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Followers
Internal education on gay liberation for you
Workers World Party’s youth group, Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF), formed an internal Gay Caucus in 1971—which soon after became the Lesbian and Gay Caucus. Bob McCubbin, who played a key role in its political and organizational formation and development, recalls what led up to and followed the establishment of the caucus.
McCubbin writes that he had been doing gay liberation work and Workers World Party (WWP) organizing on the West Coast. He had told leading members of the Buffalo branch he was gay when he moved to San Francisco, where there was no branch, six months after the Stonewall Rebellion.
And he remembered that one of the founders of the party, Vince Copeland, “had actually used the presence in New York of a large gay community as one of his incentives to get me to move to New York City” to work in the party center.
However, not until 1971 did McCubbin ever take the floor at a party meeting to speak from the political perspective of a gay man. “In the late summer of 1971, I left San Francisco for New York City and a few weeks later, at a party meeting, I took the floor to defend the party during a minor factional struggle. One of the charges being leveled was that the party had no position on the gay liberation movement.”