Before Stonewall: Queer liberation’s Communist Party roots

That might sound like a big claim to make, but it was Communist ideology and political strategy that provided the theoretical and practical architecture of the earliest effort to win gay equality in the United States—the Mattachine Society, a group whose ideas underpinned all the struggles and victories in the country that have been won over the past half century. Without them, there would no doubt have been a movement for queer equality in one form or another, as there were already stirrings elsewhere prior to Mattachine, especially in Europe. But without Mattachine, the movement that emerged would likely have looked a lot different than it does now.