Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895-1917 (review)

In Free Comrades, Terence Kissack ably brings together two issues that have all too often been considered separately in existing historiography: the growth, development, and decline of anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and evolving discourses about homosexuality during this era. Scholars of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered) people and movements, Kissack argues persuasively, have all too often overlooked anarchism as a movement profoundly concerned with homosexuality. And by the same token, Kissack maintains, historians of anarchism have not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which sexuality was a core concern for many anarchist writers and thinkers during this era.

Kissack considers a broad range of topics in his monograph, commencing the volume with a valuable overview of English-speaking anarchists' writings and speeches about homosexuality from 1895 to 1917. Effectively contending that anarchists were the only activists during this time period to place the emancipation of gay and lesbian people at the heart of both their thought and their practice, Kissack nonetheless skilfully avoids the pitfall of idealizing anarchist thinkers. Even the most progressive of anarchists held views about sexual identity and behavior that many contemporary LGBT activists would likely find problematic, and some anarchists were quite unabashedly homophobic in their attitudes. However, as Kissack's narrative reveals, many anarchists felt that the emancipation of lesbian women and gay men was a vital part of their greater project of building a world "where each person was her or his master, where no outside authority would constrain the actions of others" (17). Staunchly opposed to the power of either the church or the state to interfere with individuals' private and sexual lives, many anarchists insisted that gay and lesbian people had the right to pursue whatever romantic and sexual relationships they desired, without needing to fear violence, oppression, or arrest.

In subsequent chapters, Kissack focuses on specific anarchists, literary works, and court cases, demonstrating how anarchists wrote, spoke, and thought about gay and lesbian rights during this era. He first examines the responses of English-speaking American anarchists to the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Already fond of Wilde for his sympathetic statements about anarchism, the overwhelming majority of American anarchists reacted to news of his arrest and trial with outrage, infuriated that the government, police, medical establishment, and prison system had all become involved in what, they argued, was rightly a private matter. Kissack next turns to anarchists' reflections about the controversial life and work of Walt Whitman. Anarchists, Kissack demonstrates, responded to Whitman in diverse ways. Emma Goldman boldly claimed Whitman as an icon of sexual freedom, lauding him for being a daring rebel against the sexual status quo. John William Lloyd, by contrast, though openly admiring of Whitman's celebration of loving, "manly" comradeship between men, shrank away from public association with Whitman, as Whitman became increasingly defined as an explicitly "homosexual" author.

Kissack's final three chapters deal with Alexander Berkman's writings about male sexuality within the prison system, anarchists' uses of sexology, and the decline of anarchism after World War I. Kissack offers a fresh and intriguing consideration of Berkman's 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, specifically of that book's complex reflections on sexual relationships between men in prisons. Although quick to condemn the "kid" system in which older prisoners sexually exploited younger prisoners, Berkman nonetheless insisted on the potential for "mutual, freely-chosen, loving relations between men" within the oppressive space of the prison (112). Kissack's analysis of the relationship between anarchists and sexology is also insightful. Noting that sexology was, as many scholars have argued, an intensely problematic ideology, which often worked to uphold gender and sexual hierarchies, Kissack nonetheless stresses that "[s]exology was a multivalent discourse that can only be analyzed in light of how it was used, by whom, and to what end" (130). Anarchists such as...