’ was also the point of origin for Mieli’s praise of the ‘fantastic game of destroying roles’. In an early riposte to the all-too-common argument that trans women are simply reinforcing gender stereotypes or parodying authentic womanhood, Kaveney and Pollack make the persuasive argument that:
The whole question of roles needs to be examined, and particularly what we as transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens can contribute to a new understanding of how they operate. Some of us are opposed to roles because they can limit self-discovery. We don’t want to discard the male role just to take on the female role. Others think that transvestites can show people that roles can be fun, if you’re free to take the ones you want and discard them when you don’t want them any more. The important thing is, no one should tell you, as a man or a woman, this is the role you have to play, and you have to play it all the time.
Attention should also be paid to Mieli’s palpable desire to affirm the relationship between Gay Liberation and class struggle. The article, after all, begins with the shadow of the 1972 Miner’s Strike and the picket lines that swept across London’s still gargantuan docklands over the course of that hot summer.
The wave of autonomous, democratic wildcat strikes that shut down the British economy throughout 1972 are not there to add colour alone: according to Mieli they offer a concrete model both for how Gay Liberation should organise from the base up, and how it should resist integrationist, reformist, and bureaucratic tendencies that would sacrifice the concrete practice of freedom for its formal codification within a capitalist legal system. Mieli therefore speaks glowingly of the organisational overhaul of the GLF that took place in 1972. Abandoning a model where power was invested in a centralised general meeting dominated by a few key figures, the GLF adopted a form of autonomous federalism where, in Mieli’s words, ‘all decision-making power [and] the direct responsibility for pursuing struggles’ was invested in the base. This strategy of devolving into autonomous local groups – an attempt to emulate the model developed by London’s Women’s Libbers – is reminiscent of the decision of Sisters Uncut to do the same after their explosion in membership in 2015, and a reminder that while organisational and strategic problems never repeat, they certainly rhyme.
Ultimately, Mieli would feel that even in the GLF, this non-hierarchical organising had functioned more in word than deed. In Towards a Gay Communism he would complain that:
The organisational structure of the gay groups themselves, while more elastic and gay, and less authoritarian, than the traditional or ultra-left political rackets, often remains, all the same, substantially hierarchical (even if the collectives scarcely ever recognise official hierarchy of any type). The effective homosexual leaders often tend – and sometimes unconsciously – to lead ‘their’ groups like little gangs to be more or less kept to heel, and on which they base their own prestige and personal power. Still essentially political figures, they are as such patriarchal and reactionary, beneath all the feathers and glitter.
Beneath ‘feathers and glitter’ hierarchy – and by extension patriarchy – was still very much alive and well. Mieli’s assessment stands as an evergreen reminder of the persistent vigilance required to organise democratically, to not only claim descent from a non- or anti-hierarchical tradition, but also to be brave enough to enact it. Mieli knew, as we must know, that the only route to liberation passes by way of an eschewal of the twin temptations of ‘prestige and personal power’, in favour of an unleashing of the collective potential of the class to organise itself.
I will indulge myself one final, personal reflection: the parties sound heavenly, the squats hellish.
‘London Gay Liberation Front, the Angry Brigade, feathers and sequins’
[From “Fuori!”, n. 5, November 1972]
Great Britain, winter 1972: the Miner’s Strike throws the entire country into darkness and the most absolute chaos. The Conservative government declares a state of emergency: the lights of the City go out, the electronic brains stop working, industrial machinery grinds to a halt.
Summer 1972: the gigantic flare up of the Dock Strike jams up not only the country’s food supply, but the entire supply chain.
Although still carried out from an economistic[1] perspective, and far from transforming themselves into a conscious and unitary political combat against the class enemy and their defensive positions, these struggles demonstrate a radicalism capable of bypassing from the left the trade unions, who are unmasked as sell-outs to the enemy whose interests they serve, and of shaking up things across the whole country, igniting a new revolutionary fervour in the minds of those who, bound by a shared revolutionary imperative, languish still in ideological-practical uncertainty determined by years of uncontested capitalist power.
It is in conjunction with the Miner’s Strike that the English Gay Liberation Front overhauls its organisation, freeing itself from the bureaucratic centralist apparatus sustaining it and, through new local formations, restoring to the movement’s base all decision-making power, the direct responsibility for pursuing struggles.
During the summer, conversely, while 50,000 dockers threatened by underemployment fold their arms and defy anti-strike laws, the government, the trade unions and the Labour Party, London’s revolutionary homosexuals fight the first true and proper local battles, against bourgeois society’s murderous phallocratism [fallocratismo][2], to ensure by force – and violence, if necessary – the right to lead a life in common, in accordance with the approach dictated by the slogan come out.[3] These are the Brixton struggles, which soon see the entire female population of the neighbourhood come over to the side of the homosexuals, who are being persecuted by gangs of fascist youth; we are talking here about the establishment of homosexual communes on Colville Terrace, the occupation of houses scheduled for demolition according to a new urban plan for London that, according to the ferocious logic of economic-political speculation, seeks to remove proletarians and the exploited from central London, in order to imprison them in monstrous and inaccessible ghettoes at the extreme periphery of the city.
Born two years ago at the London School of Economics at the initiative of two students returning from a visit with the American Gay Liberation Front, London Gay Lib. quickly gained broad support among the homosexual on the extreme left. The movement has grown to a significant size: over the course of two years more than ten thousand badges have been sold in London alone, and every week, at the general meetings in Notting Hill Gate, hundreds of homosexuals participate in open discussions about the movement and its politics. Today general meetings no longer take place because, through the activities and gatherings of local groups, initiatives are implemented according to the will and following the consent of the base, removing from the few who are most active, or who tend to occupy the role of bureaucrats, any semblance of decision-making power. This new structure was suggested to the revolutionary homosexuals by the organisational model of the Women’s Liberation Front, alongside whom Gay Lib. has always acted, in its self-declared status as a radical-feminist movement. Not to forget the protest – coordinated, by shared agreement, by Women’s and Gay Lib. – against the election of Miss World in 1971, the fights with the police, the unfettered whirl around the Royal Albert Hall, the improvised Street Theatre. The slogan for that night was: WE’RE NOT BEAUTIFUL, WE’RE NOT UGLY, WE’RE ANGRY!
Angry! The queens of the London Gay Liberation Front, alongside their feminist comrades, are profoundly angry. In the joy of the unrestrained struggle they fight against the phallocratic-capitalist society denying them the freedom to exist, these English homosexuals vent their rage, a rage accumulated silently for years, amidst harassment and violence endured without the ability to respond, enchained by anguish at the cruellest of oppression. And well-aware that they share this oppression not only with women, but with anyone who more or less directly suffers under the abuse on which bourgeois society is founded, the homosexuals of London place their struggle within the broader context of any revolutionary initiative aimed at the subversion of the system, while also placing themselves in sharp antithesis[4] to the traditional left which, in England as much as Italy, is exclusively counterrevolutionary. JOY IN LIVING AND RAGE AGAINST THE SYSTEM THE DENIES LIFE! Protests, meetings, political actions, leafletting, retaliatory attacks: all interspersed with days of parties in parks (where Gay Lib. comrades meet up to publicly and fraternally demonstrate their homosexuality), with social meetings[5], with fabulous dances.
In the venerable, rented out town halls of London’s local councils, hundreds upon hundreds of homosexuals of all sexes come together to dance and have fun, in a merry-go-round of improvised costumes revealing what amazement is to be found in liberated homosexual fantasy and imagination. Between the transexuals[6] in sequined gowns and vaporous violet wigs, one also finds representatives of the most advanced extra-parliamentary left, smoke-draped hippies with a bisexual air, David Hockney and the cream of the King’s Road, feminists resplendent in anti-femininity, and the enigmatic editors of OZ. At the first few dances, secure and far from the eyes of the police, members of the Angry Brigade were meeting together (the Angry Brigade are more or less the English equivalent of our Red Brigades in Italy). Side by side with a Japanese man in an Edwardian gown more than anything like that worn by Silvana Mangano in Death in Venice, bearded Anglo-Saxon and south-American chaps in miniskirts, Italians in competition with Fellini and Gherardi for the originality of their costumes made in no time out of hospital gauze, ostrich feathers and colours from Biba, undisturbed the conspirators of the Angry Brigade plotted the most sensational attacks to have rocked London in the last few years, bringing to the ears of the English an echo of Northern Irish terror, until then muffled by the distance and hypocritical reserve of a fanatical nationalism that hides from itself its troubles at home.
Today, with the failure of the Angry Brigade’s pseudo-revolutionary attempt, now in tatters, Gay Lib. prefer political actions that are less reckless and more constructive. So, they occupy houses with feathers on their heads and an abundance of mascara; the presence of homosexuals who have come out is imposed on the local area, homosexuals who live unscheduled lives in messy communes without authority, without morality, without work and without money, in an orgy of mattresses and jumble-sale[7] clothes scattered around chaotic rooms smeared with marmalade and reeking of grass, with overflowing wardrobes and medicine cabinets filled with cosmetics, innumerable cups of tea, drawers full of LSD and shoes of all shapes and sizes (preferably silver stilettoes). In short, an ambiance of “acid and old lace”.[8]
In response to the theoretical abstraction of the more or less traditional left parties and groupuscules, and to the political adventurism of libertarian daydreamers, the Gay Liberation Front proposes as an alternative a life that becomes in itself revolutionary, denying the system its foundational cornerstones (work, family, phallocentrism, morality, property), making a mockery of the mask of permissiveness behind which English society hides sexual repression, struggling vigilantly against the threat of bourgeois recuperation, that chameleon monster with a thousand faces, a thousand tentacles and temptations, whose risk is constantly renewed.
Wherever they meet, comrades from the Gay Liberation Front openly kiss one another. An atmosphere of authentic homosexual solidarity prevails among them, in their common search for concrete and ever new practices in which to channel the revolutionary fervour uniting them.
There are many different groups that have arisen within the movement, each of which deals with particular problems. Among them of great importance is the Transvestites & Transexuals Group, a group that unites revolutionary transvestites and transexuals who, through meetings and open debates in which they discuss their personal experiences and the forms of conditioning and oppression to which they are subject, have succeeded in formulating, with the greatest possible freedom from the constraints of moralistic prejudices of a bourgeois stamp, a revolutionary interpretation of the phenomena of transvestitism and transsexualism and of the problems inherent to them. Founded by two American lesbians – one of whom is, however, genetically male: Rachel[9] – the Transvestites and Transexuals Group has had a profound influence upon the entire community of the Gay Liberation Front, disseminating the politics and flavour of transvestitism among people who used to brand it a counterrevolutionary tendency, probably influenced by the myopia of gauchiste puritanism.[10]
Today, the comrades of the English Gay Liberation Front cross-dress not in an attempt to imitate the female stereotype[11] proposed by Capital, but to protest against the polarity of sexes[12] (generally one can find united in a single person hairy shins, spiky moustaches, false eyelashes and bouclé maxi-skirts) and to indulge themselves in the fantastic game of destroying roles.
[1] Economistic means a struggle that does not aim for the total overthrow of the system through the conquest of political power.
[2] Phallocratism (analogous to the terms phallocracy and phallocentrism): the tendency to make the male member the centre of every value, which then results in the overestimation of the active position of the male in sexual intercourse.
[3] [Translator’s note: The GLF slogan was “COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!”.]
[4] In this case “to be in antithesis” means to be in disagreement, in open conflict, in contraposition. In general, however, two elements are said to be in antithesis which, although opposed to one another, are mutually determinate. For example: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are two classes that are antithetical, hostile, opposed, the second subservient to the first. At the same time, the bourgeois class owes its own existence to the exploitation of the proletariat, and is thus dependent upon it, while the proletariat constitutes itself as such only because the bourgeoisie exploits it (and thus is likewise dependent upon it).
[5] Social meetings are meetups organised for Gay Libbers to come together in places outside of the ghetto to discuss this and that, including things unrelated to politics.
[6] Transexuals are people who change sex, want to change sex, or even without the desire to change sex, identify with the opposite sex.
[7] Jumble sales are events where used stuff is sold at a low price, often done in England in the name of charity, and organised now and again by Gay Lib. to self-finance their activities.
[8] LSD is really lysergic acid and Gay Lib. comrades make abundant use of it.
[9] Rachel is a transexual: in fact, despite being endowed with both primary and secondary male sexual characteristics, he/she feels female, and desires to behave and dress as such. Nevertheless he (she) is attracted to women (and is even married to one) and has only rarely had sexual relations with men, who he/she judges unattractive because generally phallocratic and butch. For this reason he/she self-defines as a lesbian. This is also how his/her comrades in Women’s Lib. regard him/her: Rachel is one of the very few people of male sex who is permitted to take part in feminist meetings.
[10] Gauchiste is a French word meaning a militant of the extreme left. Hence “gauchiste puritanism” means the puritanism prevalent among militants of the extreme left.
[11] Stereotype refers to the conventional image that one has of something or someone, fixed in an immutable form.
[12] Polarity of sexes means that the sexes are understood as two opposed things, and each absolutely different from the other (the opposite pole), the one the negation of the other.
night offices 