A Socialism Of the Skin

Are homosexual marriages and soldiery the ultimate, which is to say the only achievable, aims of the gay rights movement, a politics not of vision but of pragmatics?

Tony Kushner

July 4, 1994 | This article appeared in the July 4, 1994 edition of The Nation.

"Is there a relationship between homosexual liberation and socialism?" the playwright Tony Kushner asked in a 1994 article for The Nation. "That’s an unfashionably utopian question, but I pose it because it’s entirely conceivable that we will one day live miserably in a thoroughly ravaged world in which lesbians and gay men can marry and serve openly in the Army and that's it. Capitalism, after all, can absorb a lot. Poverty, war, alienation, environmental destruction, colonialism, unequal development, boom/bust cycles, private property, individualism, commodity fetishism, the fetishization of the body, the fetishization of violence, guns, drugs, child abuse, underfunded and bad education (itself a form of child abuse)—these things are key to the successful functioning of the free market. Homophobia is not; the system could certainly accommodate demands for equal rights for homosexuals without danger to itself."

About the Author

Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner’s most recent work includes the new play The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and...

Also by the Author

On Puffins and Presidents (US Politics)

Citizenship is not just a duty. It’s a blessing, a gift handed down by generations of forebears.

Tony Kushner

2 comments

An Unsettling Protest in Israel (War and Peace, Peace Activism)

Dozens of Israeli theater artists are refusing to perform in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Now they’ve been joined by hundreds of artists and scholars from both Israel and America.

Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon

4 comments

Click here to download a PDF of Kushner's full rallying cry for a "Socialism Of the Skin."

Tony Kushner

July 4, 1994 | This article appeared in the July 4, 1994 edition of The Nation.