The Very Quintessence of Persecution

Queer Anti-fascism in 1970s Western Europe

Rosa Hamilton

Queer 1
activists have played a vital role in the renewed anti-fascist movements
which have organized since the mid-2010s in response to the sweeping gains
made globally by fascist movements. Inspired by these activists and new anti-fascist
scholarship, this article asks: What is the history of queer activists’ engagement in
postwar anti-fascism, and to what extent has there been a uniquely queer anti-
fascism different from other mass anti-fascist movements?2 To answer these ques-
tions, this article examines a transnational network of activists operating throughout
the 1970s in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Much like the present
moment, fascist activity in Europe increased substantially.3 In addition to a right-
ward backlash in European politics, several fascist parties either emerged or
expanded, including the National Front in Britain, the National Democratic Party
of Germany, the Italian Social Movement, and the Front National in France. Mean-
while, fascist Spain entered a late stage of intensified repression of the underground
queer community. All of these fascist movements targeted queer people as per-
ceived threats to the family, nation, and race.
Drawing on oral histories, activists’ private collections, and against-the-grain
archival research, this article argues that a uniquely queer anti-fascism emerged in
the early 1970s led by transgender and gender-nonconforming people and cisgen-
der lesbians to counter the rise of postwar fascism in western Europe.4 Queer anti-
fascists recognized the specific danger of fascism while connecting it to their

Radical History Review

Issue 138 (October 2020) DOI 10.1215/01636545-8359259
© 2020 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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experience in marginalized communities. Ostracized by cisgender-heterosexual

(cis-het) society and opposed to assimilationist gay rights politics, these activists
devised a robust anti-fascism rooted in revolutionary queerness and an analysis of
everyday fascism as inherent to capitalist society and connected to existing oppres-
sive structures of heteropatriarchy and racism. For these activists, queerness was
necessarily anti-fascist, revolutionary, and intersectional.5
This article is the first transnational historical study of queer anti-fascism and
the first to argue that queer anti-fascism offered a unique anti-fascist theory and
praxis.6 This article hopes to intervene in historiographies of anti-fascism and of gen-
der and sexuality: historians in general have overlooked queer anti-fascism.7 This
historiographic gap reflects and partly results from cis-het anti-fascists’ historical
marginalization of queer anti-fascist voices and their consequent silencing in sour-
ces and accounts. Many cis-het anti-fascists saw queer liberation as secondary to the
real goal of class revolution. As queer activist and historian Jeffrey Weeks wrote in
1977, the cis-het Left regarded queerness as a “bourgeois deviation and decadence,”
an apolitical pursuit of superstructural change for the privileged.8 Others went fur-
ther, drawing on discourses constructing fascism itself as queer. Citing Gregory
Wood’s thesis of the “myth of fascistic homosexuality,” Christopher Vials argues
that “as early as the 1930s gays and lesbians faced a persistent notion, manifested
across the political spectrum in Europe and North America, that Nazism was some-
how innately homosexual.”9 Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was the first to give
this discourse intellectual credibility, writing that homosexuals’ supposed incomplete
psychosexual development made them more likely to be fascist.10 Reich’s work influ-
enced a generation of medical experts, while historians simultaneously popularized
narratives of fascist homosexuality, as in William Shirer’s massively popular The Rise
and Fall of the Third Reich.11 Fascism-as-queer discourses also found fertile ground
amidst postwar economic rebuilding and expansion projects heavily reliant on heter-
opatriarchal re-entrenchment and conservative sexual politics.12
Whether drawing on class-first leftism or fascism-as-queer discourses, cis-het
anti-fascists marginalized queer anti-fascists who found it difficult to organize as a
result. Nonetheless, queer activists responded with a unique theory and praxis of
revolutionary anti-fascist politics that insistently argued that queerness was neces-
sarily anti-fascist. Queer anti-fascists recognized the revolutionary potential of
queer identity and centered their lived experience of oppression in their activism.
This led them to adopt a structural interpretation of fascism, which anti-fascists had
to confront with both direct action against explicit fascists and everyday anti-fascism
against white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism: anti-fascism as social
revolution. While mass cis-het anti-fascist movements developed in the mid to late
1970s, queer anti-fascists organized in the early 1970s and worked across borders,
recognizing the transnational nature of oppressive structures. Drawing from shared
influences in Black Power and women’s liberation movements and Marxism, queer

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anti-fascists across Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain adopted an intersec-
tional theory and praxis centering queerphobia as constitutive of fascist ideology and
conceptions of self, race, and nation. For a time in the 1970s, queers drew revolu-
tionary potential from their social location and pointed to what a truly radical and
inclusive anti-fascism should look like.

“Gay, Gay Power to the Gay, Gay People!”: Transatlantic Origins of Gay Liberation
European queer anti-fascism grew out of the radical gay liberation movements
founded by trans and queer people of color in the United States beginning with
the Stonewall uprising in June 1969.13 Before founding the first European gay lib-
eration movement in October 1970, the founders of the London Gay Liberation
Front (GLF), queer socialists Aubrey Walter and Bob Mellors, met in New York
City, protesting outside the Women’s House of Detention with the New York City
GLF against the imprisonment of Black Panther Party members Angela Davis and
Joan Bird. Both Walter and Mellors were living in the United States at the time and
were involved in the Black Power and women’s liberation movements.14
The Black Panther Party in particular provided a model which radical queers
took up. In September 1970, Walter and Mellors traveled with NYC GLF founders
Sylvia Rivera and Martha Shelley to the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Con-
vention organized by the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.15 Only a few weeks before
the conference, Huey Newton released “A Letter from Huey to the Revolutionary
Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Move-
ments,” in which he said, “we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fash-
ion. . . . Homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society.
They might be the most oppressed people in the society.”16 For radical queers, New-
ton’s letter was inspirational. The convention itself further emphasized coalition
building between different oppressed groups, providing a model for queer anti-
fascists.17 Inspired by the Panthers’ intersectional militancy and the examples set
by Shelley, Rivera, and Marsha P. Johnson, Walter and Mellors returned to London
three weeks later to found the London Gay Liberation Front, the first European
GLF.
Drawing on their combined influences from Black Power and women’s lib-
eration movements and Marxism, the London Gay Liberation Front announced
itself in its founding documents as “part of the wider movement aiming to abolish
all forms of oppression” under capitalism: “We believe no one can be free until
everyone is free. We support the struggles of all oppressed peoples.”18 In another
widely disseminated pamphlet titled “The Principles of the Gay Liberation Front,”
the GLF emphasized the need for organizational independence while framing its
activism as a militant socialist struggle in coalitional alliance with feminists, antirac-
ists, and anti-colonial revolutionaries around the world.19 As Walter explained: “The
spirit to fight back came from the Vietnam struggle and the cultural revolution in

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 63

China, the idea that it was right to make a revolution. Other people’s struggles, black
people, women, had shown the intelligentsia that you should fight from where you
were oppressed yourself.”20
The London GLF put its intersectional theory into practice working closely
with British Black Power activists.21 One GLF member, John Chesterman, joined
the British Black Panther Party soon after its founding, before leaving to found Lon-
don’s White Panther Party, a Panther offshoot for white allies.22 The GLF organized
with Black activists against police brutality, especially in Notting Hill, where the
police systematically harassed communities of color. One common police tactic
involved repeatedly raiding Black businesses, homes, and events under the pretext
of looking for drugs in order to provoke a reaction leading to arrests. A well-known
instance of this occurred with the Mangrove Nine, a group of Notting Hill Black
activists whom police arrested in July 1970 after repeatedly raiding their meetings.23
Their arrest set off waves of protest in which Chesterman and other GLF members
took an active part. A year later, in 1971, GLF even moved to Notting Hill, expand-
ing these efforts into a full campaign and continuing to support the Black liberation
movement in London. And while even the radical sections of GLF remained largely
white, most members with experience in contemporary social movements, such as
Carla Toney, noted that GLF’s membership was relatively more racially and class
diverse, especially in comparison to the women’s movement.24

Developing Queer Anti-fascism: Reclaiming History and Defending Community

Trans and cis lesbian feminists were the first in the movement to point toward how
the fascism inherent to capitalist society directly targeted queer people. Just a few
months after GLF’s founding, British sociologist and lesbian feminist Mary Mc-
Intosh attempted to put the following motion up for a vote at a GLF meeting: “Every
historic example shows that repression of the working-class, racism and attacks on
gay people go together. They are all components of authoritarian capitalism or fas-
cism (e.g. Nazi Germany, Spain, Brazil, Greece, etc.).”25 However, the cisgender gay
men voted the motion down. This reflected a division in the GLF between a radical
wing—generally made up of working-class queers, trans and gender-nonconforming
people, and cis lesbians—and a reformist wing of cisgender gay men and middle-
class activists. Jeffrey Weeks later recalled that a “divide was there right from the
beginning, between extreme libertarianism and a sort of liberationism which
stressed solidarity and community and involvement with others.”26 This division
hampered the movement and was partly responsible for London GLF’s breakup in
1973–74. While societal oppression led queers to a deeper critique of social struc-
tures, the LGBT+ community was not monolithic, and some preferred reform or
free love, especially if their race, class, or gender privileged them in other ways.
When able to work independently within the movement, queer anti-fascists
developed their ideas further. Fed up with men asserting control within the

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movement, GLF women in January 1972 published a scathing zine entitled Les-
bians Come Together, an intersectional, trans-inclusive, and revolutionary state-
ment of women’s anger at both society at large and GLF men. Calling on queer
women to come out and lead, the opening article decries that “for too long the Sis-
ters, whilst they have rejected heterosexual men and their values still feel it is safe to
lean on the gay brothers, instead of realising that WE have much to teach THEM.”27
Their conception of political womanhood was inclusive and intersectional: trans
women contributed significantly, including a major article challenging transphobia
in the women’s and gay movements, and antiracists promoted ongoing campaigns
such as solidarity protests during Angela Davis’s trial.28
Lesbians Come Together also includes one of the first discussions of the rela-
tionship of fascism and queerness from a European gay liberation group. The zine’s
first article, entitled “Fascism Is Alive and Well,” reclaims the history of the perse-
cution of queer people in the Nazi concentration camps. In the postwar period,
there had been no remembrances or reparations to the queer victims of the Nazis.
The authors describe this as a “conspiracy of silence,” a societal desire to inflict fur-
ther violence through historical erasure.29 Recovering this buried history was in
itself an act of resistance against fascist attempts to silence and murder queer voices
and people. This was not a full-fledged theory of fascism, but it was an early attempt
to push back on established narratives: historical reclamation and revision as queer
anti-fascist praxis.
Despite resistance within the movement to early queer anti-fascists such as
McIntosh, queer anti-fascism did gain a wider appeal in the LGBT+ community
because it provided a response to increased fascist attacks on queer people in the
early 1970s. At the time, the National Front consistently made calls for a genocidal
extermination of LGBT+ people publicly and in its magazine, Spearhead.30 The
National Front also went beyond rhetoric by attacking queer people and venues,
especially gay pubs, in London and elsewhere. After a series of particularly brutal
attacks in Leeds and London on gay bookstores in 1973, the Manchester Gay Lib-
eration Front mass-distributed a pamphlet entitled “A Few Little Known Facts
about Fascism,” which begins by connecting the history of the Nazi persecution of
queer people with contemporary attacks by the National Front. Calling on GLF’s
structural analysis, the pamphlet directly connects Nazism and these attacks to anti-
abortionists and everyday misogyny.31
The theoretical underpinning of this connection was heteropatriarchy as a
main source of fascism and as an ideological prop for the status quo. For queer anti-
fascists, fascism was a coherent ideology insofar as it directs popular resentments
away from real structural inequalities and toward defined out-groups, whom fascists
label as the malign sources keeping the nation and race decadent and degenerate.
Fascists prey on anxieties over gender, race, and sexuality to manipulate populations,
gain political control, and protect capital. Fascism—by which queer anti-fascists

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 65

meant an organized politics of hate directed at immigrants, women, queer people,

disabled people, Jews, and people of color for the ultimate maintenance of capitalist
hegemony—could not be destroyed without a change in class relations and the root-
ing out of the heteronormativity, sexism, and racism propping up capitalist society.
This analysis was straight out of the GLF handbook; it was a queer analysis of fas-
cism. As the pamphlet concludes, queer people’s social location made them
uniquely suited to understand and thereby challenge fascism and these wider struc-
tures. It states that “the Women’s and Gay Movements exist to challenge all these
male values: Fascism, in its rise, must strengthen them. That’s why we are here
today.” These activists were envisioning a new queer subject whose experience of
persecution provided the revolutionary potential to challenge fascism and over-
throw heteropatriarchal capitalism.
As a result of their revolutionary and anti-fascist conception of queerness,
many queer anti-fascists insisted on organizational independence from cis-het anti-
fascists. One such group was the Manchester Gay Libertarians (MGL), an anarchist
offshoot of the Manchester Gay Liberation Front. MGL’s pamphlet literature pro-
vides a succinct example of how queer anti-fascists differentiated themselves from
cis-het anti-fascists. In 1974, the MGL distributed one such pamphlet on the anti-
fascist tactics of the two largest cis-het anti-fascist organizations in Britain at the
time: the Socialist Workers Party and the International Marxist Group.32 MGL’s
main criticism was that cis-het anti-fascists focused solely on confronting fascists
in the streets while ignoring structural violence. Cis-het anti-fascists’ limited praxis
resulted from a class-first politics blind to structural oppression under capitalism
beyond class and dismissive of queer liberation as a necessary goal for combating
fascism and capitalism. Instead, the MGL called for both direct action and the cre-
ation of local, nonhierarchical communes that could organize against everyday fas-
cism in their communities and bring about a broader social revolution. A broad,
interconnected coalition of decentralized, democratic, and independent liberation
movements was necessary to dismantle the structures that gave rise to fascism.

Queer Anti-fascism Moves to the Continent

Queer anti-fascism was not developed by British queers alone: it was a transnational
phenomenon. London GLF provided a home for radical queers who founded their
own organizations across Europe and continued a commitment to anti-fascist theory
and praxis. This was noted by GLF member and anti-fascist Peter Tatchell, who later
said that “London GLF was a training ground for many people who went on to start
gay movements in other countries. Mario Mieli from Italy, lots of Latin Americans,
and the people who set up FHAR [Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire] in
France.”33 Jonathan Marcus and Mark Bray have shown how postwar mass anti-
fascism emerged in early 1980s France in reaction to the growth of fascist skinhead
culture and the solidification of the far right under the Front Nationa l. 34

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Interestingly, however, FHAR was anti-fascist in its theory and praxis from its incep-
tion in February 1971. In its founding publication, Rapport contre la normalité
(Report against Normality), FHAR announced its vision for a radical politics rooted
in queerness against structural oppression and for the liberation of all people: “We
reclaim our status as a social scourge for the complete destruction of all imperialism.
Down with the money society of hetero-cops! Down with the reduced sexuality of
the procreative family! . . . [We are] for self-defense groups who will oppose by
force the sexist racism of hetero-cops. For a homosexual front that assaults and
destroys ‘fascist sexual normality.’”35 This wide-ranging critique tied fascism to the
structural repression of gender and sexual minorities. As a “social scourge,” queers
occupied a unique position to challenge capitalism and the “hetero-cops,” an evoc-
ative term for all who supported the existing system of racial, heteropatriarchal
capitalism.
In its two main newspapers, Fléau social and Antinorm, FHAR promoted its
queer anti-fascist analysis of fascism as structural and not limited to parties alone.
Fascism was not just a historical movement; it also encapsulated a set of authoritar-
ian social practices rooted in heteropatriarchy. In 1973, the editors of Fléau social
developed this critique into its conception of le fascisme kotidien (everyday fascism),
which broadened the analytical focus of fascism to include not just historical move-
ments but also anti-abortion campaigning, sexual repression, and ableist mental
health norms.36 In the same year, Antinorm developed these ideas further while
centering discussions of gender. As both a historical movement and political phe-
nomenon, fascism relied on restrictive gender roles, female submission, and the val-
orization of cis-het male dominance and superiority.37 On the level of subjectivities,
fascism recognized men as subjects with agency while reducing women to passive
objects. Their agency denied to them, women under fascism could exist only if
they submitted to men, otherwise they could be discarded. Crucially though, this
differed from the existing liberal capitalist system only in fascists’ greater use of vio-
lent coercion in the subjugation of women and queers. Drawing the connections
between fascism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, Fléau social and Antinorm
encouraged queers to recognize fascism as a living system tied to their experience
of oppression.

FUORI! and Gay Communism in Italy

Tatchell’s reference to Mario Mieli, a queer, gender-nonconforming Marxist and
early attendee of London GLF meetings, reflected Mieli’s enormous influence on
Italian queer activism.38 Inspired by GLF, Mieli returned to Milan in 1972 to found
Italy’s first queer activist group, the Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario
(styled as FUORI!, Italian for “come out!”), but he remained in touch with the Lon-
don GLF and FHAR for the rest of the decade. Mieli theorized that capitalism was
based on heteropatriarchy; queers challenged heteropatriarchy with their very exis-
tence and were therefore the revolutionary class most capable of overthrowing

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 67

capitalism and instituting communism. As his major work, Towards a Gay Commu-
nism, states, “Today, the real revolutionary movement includes, above all, the move-
ment of women and homosexuals who struggle against the system and against the
heterosexual phallocentrism that sustains it.”39 The cis-het Left could never be rev-
olutionary because its class-first analysis overlooked the heteropatriarchal struc-
tures upholding capitalism.
Like other queer anti-fascists, Mieli connected these critiques of capitalism
and heteropatriarchy to fascism. He argued that fascism’s violent antipathy toward
queer people was an extension of queerphobia under capitalism, writing that “the
extermination of homosexuals under the Third Reich offers the clearest picture, the
very quintessence, of the infernal quotidian persecution inflicted on gays by capital-
ist society.”40 Capitalism requires queerphobia because it relies on cis-het families to
reproduce workers; whereas a communist society would socialize childcare in the
community, capitalism requires families to do this. This also explains capitalism’s
reliance on heteropatriarchy: men require and expect women to care for them,
the children, and the home. Communism challenges these structures by socializing
production and resources, while fascism reinforces them. For Mieli, the crucial dif-
ference between liberal capitalism and fascism is degree of enforcement: fascism as
a “quintessence of persecution” that violently enforces social norms to an even
greater extent through repressive and ideological state apparatuses.
As editor of FUORI!’s eponymous newspaper, Mieli had a platform to pro-
mote the importance of anti-fascist activism to the community. Under his editorship,
FUORI!’s spring 1974 edition featured a special issue on the history of the Nazi per-
secution of queer people. As in Lesbians Come Together, the article showed the rad-
ical possibilities of reclaiming silenced history: to remember the dead, and identify
and dismantle the systems that supported their murder. To that end, the article
challenges how cis-het anti-fascists disingenuously used Nazi SA leader Ernst
Röhm’s sexuality against queer anti-fascists: if Röhm could be gay, then the Nazis
must not have been anti-queer. As the article makes clear, Nazism violently sup-
pressed queer life, and Nazis never accepted or even admitted to knowing about
Röhm’s homosexuality.41 The article goes further, questioning whether Goebbels’s
propaganda machine fabricated Röhm’s homosexuality in the wake of the Night of
the Long Knives. Once again, historical revision was an essential aspect of queer
anti-fascist praxis. Challenging well-established fascism-as-queer discourses, queers
sought to reclaim their history of persecution as part of a wider project of promoting
the necessarily anti-fascist nature of queerness itself.

Reckoning with the Past: West German Queer Anti-fascists

and the Legacies of Nazism
Ronald Van Cleef and other historians generally argue that West German gay liber-
ation had separate origins from American or European organizations.42 To an
extent, West German gay liberation groups regarded themselves as distinct because

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of the legacies of National Socialism and the Cold War geographic isolation of West
Berlin, the most active area in the country for queer organizing. Yet their major
influences—Marxism, women’s liberation, and Black Power—were the same as
seen in the moment historians cite as the origin point of German gay liberation:
the airing of Rosa von Praunheim’s 1971 television movie, Nicht der Homosexuelle
ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is
Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives).43
Produced in the wake of the decriminalization of same-sex intercourse in
1969, the film shocked West Germany. Heavily influenced by Marxism, women’s
liberation, and Black Power, it criticized society’s sexual repression and the alleged
apolitical hedonism of the LGBT+ community. The film is a call to arms for queer
people to come out of the closet, as seen in its final lines: “Be proud of your homo-
sexuality. Come out of the [public] toilets, clear out into the streets. Freedom for
gays!”44 Rather than hide away, queers should embrace their revolutionary potential
openly. As a way forward, the characters Paul and Achim promote supporting the
struggles of socialists and other oppressed groups. One place of unity with the cis-
het Left would be the union, as they tell their comrades to “be in solidarity with your
colleagues in conflicts with the company and you will also be able to count on their
help.”45 Despite historians’ attempts to separate German gay liberation from trans-
national influences, however, the characters call on queers to “fight against the
oppression of minorities along with . . . the Black Panthers and the women’s move-
ment.”46 This points to early queer organizing as fundamentally transnational: none
of the European gay liberation movements emerged independently.
Inspired by these calls to action, gay liberation groups began forming imme-
diately after the film’s release. In Frankfurt, RotZSchwul set about translating Huey
Newton’s letter to the gay and women’s movements, once again showing the trans-
national influence of the Black Panthers on European queers.47 In West Berlin,
Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin (HAW), the first and subsequently largest queer
liberation movement in Germany, formed. In its founding document published in
November 1971, HAW echoed sentiments seen in Britain, Italy, and elsewhere:
queers shared a common experience of oppression under capitalism, which made
them uniquely capable of overthrowing the existing order.48
From the beginning of German gay liberation, radical queers centered anti-
fascist struggle due to the legal legacies of National Socialism in West Germany and
the revolutionary impulses from trans and cis feminists in the movement. The Nazi
regime had used a law known as Paragraph 175 to arrest one hundred thousand
queer people and send fifteen thousand to the concentration camps.49 After the
war, this law remained unchanged, and the queer victims of the Nazi regime
received no memorialization or reparation. Instead, the Allied Forces kept many
in the camps, and the new West German state threatened to rearrest released pris-
oners if suspected of further homosexual activity.50 Repealing Paragraph 175 and

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 69

providing reparations to queer victims were perhaps the most demanded issues in
the queer movement. This was vital for the self-conception of the movement as not
only a vehicle for queer liberation but also anti-fascism: the Federal Republic was a
legal continuation of the Third Reich and therefore fascist itself. This unique legal
circumstance made anti-fascism especially relevant for German queers, yet their
anti-fascist theory shared much with the rest of the continent: fascism was more
than a historical phenomenon, and anti-fascists had to target the institutions of lib-
eral capitalism, including the state.
Trans and cis lesbian feminists were once again key to centering anti-fascism
within the movement and connecting the threads of anti-capitalism, anti-fascism,
and queer liberation. Already by 1973, lesbians and trans people had formed their
own HAW working groups to challenge the moderating policies of privileged cis gay
men in the majority. At a major HAW plenum on November 4, 1973, the HAW Fem-
inist Group presented a series of radical proposals centering revolutionary struc-
tural change and the fight against heteropatriarchy. Like the rest of the movement,
the Feminist Group called for the abolition of Paragraph 175 and the payment of
“reparations for the gay prisoners of the camps.”51 They went further, though, by
being the first to call for the pink triangle, the symbol worn by LGBT+ prisoners
in the concentration camps, as a symbol for the queer movement. The Feminist
Group spoke at length about the history and symbolism of the pink triangle, arguing
that it was a recognition of the continuation of fascism in the Federal Republic
through the oppression of queer people: “[The pink triangle] conveys that there is
only a quantitative and not a qualitative difference between the gay oppression in
fascism and our own oppression in liberal [West Germany and West Berlin].” More-
over, in their design, the Feminist Group placed the pink triangle on a red back-
ground, emphasizing that the queer fight against fascism was also a socialist struggle
against capitalism.
Drawing on the symbolism of the pink triangle, the Feminist Group pre-
sented a vision of collective struggle for all oppressed peoples. They contrasted
this especially with cisgender white male moderates hoping to achieve rights over
liberation, writing that “demanding solidarity with one another and with other
oppressed peoples (beyond empty rhetoric) is one of the central tasks of the
HAW.”52 They then emphasized the need for queers, Jews, women, and Black peo-
ple to work together. The pink triangle visually embodied the necessarily anti-fascist
and intersectional nature of queerness. Once again, trans and cis feminists led the
way in constructing and promoting this queer anti-fascism.

Queer Anti-fascist Praxis (I): A Transnational Overview

The following three sections provide an overview of how queer anti-fascists con-
nected theory with various forms of anti-fascist praxis, including monitoring fascists,
organizing counterdemonstrations, and working in local communities. In West

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 70 Radical History Review

Germany, HAW organized numerous protests against the rising neo-Nazi move-
ment, but they deliberately connected these protests to systemic injustices and
larger critiques of capitalism and the state. For example, on April 26, 1974, HAW
organized a counterdemonstration against a neo-Nazi rally and prayer service hon-
oring Rudolf Hess. Hess was serving a life sentence in prison for his genocidal
crimes, and support for him was a key unifying practice on the German far right.
A poster from the HAW counterprotest rightly describes Hess as a mass murderer
responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews, queer people, and other minorities.53
It then emphasizes the utter immorality of a prayer service when “not a single one of
the few homosexual survivors ever received reparation for their unhappy suffering.”
To avenge this suffering and make good on the past, the poster exhorts queers “to
fight the Nazis of today!” HAW recognized the significance of direct action but
emphasized the need to connect specific protests to larger struggles. The reference
to reparations tied neo-Nazism, which West Germany formally opposed, to the Fed-
eral Republic itself and therefore the institutions of liberal capitalism.
HAW extended this critique, arguing that fascism never ended for queer peo-
ple, as indicated by the title of the poster: “For queer people, the Third Reich is still
not over!” West Germany’s “apparent liberalization” had papered over the failures of
denazification, the continuity of Nazi figures in the West German state and econ-
omy, and the underground organizing of neo-Nazi movements. The liberal state
could not confront racism and heteropatriarchy because these were at the founda-
tions of capitalist society. Even despite the state’s best efforts, such as attempts to
ban Holocaust denial, West Germany would never be able to attack the roots of fas-
cist support. Tying all this back to queerphobia, the poster’s conclusion describes
the fight against fascism as a fight against not just reaction but also “prejudice and
discrimination” against queer people. It then ends with calls to fight fascism by abol-
ishing Paragraph 175, making reparation to queer victims of the concentration
camps, and protecting free labor organizing in the workplace against capitalist
exploitation. Anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and queer liberation could not be
separated.
While the West German context shows how queer anti-fascists connected
protesting fascist parties with social justice, the work of French queers demonstrates
that queer anti-fascists were monitoring fascist groups across Europe years before
antifas took these activities up in the late 1970s.54 While some historians have
emphasized FHAR’s confrontational style and rhetoric over substantive change,
anti-fascist monitoring points to a practical result of FHAR’s revolutionary ener-
gies.55 In 1972, for instance, Fléau social published a special report on European
Action, a fascist periodical and transnational coordinating network of the largest
European fascist parties supporting pan-European white nationalism and a geno-
cide of Jews, LGBT+ people, and people of color.56 Through financial support
and media training, European Action worked to prepare fascist movements to take

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 71

over European governments. The Fléau social special report shined a light on these
clandestine operations, but despite its importance, the report’s impact outside the
LGBT+ community is unclear and was likely limited. As Julian Jackson has written,
the French Left rejected working with radical queers out of “a belief that homosex-
uality was a bourgeois vice: revolutionary activists must subordinate their personal
lives to the future of the revolution.”57 Facing this consistent marginalization across
the continent, queer anti-fascists struggled to convert revolutionary aims, analyses,
and actions into mass campaigns.

Queer Anti-fascist Praxis (II): Transnational Support

and the Queer Underground in Spain
From 1971 to 1974, a transnational network involving FUORI!, FHAR, London
GLF, and Revolt (Sweden) cooperated to support underground queer movements
in fascist Spain. Until Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, Spain remained a fascist
state with the financial and diplomatic backing of the United States and other liberal
democracies. Franco’s Spain valorized patriarchal families, childbirth, and confor-
mity to rigid gender roles and forced the LGBT+ community to remain under-
ground. In 1970, Franco intensified the persecution of queer people with the Law
on Danger and Social Rehabilitation, which explicitly labeled homosexuality and sex
work “social hazards.” Under Mieli’s leadership, FUORI! monitored the situation
and produced a special report in 1972 on the incarceration and torture of Spanish
queers in asylums.58 The report emphasized that the persistence of fascist rule in
Europe was possible only with the support of capitalist governments and the Cath-
olic Church, underlining the compatibility and close relationship between fascism
and mainstream liberal and conservative institutions.
In a fascist state that criminalized and targeted queerness, existence itself
was an act of anti-fascist resistance. In response to the 1970 law, Spain’s first queer
organizations emerged underground. In 1971, Armand de Fluvia founded the Movi-
miento Español de Liberación Homosexual (MELH), which modeled itself on the
London GLF. MELH similarly adopted a radical queer Marxist politics privileging
the need for intersectionality and social revolution for all.59 Based in Barcelona,
MELH operated until 1974 with transnational support from FUORI!, FHAR, Lon-
don GLF, Revolt (Sweden), and the French organization Arcadie. For instance,
between January 1972 and November 1973, Arcadie and Revolt helped MELH
fund and produce a clandestine newsletter written by mostly Catalan activists for
publication throughout Spain.60 By 1974, the police had identified these activities
and shut down the newsletter and MELH. However, these queer activists would be
key in Spain’s post-1975 transition to democracy.61 MELH members regrouped
after Franco’s death in 1975 in the Front d’Alliberament Gai de Catalunya
(FAGC), which remains active in Catalonia today. Along with organizations such as
the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de Castilla in Madrid, FAGC worked for the

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 72 Radical History Review

decriminalization of homosexuality in 1978.62 Fascism in Spain had been based on

heteropatriarchy and capitalism; by challenging these structures with their very
existence, members of MELH and other Spanish activists embodied the connection
of queerness and anti-fascism.

Queer Anti-fascist Praxis (III): Punk, Protest, and Coalition Building in Britain
In Britain, queer anti-fascists were heavily involved in protesting against the National
Front. One of their earliest engagements occurred in June 1974, when queers in and
outside the GLF took part in the Red Lion Square demonstrations. Although Nigel
Copsey’s authoritative history points to Red Lion Square as one of the starting points
of British anti-fascism’s 1970s revival, his account leaves out queer anti-fascists.63 An
anti-fascist activist who had been present later estimated that two-thirds of the fifteen
hundred anti-fascists who marched against the two hundred fascists were women,
and he went on to emphasize the militancy of the “very large women’s and gay con-
tingent” that directly confronted the National Front’s meeting rather than join a
peaceful counterdemonstration nearby.64 Yet while they successfully disrupted the
fascist march, the press reaction sided with the fascists and depicted the anti-fascists
as violent. In response, anti-fascist campaigns emerged across the country emphasiz-
ing that “The National Front is a Nazi Front.”65
Queer anti-fascist activity likewise surged. It was at this time that Lucy
Toothpaste, a lesbian feminist journalist and punk musician, committed herself to
the antifascist cause. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, she wrote for numer-
ous leftist publications including the feminist magazine Spare Rib, her self-
published queer punk zine Jolt, and the anti-fascist periodical Temporary Hoarding,
calling on queer punks to get involved.66 On April 23, 1977, Toothpaste protested
with newly formed queer organizations, including Women Against Racism and Fas-
cism, the All London Gay Groups Against Sexism, Racism, and Fascism (ALGG),
and London Gay Socialists, against the largest fascist rally in Britain since the inter-
war years.67 Twelve hundred National Front fascists marched through the multicul-
tural, working-class borough of Wood Green in North London looking to intimidate
minorities at a time when the Front’s membership was peaking.68 Toothpaste and
others describe Wood Green as a massive collection of “running battles” as fascists
and anti-fascists fought wherever gaps broke in police lines. These fights turned dan-
gerous quickly, not least because of police violence against anti-fascists. Toothpaste
later reported police siding with the National Front and furiously beating and mock-
ing anti-fascists. Nonetheless, the anti-fascists successfully disrupted and dispersed
the fascist procession, but at a high cost: dozens were seriously injured, and police
arrested over seventy anti-fascists while neglecting to arrest more than a handful of
the fascists, who had come to Wood Green looking for a fight.69
In the aftermath of Wood Green, Toothpaste made further calls for punks
and queers to organize. In her self-published zine Jolt, she promoted the even larger

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 73

August counterprotest at Lewisham, where over one hundred people were injured
and two hundred arrested protesting five hundred National Front marchers.70 Cop-
sey and Renton have written that Lewisham was a breaking point; the National
Front never organized a protest as large again, and mass anti-fascism only grew
over the next two years.71 Two broad national campaigns emerged at this time: the
Anti-Nazi League, one of the largest mass anti-fascist organizations in history, and
Rock Against Racism, a broad coalition of bands founded in 1976, which hosted
two anti-fascist music festivals in 1978, drawing almost one hundred thousand
people.
Historians, however, have neglected the surge in queer anti-fascist activity
after Lewisham. Toothpaste continued her organizing: after Rock Against Racism
staged several bands with misogynistic lyrics, she created Rock Against Sexism
(RAS), a coalition of feminist and queer anti-fascist bands, writing in a 1979 Spare
Rib article that punk music was the ideal vehicle for exposing young people to queer
feminism.72 In RAS’s self-published zine Drastic Measures, Toothpaste clarified
that the organization’s main goals were “to define the right of everyone to determine
their own sexuality, whether they be straight, gay, both, or neither,” and “to fight
sexism in music and to use music to fight sexism at large.”73 For example, RAS cam-
paigned heavily against the Corrie Bill, a parliamentary attempt in 1979 to restrict
abortion access, organizing a major benefit show in October 1979 at the University of
London, and once again highlighting how queer anti-fascists recognized the need to
enact structural change.74 RAS was successful throughout the United Kingdom and
Ireland, featuring bands like Gang of Four, the Mo-dettes, Poison Girls, Soulyard,
and the Au Pairs.
RAS’s success points to the importance of musical subcultures in queer anti-
fascist organizing. Discos, zines, punk shows, installations, street theater, and ska
gigs were all vital as links for a queer activist community and as effective fund-raising
sources, but these were also contested spaces. Rhoda Dakar, a Black feminist activist
and singer for the all-female ska group Bodysnatchers, shared Toothpaste’s belief in
the importance of anti-fascist music and underground subcultures like ska and
punk.75 Dakar’s experience, however, shows how they could also be dangerous for
women and people of color. In a 1980 interview conducted by Toothpaste, Dakar
spoke about the rise of fascist skinhead culture in the early-1980s punk and ska
scenes and the subsequent increase in incidents of hate, intimidation, and violence
at gigs.76 This tension between resistance and recuperation by structures of violence
points to the perpetuation of inequalities even within anti-fascist subcultures, as
well as their possibilities for real change.
While Toothpaste was working with RAS in the late 1970s, two major queer
anti-fascist groups emerged: Gays Against Fascism, a subgroup of the GLF-successor
organization Gay Activists Alliance, and Gays Against the Nazis. The latter orga-
nized several mass-leafleting campaigns, including at the second Rock Against

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 74 Radical History Review

Racism festival, where they handed out ten thousand flyers that appropriated the
anti-fascist slogan “the National Front is a Nazi Front” but changed to “NF=Nazi
Front=No Future for Gays!” The modification connected anti-fascism to the broader
struggle of queers against societal repression of gender and sexual minorities. For
queer anti-fascists, the National Front could not be separated from the general
anti-queer backlash of the late 1970s: the year of the Rock Against Racism festivals
also saw Margaret Thatcher co-opting the National Front’s racist and queerphobic
rhetoric and drawing away its members to the Conservative Party.77
Queer anti-fascists consistently pointed out the connections between main-
stream conservatism and fascism. In 1979, Gays Against Fascism published their
own document: an extended structural analysis of fascism and queer anti-fascist the-
ory and praxis called An Anti-fascist Handbook. Intended for both cis-het and
queer audiences, the handbook distilled the theoretical contributions of queer anti-
fascists into an accessible text while critiquing anti-fascists who separated their activ-
ism from structural violence and the rising tide of anti-abortion, anti-queer, and
anti-immigrant conservative movements in the late 1970s. To this end, its discussion
of fascist groups goes beyond the National Front to include organizations such as the
Freedom Association, an early neoliberal think tank devoted to anti-union propa-
ganda; the Nationwide Festival of Light, a queerphobic organization dedicated to
the “sanctity of marriage”; and the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child,
an anti-abortion group.78 Calling these groups fascist was not just rhetoric: the
handbook was a serious attempt to broaden definitions of fascism and show its rela-
tion to everyday, mainstream forms of oppression.
The pamphlet also continues and develops queer anti-fascism’s intersec-
tional praxis. In a section on effective anti-fascist organizing, the pamphlet argues
for a coalitional approach of “autonomous organisations centred around particular
categories of oppression to enable people to come into an awareness of their own
distinct personal/political needs.”79 Queer anti-fascists recognized the need for coa-
litions of oppressed groups through their own experience and the enduring influ-
ence of Black Power and especially Black feminism.80 While criticizing the margin-
alization of queers by class-first cis-het anti-fascists, the authors highlight the “need
to recognize the validity of every form of oppression.”81 Compared with earlier sour-
ces, An Anti-fascist Handbook shows the continuity in queer anti-fascism and its
unity of theory and praxis: fascism was rooted in structural oppression and could
be defeated only by a coalitional, democratic movement of autonomous organiza-
tions united for a social revolution against white supremacy, capitalism, and
heteropatriarchy.

Decline and Legacy

What happened to this queer anti-fascist network? Most of the organizations I have
described either did not surv ive into the early 1980s or abandoned their

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 75

revolutionary aims. I argue there were two main causes of decline: first, the cis-het
Left’s marginalization of queer anti-fascists, and second, new political realities aris-
ing from neoliberal restructuring, the rightward turn of European governments,
and the devastating effects of the AIDS crisis and the subsequent anti-queer back-
lash. In addition to the traditional denunciations of queer anti-fascism as bourgeois
identity politics, cis-het anti-fascists pushed out queer anti-fascists by making them
convenient scapegoats in internal activist struggles. In Britain, for instance, cis-het
anti-fascists blamed women and queer activists for the collapse of the national coor-
dinating bodies of local anti-fascist groups—the Campaign Against Racism and Fas-
cism and the Anti-Racist, Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee (ARAFCC)—at
the ARAFCC Conference on Racism and Fascism in the summer of 1978. In the
July 1978 issue of Searchlight, Britain’s largest anti-fascist publication, the editor
Maurice Ludmer wrote: “Certainly those responsible (certain women, Gay and
Left groups) must bear a heavy responsibility. They sought continuously to confuse
issues and saw the question of ‘sexism’ as one of the dominant themes of the confer-
ence.”82 Ludmer’s dismissiveness of social justice issues was emblematic of the cis-
het Left’s narrower politics. Some anti-fascists took issue with Searchlight, such as
the Oxford Anti-Fascist Committee, which wrote a reply letter disagreeing firmly
with the scapegoating of queer activists.83 In a response, however, Ludmer doubled
down, arguing that queer organizations did not belong in a national coalition of local
anti-fascist organizations.84
This rejection from the mainstream led to burnout and the demise of many
queer groups due to lack of support and resources. Unable to work with the socialist
Left, activists had to choose between continuing on their own or joining the new
reformist movements that began making substantial headway pursuing a strategy
of gay rights over queer socialism. Mieli had noticed these trends as early as 1973
as he saw an influx of moderate cisgender men enter the movement, attracted to
revolutionar y language but not real social revolution. 85 Against his wishes,
FUORI! federated itself in 1974 to the Italian Radical Party, a center-left coalition
promising to secure rights for the LGBT+ community. Soon after this, Mieli left to
focus on radical queer theater until his death in 1983.86 As Miguel Malagreca has
written, “Whatever remained of the original movement was noteworthy only as a
linguistic remembrance.”87
In Germany, the queer movement split between the majority mainstream,
which embraced reform, and an active underground minority. As Van Cleef has
written, anti-capitalism declined as moderates took up the mainstream in the mid-
1970s.88 Meanwhile, queer anti-fascists continued in smaller numbers while main-
taining their intersectional approach and organizing to protect immigrants and
asylum seekers. By the mid-1980s, queers had embraced the tactics and decentral-
ized structure of the autonomists and the black blocks, or “gay blocks” (Schwule
Blöcke) as they called themselves. Transgressive and intersectional groups—such

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 76 Radical History Review

as Schwule Antifa, which was active by 1985, and feminist Fantifa groups—
continued the tradition of queer anti-fascism into the 1990s, providing models for
present-day intersectional antifa organizing.89 Nonetheless, despite the persistence
of exciting grassroots activism, gone were the days when the largest queer organiza-
tions were openly anti-capitalist and anti-fascist. Instead, gay rights organizations
increasingly sought accommodations with the state and capitalism, reflecting trends
general to the LGBT+ movement at the time.
As the German case shows, the 1980s marked a restructuring rather than an
endpoint. As European governments shifted to the right, the mass anti-fascist move-
ments of the 1970s went into a period of relative decline before the emergence of
new forms of autonomous organizing in the mid-1980s, such as Anti-Fascist Action
(AFA). Yet queer anti-fascists had always looked beyond party politics. Like many
others, Peter Tatchell, a founder of London GLF and a queer anti-fascist who
later marched with AFA, became a radical AIDS activist and continued the tactics
pioneered by gay liberation.90 Increasingly, queer people of color founded their own
organizations, such as London’s Black Lesbian and Gay Centre.91 Queers showed
what an inclusive and radical anti-fascism should look like and how queers could
draw revolutionary, anti-fascist potential from their positionality. Their analysis
and organizing laid a foundation and provides a model for today’s intersectional anti-
fascist movements as well as a warning against marginalization and power imbal-
ances within liberatory movements.

Rosa Hamilton is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Virginia writing her disserta-
tion on queer anti-fascism in twentieth-century Europe. She is a cofounder of the Far Right and
Anti-fascism Group, an interdisciplinary collective in Charlottesville, Virginia, which provides a
public platform for research on fascism and anti-fascism, especially for women scholars in a cis-
men-dominated field. She received her BA in history from the University of California, Davis, and
her MA in history from the University of Virginia.

Notes
1. I use queer for revolutionary, anti-assimilationist gender and sexual minority identities
that are diverse and fluid but also shaped by existent social totalities. I use LGBT+ for
broader gender and sexual minority communities.
2. Charlottesville queer anti-fascists remain active long after the Unite the Right rally; see
Montgomery, “Charlottesville Residents.”
3. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, chap. 6.
4. Transgender, lesbian, and gender-nonconforming are not exclusive terms. The reference
highlights the contributions of overlapping identities marginalized within the LGBT+
movement.
5. Crenshaw, “Intersection.”
6. Vials first used the term for American and German activists who reclaimed the Nazi
persecution of LGBT+ people especially in 1980s AIDS activism (Vials, Haunted by
Hitler, 194–213). Lucy Robinson’s work on gay men in the British Left discusses some

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 Hamilton | The Very Quintessence of Persecution 77

queer anti-fascists (Robinson, Gay Men and the Left, 110–17). This article decenters gay
men and argues for a uniquely queer anti-fascism.
7. Mark Bray’s history of transnational anti-fascism and Emily Hobson’s history of the gay
and lesbian Left have been particularly significant for me; see Bray, Antifa; Hobson,
Lavender and Red.
8. Weeks, Coming Out, 148.
9. Vials, Haunted by Hitler, 206.
10. Reich, “What Is Class Consciousness?,” 297; Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism, 192.
11. Shirer, Rise and Fall, 120, 122.
12. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 61; Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 5–7.
13. Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 203–66.
14. Power, No Bath, 4–5. I use the interviews collected in Power’s oral history of London
GLF extensively.
15. Stein, Loves, 331–40.
16. Newton, “Letter from Huey.”
17. Porter, “Rainbow in Black,” 372.
18. London GLF, “Oppression.”
19. London GLF, “Principles.”
20. Power, No Bath, 16. On GLF’s history, see Walter, Come Together.
21. Angelo, “Black Panthers in London”; Narayan, “British Black Power.”
22. Power, No Bath, 17.
23. Hillel and Iglikowski, “Rights, Resistance, and Racism.”
24. Power, No Bath, 62, 79.
25. Power, No Bath, 38.
26. Power, No Bath, 61.
27. Lesbians Come Together, “Free Our Sisters,” 1.
28. Lesbians Come Together, “Don’t Call Me Mister,” 18–19.
29. Lesbians Come Together, “Fascism Is Alive,” 2.
30. Outcome, “Gays against Fascism,” 20–22.
31. Manchester GLF, “Facts about Fascism.”
32. MGL, “On Opposition to Fascism.”
33. Power, No Bath, 62.
34. Marcus, National Front and French Politics, 131–58; Bray, Antifa, 49.
35. FHAR, Rapport contre la normalité.
36. Fléau social, “Le fascisme kotidien,” 8.
37. Antinorm, “Des lycéens parlent,” 10.
38. Mieli used he/him and she/her pronouns interchangeably. English language sources use
he/him pronouns, so this article does the same.
39. Mieli, Gay Communism, 172.
40. Mieli, Gay Communism, 130.
41. FUORI!, “Le sterminio,” 32.
42. Van Cleef, “A Tale of Two Movements?,” 1.
43. Van Cleef, “A Tale of Two Movements?,” 1; Salmen and Eckert, “Die Neue
Schwulenbewegung.”
44. Praunheim, Nicht der Homosexuelle, 57.
45. Praunheim, Nicht der Homosexuelle, 56.
46. Praunheim, Nicht der Homosexuelle, 56.

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47. Plastargias, RotZSchwul, 187–99.

48. HAW, “Grundsatzerklärung.”
49. Grau, Hidden Holocaust?
50. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Persecution of Homosexuals.”
51. HAW Feministengruppe, “Thesenpapier,” 1.
52. HAW Feministengruppe, “Rosa Winkel,” 13.
53. HAW, “Noch nicht.”
54. On French anti-fascism, see Vergnon, L’anti-fascisme en France.
55. Gunther, Elastic Closet, 46; Sibalis, “Gay Liberation.”
56. Fléau social, “Fascisme européen,” 9.
57. Jackson, “Sex, Politics, and Morality,” 87–88.
58. Airone, “Spagna: Fascismo!,” 8–9.
59. Pérez-Sánchez, “Queer Nation?,” 373.
60. Pérez-Sánchez, “Queer Nation?,” 383–86.
61. Pérez-Sánchez, Queer Transitions, 187; Pérez-Sánchez, “Queer Nation?,” 395.
62. Pérez, “ España cumple 40 años.”
63. Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, 114–20.
64. David Landau, interview by Daniel Jones, August 7, 2015, Searchlight Oral Histories
Collection.
65. Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, chap. 4.
66. Lucy Toothpaste, interview by Rosa Hamilton, August 10, 2018.
67. Gay News, “ALGG,” 10.
68. Renton, “Guarding the Barricades.”
69. Renton, Never Again, 69.
70. Toothpaste, “Important Message,” 6.
71. Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, 123–25; Bray, Antifa, 46–47; Renton, Never Again, 69–
86.
72. Toothpaste, “Rock Against Sexism,” 6.
73. Toothpaste, “Aims,” 4.
74. Toothpaste, “Right to Choose,” 4–5.
75. Rhoda Dakar, interview by Rosa Hamilton, August 19, 2018.
76. Toothpaste, “Bodysnatchers,” 13–14.
77. Pitchford, Conservative Party, 4.
78. Gays Against Fascism, Anti-fascist Handbook, 3–16, 22–23.
79. Gays Against Fascism, Anti-fascist Handbook, 68.
80. For the intersections of 1970s Black and trans feminisms, see Stryker and Bettcher,
“Trans/Feminisms.”
81. Gays Against Fascism, Anti-fascist Handbook, 68.
82. Ludmer, “Editorial,” 2.
83. Oxford Anti-Fascist Committee, “Letters,” 5.
84. Ludmer, “Letters,” 5.
85. Collettivo Redazionale, “Omosessualità e controrivoluzione”; Mieli, “I radical-chic.”
86. Malagreca, Queer Italy, 102–8.
87. Malagreca, Queer Italy, 125.
88. Van Cleef, “A Tale of Two Movements?,” 154.
89. Schwule Antifa, “Kampf.”

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90. Lucas, OutRage!

91. Murphy, “Black Lesbian and Gay Centre.”

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