A working-class intellectual who spoke French, German and Russian, he is the unknown Scottish hero of gay liberation. That man was a 27-year-old journalist from Edinburgh who was working in Moscow. He dismissed the man who made it as an idiot and a degenerate. This how the argument was made to recognise and defend gay people in revolutionary Russia.Īnd yet for Stalin, to whom the argument was addressed, there was no doubt that it was unacceptable. When you can grasp that intolerance doesn’t come from the masses, you can recognise that it is a choice and a form of ideological oppression. This assertion is the crux of the socialist case against homophobia. THE masses are not intolerant of gay people.
