At the core of queer liberation today are at least some rights that are at odds with the demands of the austerity-addicted, tyrannic capitalist class, such as free and accessible healthcare for transition, reproductive medicine, HIV prevention and treatment; encompassing protections from discrimination in areas like working and housing, and a protection from targeted harassment campaigns that is fundamentally contrarian to how the free speech paradigm works in a media landscape dominated by the most reactionary stratas of fossil capital. Moreover, from my lived experience as a trans woman i can say that the way liberal democracy organizes majorities and manufactures consent is absolutely terrifying when you’re part of a group that’s probably less than 1% of the population, unless that less than 1% group is the bourgeoisie.

Now the problem here and the reason that for the last decades, queer communities were more visible in the imperial core than in the periphery, is that liberal democracy makes grassroots organizing outside of sanctioned party structures a lot easier than the societal model you see in the siege socialism AES states necessarily had to practice. That frequently meant that widespread societal acceptance and queer organizing lagged significantly behind the legal situation of queer people in AES states. The East German DDR legalized gay sex a full year before the West German BRD followed suit with a partial legalization that only caught up to the DDR’s laws 4 years after “reunification”. For trans people, the situation after the West annexed their home country was dire, as it led to a drastic worsening of their legal situation - the DDR did not have the forced sterilizations and forced divorces that were part of changing your name and gender ID in the BRD until the 2010s. But societal acceptance of gay and lesbian people reliably polled higher in the West than in the East, because the West had a very public, thriving (and, unfortunately, also very commercialized) gay subculture, whereas the DDR, apart from a few gay work groups within the party, did not have anything but clandestine cruising spots until the first state-funded gay bars opened up in Berlin in the 1980s. As cool as state-funded gay bars are, that’s a bit late to the party for Berlin. When we look at the state of Eastern Europe today, it’s a sad reality that after the collapse of AES there, the reactionary backlash had it easy to roll back progress in queer liberation, with the main exception being Slovenia, which during Tito’s years, when it was part of Yugoslavia, had a very active, well-organized queer community and was the first region in Europe to host a queer film festival. Up until today, it is the most accepting nation out of all the post-AES ones in that part of the world.

As materialists, we are quick to dismiss the liberal talking points of visibility and representation and awareness, and they are indeed pointless if they are mistaken to be an end in themselves and lead to no material changes beyond, but from lived experience i can tell you that it matters if people are familiar with queer experiences. It’s the only way to create a welcoming, open social environment that allows you to thrive as a queer person, and in the past AES states frequently struggled with that part in spite of political goodwill, while many places in the West succeeded at this in spite of queer communities still having to fight our governments tooth and nail for every tiny bit of legal and political recognition. Make no mistake, queer liberation in the west is a success story of the tenacity, endurance and ingenuity of our own community, not something that our supposedly so benevolent freedom-loving governments handed down to us. Let no rainbow capitalist and no warmongering liar who dares to put the NATO star on one of our pride flags deceive you: We do not have our rights due to western values, we have them because of decades of organization and struggle against the repressive cishetnormative morals of the West, and it’s simply that this struggle is a lot easier when your government doesn’t have to worry with every NGO if it is a front for the CIA working on a coup. The West’s efforts at regime change actively undermine the possibility for queer self liberation in the post-colonial world. It is easy to scapegoat queer activists as Western agents when our plight is instrumentalized by imperialists the way it is today.

So what’s the way forward here? We can look to Cuba for the answer. Not only have they just trained 10 doctors in gender reassignment surgery, doctors who, in the usual Cuban tradition, will help people all across LatAm with their knowledge, people who could otherwise never afford such surgeries. Cuba also has demonstrated a clear willingness to win the people over and spread acceptance of queer rights, as we saw before the referendum for the new family code. Their information campaign successfully countered the opposition of reactionary actors like the Catholic church and made the people of Cuba approve of what’s probably the most progressive family law in the world. Socialist states do not only need to give legal recognition to queer people, the party needs to play an active role in engaging with and provifing a platform for the queer community, as for all groups among the masses that have been marginalized under capitalism. This is essential to build a truyl unified, solidaric society working towards communism.