Gays for Empire

Following Queers for Palestine’s call in these pages to critique and learn from queer history, a researcher of queer and radical history examines the long entanglement of LGBTQ+ life and imperialism in the Global North, and argues for a left queerness.

I. Blest Relief

On Valentine’s Day, 1779 – it was a Sunday – Captain James Cook’s final mission ended. As Cook attempted to take King Kalani’opu’ hostage, an indigenous Hawaiian lifted his club. He struck the back of Cook’s head. The “syphilitic, tubercular racist” died instantly. Once a calm, composed imperialist, Cook had grown irascible in his final months. He had branded three Nuu-chah-nulth men with smallshot during a fruitless, frustrating search for the Northwest Passage; he stomped across deck in angry paroxysms, doubled the rate of floggings, and halted brandy rations when sailors protested. And then he died in a chaotic scuffle. Cook, who couldn’t swim, had tried to call boats ashore to rescue him. Lieutenant Williamson misread his frantic waving as an order to retreat.

But the narrative of a majestic British Empire, triumphantly expanding, required a noble tale. Anna Seward, a reclusive sapphic poet from Lichfield, would become its unlikely provider. Nine months after the letter announcing Cook’s messy killing was sent from Kamchatka, news reached London. Seward read it, and began her Elegy on Captain Cook. The poem begins with an imitation of a country-church funeral – the orderly, Anglican burial Cook had not received:

Strike the slow death-bell!–weave the sacred verse, And strew the cypress o’er his honor’d hearse

Seward explained that Cook was driven by a deep sense of “humanity” to civilise the “uncultur’d” Pacific Islanders. His death was honourable. Her words ritualised it. They wove a handsome shroud to cover his bloodied body. The Gentleman’s Magazine said that Seward’s lines gave a bereaved nation “blest relief” as it “fondly listen[ed] with subsiding grief”.

In other words: Elegy on Captain Cook functioned something like how the U.S. Army uses Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy today. The Pentagon deploys EMDR to heal American soldiers’ debilitating PTSD and recuperate them, so they’re ready for the next invasion. Seward’s bestselling dirge also gave shape to chaos; narrative to trauma. It allowed Britain to invent a myth of heroic sacrifice, and seamlessly continue its settler-colonial projects in North America and Oceania.

At 38, Anna Seward finally had her hit. Men in London coffee houses bought Elegy on Captain Cook with money they’d just made selling enslaved humans, and nodded. Seward kept elegising imperial fighters. She soon became the “most prominent and formidable woman writer” in Britain. With her newfound reputation (and newfound income), she established a modest room of her own in the Bishop’s Palace, Lichfield. There she could sew, think, and embellish the queer love poetry she had written years before.

In Sonnet X: to Honora Sneyd, first drafted in 1773, Seward addressed the woman she then loved, imagining the time when Honora would marry, and go to live in hetero-land:

When for the love-warm looks, in which I live,
But cold respect must greet me, that shall give
No tender glance, no kind regretful sighs

Sonnet X’s sorrowful beauty made it a staple of twentieth-century lesbian anthologies, like Lilian Faderman’s pioneering 1981 work Surpassing the Love of Men. It became a Sapphic fragment, devoid of context. But really, Sonnet X was a delicate tambour work with a backing paper of devastation; a rococo building whose foundations were stolen from other lands.

Anna Seward was not the only Gay for Empire in Georgian Britain. Imperial expansion offered personal opportunity to many wealthy Brits with same-sex desires. In the 1980s, Faderman led a wave of ancestor-starved queer historians in the USA in reclaiming those very imperialists as queer icons, without interrogating their politics, or what funded their gay leisure. The historians (often liberal Zionists, like Faderman) claimed Seward’s contemporary William Beckford was a camp, bisexual twink with a penchant for interior design – not the pederastic owner of three thousand slaves. Seward’s friends Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby became a pair of butch eccentrics – not Anglo-Irish settlers who argued against abolishing the Middle Passage. They were, of course, both.

Surpassing the Love of Men established a new lesbian canon; it framed that canon as inspiration, precedent and beacon to modern queers. But our history is also a warning sign. Because Faderman et al. ignored the duality of Seward and friends, queer culture in the Global North often draws on a partial vision of history, to describe queerness as automatically and without further effort an act of political resistance. Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde occasionally pop up on my Instagram Explore page alongside inspirational quotes and Stonewall donation links. Their uglier sides (like blackface; like teenage boys) are hidden. Stonewall’s work with BAE Systems goes unmentioned, too.

In reality, queer identities are polysyndetic. Some are beautiful, but some say no fats no femmes no Asian on Grindr, but some actualise long-forbidden desires, but some work for Shell, but but but but but. As Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller say in Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, the flawed project of mainstream liberal queerness has failed to liberate us all. To understand how, we need to make queer history bad: to investigate bisexual evildoers, gay capitalists, lesbian imperialists – and critique them. If we were to make Seward and Beckford’s imperial wealth as much a part of our queer archives as their desires, we would reveal that colonialism has always benefitted a few white queers in the imperial core, even as it destroys marginalised queer life on the periphery.

II. Zärtlichkeit

That’s true of former colonial powers, and in present-day settler-colonies. In 1891, five years before Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, he received a letter from his one-time companion, Heinrich Kana. In the letter, Kana declined an invitation to Herzl’s wedding. He reminded him of how brightly their own love had burned:

I thank you today, which I have never done till now, out of this silly shamefulness from which I can never free myself, for all the Zärtlichkeit [caresses, affection, tenderness] you have given me.

Herzl’s marriage soon failed; he often dreamt of leaving women behind. Political Zionism – described by Tariq Dani and Ali Jarbawi as settler-colonialism, “fundamentally based on the operative logic of ‘eliminating the native’” – was founded by a gay man.

That’s not to say that the Zionist project is, in some eccentric way, an inherently queer one. After the settling of Palestine, gay identity developed in the shadows. Early propaganda depicted Israeli men as heterosexual, virile, muscular. Arabs were always effeminate, limp-wristed, undeserving of their own land. But come the 1960s, gay men in the Zionist entity began to forge their own imperial-capitalist success stories. A few private gay spaces opened in Tel Aviv. A few discreet, masculine homosexuals from the racial in-group got to flirt and dance on the foundations of a demolished Palestinian home.

Something similar had happened in the British Empire – Herzl’s greatest inspiration, he once wrote to fellow gay man Cecil Rhodes, for his own “something colonial”. With the money they made from imperial expansion and plunder, Anna Seward and William Beckford built private spaces to indulge their desires. She decorated the Bishop’s Palace with pictures of Honora; his vast Jamaican sugar plantations paid for the Gothic folly of Fonthill Abbey. He commissioned a crimson bedchamber, in which to horsewhip teenage boys. And meanwhile, as the Empire enabled the lives of a few wealthy, white queers, it destroyed queerness among the colonised people it governed.

On arriving in Africa, for instance, Britain hacked up indigenous systems of gender and sexuality. Prior to colonisation, many cultures on the continent had not known gender as binary. Igbo and Yoruba people did not assign sex at birth. Instead, they tended to wait for someone to know their own gender, and accept what they said. Eighteenth-century Africa wasn’t, necessarily, a queer utopia. But many of its cultures offered chances to exist outside binaries. Colonial laws (still standing in seventeen of the UK’s twenty-three former African colonies) curtailed them.

In 2019, as he struck down the century-old prohibition against homosexuality, the Botswanan judge Michael Leburu said that “anti-sodomy laws are a British import,” the other face of the imperial project that built Seward’s career and Beckford’s palace. His words resonate on other continents, too. In a Parapraxis essay on Israeli pinkwashing, Hussein Omar points out that the first outlawing of homosexuality in Palestine came under the British Mandate.

Come the late twentieth century, the queer citizens of colonisers-turned-liberal-democracies won limited rights. So queerness, now an acknowledged part of public life, entered colonial discourse in new ways. After socialism fell across much of the world in 1989, Zionists’ co-opting of it via kibbutzim held less appeal. Instead, successive Israeli governments weaponised homonationalism: co-opting gay rights discourse to hallucinate a moral high ground for racial segregation, and appeal to liberals in the Global North. Their arguments are familiar now.

“Some of these protesters hold up signs proclaiming ‘Gays for Gaza’,” Benjamin Netanyahu joked in his 2024 speech to Congress, pausing like it was stand-up night at the Rotary Club: “they might as well hold up signs saying ‘Chickens for KFC’”. The Congressmen and -women laughed. By framing his settler colony as a unique beacon of LGBTQ+ inclusion, Netanyahu’s rhetoric could divert their attention from a genocide, and render its victims undeserving, barbaric, and killable without moral stain.

Using that same logic, IDF soldier Yoav Atzmoni claimed in 2023 to fight for “democratic values”, and for “gay people [having] the freedom to be who we are”. Standing in the ruins of a Palestinian home, he waved a rainbow flag with “In The Name of Love” scrawled across it in English, Arabic and Hebrew. @StateOfIsrael soon reposted Atzmoni’s picture, captioning it: “The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza”. Never mind that a Gazan sculptor had carved a homoerotic, topless statue of Antinous – the Roman emperor Hadrian’s male lover – two millennia before. (Found on the seabed near Gaza City, it’s now item JKC0156 in the Palestinian Authority’s archaeological collection). And never mind, either, the Palestinian queer organisation alQaws saying that:

While our queerness was diminished during these painful months, our mere Palestinian-ness is undergoing the most brutal forms of literal erasure. Many Palestinian queers speak in our community spaces about the latter and not the first.

Never mind any of that. In Atzmoni’s head, Israel could become the origin point – the only point – of queerness in the Middle East.

As the genocide in Gaza has continued, left-wing queers in the imperial core have revolted against Israel’s weaponisation of their experience. In 2023, Queers for Palestine began organising in the UK. Similar groups have subsequently sprung up across the globe. “I’m not just fighting out of kindness for Palestinians,” one queer activist told me recently, “but because I consider our struggle to be the same”. Their anti-imperialism comes from a queer left politics that understands Palestinians and queers as comrades in one fight.

“Palestine is not free”, the activist explained, due to “a system of power and oppression that continually dehumanises certain groups. Historically, that’s always been Palestinians, people of colour, women and queer people. So the struggles against colonialism and capitalism – and, I would also say, liberalism – are the fights that will bring queer liberation, and they will also bring the liberation of Palestine”.

III. A Left Queerness, or The Internationale is a Gay Anthem

The activist’s critique of liberalism, though familiar to Prometheus readers, might rankle with a few British gays. Ten years ago, many single-issue gay activists believed that liberalism had delivered them to an optimistic end of history. They had found the sunlit uplands. Gay was okay. A wealthy man could go to the BP workplace pride party and return home – slightly tipsy – to London suburbia to kiss his husband, a bit like a 1950s sitcom dad, if that dad knew every single urinal in Soho. As a bonus, perhaps the couple’s trans nephew might eventually have his waiting list for NHS top surgery fall below ten years.

Of course, their Whiggish view of history – history as a narrative of constant, inevitable progress through the refinement of liberal-democratic institutions – was spectacularly naive. It ignored the inevitable lesson – which we learn from Rosa Luxemburg’s murder, or the career of Keir Starmer – that liberalism and social democracy will always accommodate fascism, to save capitalism during crisis. Now, as crisis deepens and the far-right rises, queer liberalism is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.

Labour’s gay health secretary has pioneered new forms of cruelty against trans children. And the Liberal Democrats, having long parroted their line that our Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, spearheaded same-sex marriage in 2013 as rainbow-flagged cover for their enthusiastic participation in the austerity that caused 148,000 excess deaths, including those of many queers, now state: “we accept the Supreme Court’s ruling, which rightly recognises there’s been too much confusion for too long over what protections the Equality Act provides”. They’d prefer to talk about rearmament, not LGBTQ+ rights.

But although the political legacy of queer liberalism is being dismantled, its influence on organisational strategy still lingers. Most LGBTQ+ organisations still model themselves on groups like Stonewall and the Human Rights Campaign, and aim to win single-issue concessions. This is – unfortunately – strategically ineffective. You’ve probably seen well-meaning Instagram posts that announce another hideous setback for trans people in Britain, then ask us to email your MP now using our tool! But as trans organiser Josie Giles writes, the years she spent working on such campaigns meant “making appeals to a state that fundamentally did not care for me”, and wasted her time.

In part, we might blame the popularity of these unhelpful approaches on the depoliticisation of queer history that also erased the stories of Gays for Empire. If queers are only offered stories of Inspirational Individuals™ – presented as role models solely because they were powerful and gay – it becomes very hard to understand how social change actually happens.

So it’s up to us, as socialist queers, to make the case that lasting liberation won’t come from intra-community NGOs politely asking for specific rights without challenging neoliberalism. Our communities are living with the after-effects of the limited-scope campaigns of the 2010s today: a working-class lesbian couple in Dublin might now be able to marry, but they certainly can’t access a stable home in which to live. Socialists within the community can set out an alternative thesis: that liberation comes instead from working in coalition with others (in parties, unions, direct action groups, mutual support networks and solidarity campaigns) to transform society.

On both domestic and international fronts, socialist queers can build that thesis by highlighting the deep interconnection of our struggles with those of society at large. As Kristen Ghodsee highlights in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, gender and sexual politics are never separable from wider economic and political systems. In her brilliant book The Transgender Issue, Shon Faye doesn’t call for easier self-ID alone. She works within a socialist framework, and argues for a social transformation that would enable trans people (and everyone else) access to good housing, free healthcare, fair work and self-actualisation. “The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society,” Faye writes. “Our full emancipation will only be achieved if we can imagine a society that is completely transformed from the one in which we live.”

To evidence and inspire that transformation, we might seek inspiration from the previous achievements of communist queer liberation. Under Cuba’s extraordinary 2022 Family Code, for example, a trans woman in Havana can freely and easily access gender affirming care. She is legally protected from discrimination; her passport says F under Sexo / Sex; if she is polyamorous, she can have all her partners officially recognised as family. A woman who is exactly like her – but happens to live 230 miles away, in Miami – has none of the above.

The history of socialism is usually depicted in liberal media as one of grey, heterosexual, concrete sterility. But if you look at Cuba’s family code – or at Evgenii Fedorovich M., a trans man who married his girlfriend and established a family in a rural Soviet village; or at Lenin’s sexual revolution abolishing tsarist anti-homosexuality laws and establishing “the absolute noninterference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured, and no one’s interests are encroached upon”; or at East Germany legalising homosexuality early in its existence, but West Germany never doing so – a very different picture emerges.

These examples don’t represent perfect utopias, of course. Restrictions on non-socialist associations in East Germany kept queer groups semi-underground, though many existed; the heightened US blockade has limited access to all healthcare in Cuba, including gender-affirming care; Stalin – in retreat to a nuclear-family-oriented vision of socialism – undid the Bolsheviks’ early queer and trans liberations. But history is not a template to directly replicate. It is a resource to draw from. Here, it teaches socialist queers that we all need to be active in the struggle.

All of these extraordinary achievements were hard-won through the immense efforts of revolutionary communists. We should be optimistic, despite our hideous current conditions, that we can replicate their success. As Marco Blechschmidt and Niko Weber write in an essay on communist queer history, the productive capacities that revolutionary communism could harness in our modern world are far greater than those of the twentieth century – and so, logically, are the liberatory possibilities:

Whereas in the young Soviet state, for example, attempts to socialize reproductive labor were bound to fail and the project of abolishing the heteronormative family remained stuck in its infancy, the economic conditions for such a project are incomparably superior today.

To harness those conditions will require a queerness that is both left-wing and anti-imperialist. The liberation of the Global South is – of course – a moral imperative for communists. It’s also an essential strategic plank of the struggle for socialism in the Global North.

Karl Marx wrote in 1870 that Ireland’s colonisation by the English upper-class allowed those aristocrats to keep control of England:

The exploitation of that country is not only one of the main sources of their material wealth; it is their greatest moral strength. They, in fact, represent the domination over Ireland. Ireland is therefore the cardinal means by which the English aristocracy maintain their domination in England itself.

If the mainstream queer community in the Global North keeps believing that BAE Systems or the World Bank could really be pro-LGBTQ+ organisations, that we need them to build wealth for our pride parades and nuclear households, despite the deaths and debt they cause in the Global South, it will remain unable to free itself.

As socialist queers counter that dominant narrative – and construct one in which, as the activist I spoke to suggested, our loyalty doesn’t go to a bomb-maker who happens to be gay, but “to another person who is being oppressed by capitalism and colonialism” – we can draw inspiration from countless historical queers in the Global South who fought imperialism. Take the transfemme Haitian revolutionary Romaine-la-Prophétesse; or take Simon Nkoli, the anti-apartheid and gay rights activist, who said at South Africa’s first pride – immediately after Nelson Mandela’s release – that:

This is what I say to my comrades in the struggle when they ask me why I waste time fighting for moffies [derogatory term for queers]. This is what I say to gay men and lesbians who ask me why I spend so much time struggling against apartheid when I should be fighting for gay rights. I am black and I am gay. I cannot separate the two parts into secondary and primary struggles. In South Africa I am oppressed because I am a black man, and I am oppressed because I am gay. So, when I fight for my freedom, I must fight against both oppressors.

Nkoli’s vision of fights working in coalition was echoed by queer communists in the Global North, like June Jordan and Leslie Feinberg. In turn, their solidarity resonates in the work of queer comrades in Britain today.

It’s no accident that many political prisoners from anti-imperialist groups are trans and queer. Gays for Empire like Seward and Beckford once treated their position in the imperial core as an opportunity for personal profit. In our neocolonial times, anti-colonial queers have flipped that logic; they’ve taken living in empire’s heart as an opportunity to disrupt. Like Bash Back (a trans direct action group who supported the hunger strikers), Trans Kids Deserve Better (who have highlighted the links between Labour’s oppression of trans people and its support for Israel) and Queers for Palestine, those prisoners refuse to subscribe to one single struggle. They’ve taken their experiences of oppression not as a motive to build individual rights, individual wealth and individual power, but as a reason to fight colonial capitalism itself.

Revolutionary queerness might, as Queers for Palestine suggested in their recent Prometheus interview, actualise itself through mass organising, as well as direct action. As it does so, it might also draw on queer history’s central lesson: individual success may allow a privileged few to temporarily escape queerphobia, but it can’t improve the world. It loosens one manacle, but won’t break chains. Organising ourselves – in coalition with the oppressed of the world – is the only thing that has ever freed all of us, and the only thing that ever will.

IV. Educate!

All left-wing queers have a role to play in building that coalition. And, following Marta Hanecker’s concept of communists as popular educators, all of us will benefit from learning about our history: critiquing queer upholders of imperial capitalism, and drawing inspiration from the revolutionary queers who came before us. Equipped with that knowledge, we can go back to our community spaces and talk to other queers about revolutionary queer liberation – not as a nice idea, but a concrete, historical reality. We can start to dispel the dominant myths of inevitable progress through liberalism.

In doing so, we might produce a community with more character and inclusion, rather than a scene that mostly consists of physically inaccessible, largely white outposts of neoliberal pop culture. (London Trans+ Pride, which is led by the radical grassroots, offers far more inclusion, freedom and fun than the Coca-Cola float at the corporate parade). But most importantly, we’ll be working to consolidate an important part of a revolutionary bloc. We’ll be helping to build the movement that can win a better world, for everyone.

Alex Haydn-Williams is a researcher of queer and radical history. Their work has featured in the International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, at the International Bisexuality Research Conference, and on Resonance FM. With Seedlings Press, they run quarterly Rambles through London’s radical, queer and ecological histories.