Editorial Comment on QC Call, April 2011

Editorial on the October 2010 “QC Call”
by Daniel Frontino Elash and Michael Z. Ladson

It has now been six months since our original call to build Queer Communist consciousness, perhaps leading to QC formations, and the results have been encouraging. We are two issues into a new publication exploring vast fields of issues, we’ve generated relatively major support, and we’ve started establishing distribution channels that will lead to a wider distribution than just the people we already know.

At the same time, there have been interesting (if predictable) wrinkles in the scheme. To begin with, elements of leadership in the American Marxist-Leninist movement remain nervous about, and even resistant to, the effort-- but that is part of the point of mounting this particular challenge. At the same time, good comrades (both independent and of other parties) have consistently expressed concerns that the framing of the original Call was perhaps too exclusive to really allow them room to participate. We addressed this in the first issue of the QC newsletter, but we’d like to reiterate that this Call is for all Marxist-Leninist (and supportive) comrades of goodwill to come together in support of forming a real Marxist approach to LGBT issues. We do not see this work as defying organizational boundaries. Rather, we think that LGBT folks naturally tend to organically connect social formations that are in fact connected, but in practice seem quite divided. We are sinews between muscles. This is part of the glory of our peoples, and an important contribution wherever we make it. And here, we would like to make it among the socialist left in America. All comrades of goodwill are welcome in this work.

Furthermore, we don’t just see this as a pragmatic approach to current class-organizational problems under the conditions capital would impose on us in 2011, though of course that’s really important. Also, we see this work as healing a historical rift in the history of both the American Communist and the American LGBT movements. As we said in the original Call, this contradiction is intolerable in practice in our lives, and by now, it’s intolerable organizationally. Queer folk have always built the Communist movement, worldwide, and likewise, queer Communists have have always contributed to building American Marxism-Leninism. And yet the two movements stand apart. There are historical reasons for this on both ‘sides,’ and plenty of evidence that the problem widely persists, despite all we’ve collectively learned in the past 50-some years.

This contradiction is long overdue for synthesis, whether on the part of comrades well past it or on the part of those yet to face it. This is our great work. Please join us in it.

Philadelphia PA, April 2011