Review of San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919–1958 by Robert Cherny (University of Illinois Press, 2024) and Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s by Bettina Aptheker (Routledge, 2023)

When I was eight, two men in dark suits and fedoras stopped me on my way home from Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, California. “We want to talk to you about your parents,” they said. My mom and dad had warned me this might happen and told me how to respond. “You have to talk with them,” I said.

I don’t know if the FBI agents ever actually went to our house. I doubt it. My parents had been visited before, and they told the agents they had nothing to say. Talking wasn’t the point of stopping me anyway. It was to send a message: You’re vulnerable. We can hurt you. Be afraid.

Fear was something I grew up with. It’s why I’m an Oakland boy, not a Brooklyn boy. Our family left New York City the year the Rosenbergs were tried. My dad, head of his printing and publishing union, was blacklisted. We got in the car and drove across the country to the Bay Area, where he’d found a job in the printing plant of the University of California. I was five. Two years later, the Rosenbergs were executed.

For better or worse, my mother laughed when she told me stories about those years. She’d been given the job of Alameda County organizer for the Communist Party after they found an apartment in West Oakland. When she had meetings with the party’s district organizer, Mickey Lima, they’d go out to the end of the Berkeley fish pier, where they were sure they couldn’t be overheard.

She was frustrated to leave New York. In the years before we drove west, she’d begun teaching at the Jefferson School, a Marxist adult-education school where the Communist Party held classes for its own members and other left-wing activists. After teaching about children’s literature (she eventually became a children’s librarian and author), “I was finally tapped for a more prestigious political course,” she remembered in a contribution to a collection of memories of senior radicals, Tribute of a Lifetime. After World War II, she had been the editor of a party newsletter on the “woman question” with Claudia Jones (“the most beautiful woman I have ever met,” she called her). And so she became the Jeff School teacher of this subject, as emotionally charged then as it is now.

In 1952 and 1953, my mother recalled, she was struggling with her students and herself over how to teach it. “I had read extensively from Engels to Simone de Beauvoir, but what good did it all do when an African American woman accused me — quite rightly — of ignoring her life experience in favor of book knowledge?”

She gave the course three times, the last time to a disproportionate number of young men. “Their expressions and their remarks were both aggressive and sheepish — a curious combination that I did not understand at first. I finally discovered they had all been sent to my class by their Communist Party clubs as a punishment for sexist remarks and behavior. I still wonder how they turned out.”

A couple of months later, our family moved to California.

Betty Bacon was able to laugh, and teach what she believed, even when it wasn’t popular among many party members. Yet at the same time she, my father George, my brother Dan, and myself were all leaving the city, their union had been destroyed in the purge of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In those years, party leaders were already in federal prison and more were on trial. Staying meant potentially being called before a committee, getting arrested, or worse.

The lives of most people who were in the Communist Party are unknown to social-justice activists today. The Second Red Scare and ensuing secrecy have hidden not only the identities of party members but also the quality and texture of the lives they led. Yet what they thought and did, their day-to-day political work, how they socialized and maintained families, and the ideas they tried to bring to an increasingly hostile society should be important to us. They struggled with many of the same questions as organizers for social change do today, and frequently had deep and meaningful discussions about them that yielded profound insights. As my mother told me, “I can’t help being annoyed at the casual assumption of some of today’s radical activists that they invented the woman question.” Denying or forgetting this history denies people fighting for social change today the ability to consider the experiences and knowledge of those who’ve come before.

Two recent books help dissipate that cloud of secrecy: San Francisco Reds by Robert Cherny and Communists in Closets by Bettina Aptheker. Each presents important material that helps us assess part of the US radical experience in ways we haven’t been able to before.

Cherny’s San Francisco Reds focuses on the history of the Communist Party in San Francisco and its surrounding area, which had a profound impact on the politics of California and the country. Aptheker’s Communists in Closets discusses the history of gay and lesbian party members, revealing the huge contradiction within a party that proposed radical social change while maintaining some of the most backward homophobic and anti-woman prejudices.

Because Communists in Closets tells the stories of individual people, often in great detail, it brings us closer to the actual experience of belonging to the Communist Party. The book is in good part Bettina Aptheker’s account of her own life in the party, and her increasing difficulty reconciling the politics she was raised with and her growing awareness of her own sexual identity. It also profiles several other gay and lesbian party members, highlighting their courageous commitment to radical social change, and often the pain and tragedy the contradiction brought to their personal lives.

Aptheker identifies with the fear that led many to stay in the closet, and with the liberation at letting the world know who she really is. Despite dwelling on very frustrating and painful experiences with homophobia and party hypocrisy, Communists in Closets is a very loving book — and one that makes Communist lives vastly more imaginable.

San Francisco Reds is a much more impersonal account, painting a detailed portrait of the Communist Party through its presence in the city. Cherny says in his preface that the book “takes a somewhat biographical approach to political behavior, as I’ve followed nearly fifty individuals from the time they joined the CP, through the party’s changing policies, to the point when most of them left the party, and what they did afterward.” It too is a notable contribution, helping fill in the parts of our memory that have been erased.

Writing in the Blank Pages of History

Cherny moves back and forth between capsule biographies of Communist Party members, using a few at a time to illustrate each turn, as he sees it, in Communist Party policy. Several hint at historical phenomena that could fill volumes in their own right. Some Californians, for instance, mostly immigrants themselves, went back to the Soviet Union to start communal farms, an experiment that lasted until the mid-1930s.

Colorful personalities from the party’s history make appearances, from labor militant Mother Bloor to writer Bertram Wolfe. Rather than recounting their personal experiences, however, Cherny presents them as actors in the party’s efforts to craft and implement political directives coming from the Communist International in the 1920s and ’30s, and in the factional fighting that accompanied them. National characters loom large, like William Z. Foster (labor organizer and later CP chairman) fighting with Jay Lovestone (expelled CP leader and later the link between the Central Intelligence Agency and the AFL-CIO) and then Earl Browder (longtime CP general secretary expelled for dissolving the party in favor of a Communist Political Association).

San Francisco Reds documents the involvement of California Communists in these fights. Some of the state’s leading reds, like William Schneiderman, who headed the state party for two decades, were themselves national players. Cherny describes in detail how national factional disagreements were replicated in deep local divisions, sometimes paralyzing political work. He presents the disagreements as largely personality-driven, often using political theory or policy as a pretext for personal feuds. Those he accuses of keeping those fights going, such as Harrison George, don’t come off well.

One hero of Cherny’s account is Sam Darcy, described as a talented organizer willing to put practical needs ahead of unworkable directives. Darcy helped organize the largest farmworker strike in US history: the 1933 cotton strike by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU), one of the industrial unions the party started as left-wing alternatives to the conservative ones of that era. Growers shot down strikers, and violence in the San Joaquin Valley reached terrifying levels, but workers won pay increases, although not union recognition. The Communist Party grew because it played a big role not just in planning and strategy but also in providing food for thousands of striking families to eat, building tent cities, and freeing people from the clutches of racist sheriffs and courts.

The next year Darcy was in San Francisco, where he mobilized party members to support longshoreworkers as they fought one of the critical battles that built the CIO. The entire city struck for three days when police fired on strikers in their effort to herd strikebreakers onto the piers to unload the paralyzed ships.

Cherny presents Darcy as the reality-based organizer locked in conflict with doctrinaire functionaries, such as Harrison George, whose long critical diatribes to party headquarters in New York are quoted in the book. Yet Darcy was a functionary too, and both before and after the two strikes spent time in Moscow at the Comintern offices trying to create an international structure for Communist activity.

Two of Cherny’s other heroes are Louise Todd and Oleta O’Connor Yates. Both San Franciscans are largely forgotten now, but their names were familiar to thousands of city residents for two decades. They were Communists who repeatedly ran for supervisor and other public offices. Much of Cherny’s analysis of party activity in the city is based on these campaigns — how many votes they got and, by implication, the size of the party’s popular base in San Francisco.

Cherny is a thorough researcher, and much of his material comes from folders in the Russian state archives. The book includes discussions in the Comintern, reports made by party officials, and polemics about the general direction of the Communist movement. Two debates had a great impact on California Communists. In one, the party discarded policies that led to organizing left unions like the CAWIU, advocating instead a broad “Popular Front” to oppose fascism. Party policy was based on the defense of the Soviet Union — first as the socialist bulwark against fascism before World War II, especially in Spain’s Civil War, and then when it negotiated a pact with Adolf Hitler, and then finally as it was forced into an all-out war to defeat Nazism (a war in which the Soviet Union lost 22 million people).

Much of Cherny’s book concerns how these debates played out in the political life of San Francisco Communists. While defending the Soviet Union and existing socialism as they saw it, most party members found reasons to excuse news of the purge trials of revolutionaries in the 1930s and the development of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and the network of prison camps. Cherny quotes Peggy Dennis, a national leader who lived (and left a son) in Moscow, and was married to CPUSA general secretary Gene Dennis: “We cannot claim that we did not know what was happening. We knew that the Comintern had been decimated. . . . It was as though we could not trust ourselves to open that Pandora’s box.”

As Ed Bender, who organized unemployed councils and then fought in the Spanish Civil War, explained in Tribute of a Lifetime:

In the beginning I was very inspired by the Soviet Union. They were building the new society. Over the years there has been some disillusionment; but I still believe in socialism and a just society. The class struggle is still here.

After hearing about Stalin’s repression in the 1956 report by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Bender simply stopped attending party meetings. Nevertheless, like many others, he continued to work as a social-justice activist.

Keeping Pandora’s box closed meant giving no ground to the government and media’s hostility toward and hatred of socialism — and, by extension, the Soviet Union. That hard defense had roots in repression. San Francisco Communists often spent time in prison, long before the McCarthy witch hunts. Louise Todd, for instance, was indicted during the San Francisco general strike for falsifying signatures on ballot petitions. At the federal prison in Tehachapi, she joined Caroline Decker, who was jailed for leading the 1933 cotton strike. Although classified as “incorrigibles,” Cherny describes a constant stream of visitors — not just other Communists, but socialist author Upton Sinclair, journalist Anna Louise Strong, and even Hollywood celebrities. Todd served thirteen months. Decker was let out after three years.

By the 1950s, that esprit was largely ground down by the terror of committee hearings and Smith Act trials. Yet San Francisco reds proved more flexible and politically savvy than their New York party leadership. When the national party told key activists to go underground, interpreting the moment as five minutes to a fascist midnight, California disagreed. Oleta O’Connor Yates, Mickey Lima, and eight codefendants insisted on defending the party’s legal right to exist. They mounted a strong defense at their Smith Act trial in 1951, after national party leaders in New York had refused to mount a defense and had gone to prison or underground.

Five years later, their appeal finally reached the Supreme Court, and in 1957 their conviction was overturned. Dozens of others indicted under the Smith Act in cities nationwide saw their charges dropped. By then the party, which had 100,000 members during World War II, had been reduced to a few thousand. The attrition could be attributed to the impact of McCarthyism, the party’s own internal divisions, and the revelations about Stalin.

Cherny’s book is a necessary and revealing chronicle of the life of the San Francisco party, but it’s not without omissions. Some of the people who kept the party alive through this period and advocated for an open presence, particularly Mickey Lima, are unmentioned.

Nor is there much description of the vibrant cultural life of Communist painters, poets, and writers — particularly the influence of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the Mexican muralists, which held on in San Francisco even through the Cold War. Likewise, the San Francisco Film and Photo League, a group with strong left-wing activist credentials and party connections via the New York Photo League, left a radical imprint on California documentary photography that was felt for many decades. Cherny wrote a separate biography of an important Communist in this movement, Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art, and some of the history recounted there would help to create a fuller picture here.

Finally, because Cherny relies so heavily in San Francisco Reds on official documents, particularly reports in the party press and archives or state archives in Moscow, he focuses on what they contain. He details the factional fights extensively, but the participation of party members in the mass movements of their times is often hard to see. One result is a general absence of the experience of black CP members, as well as immigrants and other people of color.

The Legacy of People of Color in the San Francisco Party

Black Communists were very visible and vocal in California, and they played a fundamental part in the state’s Communist and labor movements.

For example, William L. Patterson, born in San Francisco, headed the International Labor Defense, which defended political prisoners for several decades until the Civil Rights Congress took its place. Patterson’s mother was a slave, and he worked his way through the city’s Hastings Law College in part by labor on the railroad. He was arrested several times for protesting the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and went on to defend other prisoners of racism and class war. In 1951, at the height of Cold War terror, he and Paul Robeson presented a petition to the United Nations documenting the history of lynching, titled “We Charge Genocide.” Like Robeson and Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, Patterson’s passport was revoked in retaliation for his political activity.

The friendship between poet Langston Hughes and William and Louise Patterson, along with Matt Crawford and Evelyn Graves Crawford, is documented in the collection Letters From Langston. Their correspondence, collected by their daughters Evelyn Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson, testifies eloquently to the vibrant cultural life of African American reds. While the Pattersons, who moved around, don’t appear in San Francisco Reds, the Crawfords, whom Cherny does discuss, became stalwarts of the East Bay left.

Black Communists were leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), some openly Communist and some not. As a result of the pact between the city’s African American community and longshore strikers, the exclusion of black workers from most waterfront gangs ended after 1934. Today ILWU Local 10 is a majority-black union. Communists played a part in making it so, as well as integrating the longshore clerks’ Local 34.

Other leaders who briefly walk on and off Cherny’s stage include Mason Roberson and Revels Cayton. But others don’t appear at all, like Roscoe Proctor, a leader of black workers in the ILWU, or Alex and Harriet Bagwell, who became beloved singers and music historians. Because their activity is hard to see, their ideas about the relationship between African American liberation and class struggle are absent too.

African Americans became Communists, MaryLouise Patterson and Evelyn Crawford say, in part because “white and Black Communists were in the streets and neighborhoods, fighting against evictions and racist violence — especially in its most heinous form, lynching — not just talking about it on the street corners or writing about it in their newspapers.” International Labor Defense campaigns in San Francisco defended the Scottsboro youth in Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Georgia. Even at the height of 1950s repression, the Civil Rights Congress sent two white Bay Area Communists, Billie Wachter and Decca Treuhaft, to the South to support Willie McGee, an African American man falsely charged with rape and later executed. In Oakland, Bob Treuhaft, Decca’s husband, stopped the execution of Jerry Newsom, another railroaded black man, and won his freedom.

In his forward to Letters From Langston, historian Robin D. G. Kelley posits the question of why the Pattersons and Matt Crawford chose communism, and answers:

Because they believed that, through relentless global struggle, another world was possible — one that was free of class exploitation, racism, patriarchy, poverty and injustice. They thought that an international socialist movement offered one of many possible paths to a liberated future.

Cherny does mention the remarkable life of Karl Yoneda, a Communist born in California to Japanese immigrant parents. But he does not mention the existence of other Japanese American Communists and radicals.

The absence of people of color in San Francisco Reds is especially notable in relation to San Francisco’s Chinese community. Chinese San Franciscans have a long history of Communist activity, which also deserves acknowledgment.

The city’s legacy of violent racism toward Chinese people goes back to its origins in the years of the gold fever, when immigrants came from Guangdong province to work on railroads, drain the delta, and mine gold before they were driven, along with the Mexicans, from the mines.

San Francisco was a base for organizers of the Chinese Revolution. Sun Yat-sen, who planned the overthrow of the last Manchu empress and the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, spent time in the city. He is honored with a statue by radical sculptor Beniamino Bufano in St Mary’s Square. Like radicals in other migrant communities, Chinese revolutionaries balanced efforts to support the movement back home with organizing against virulent racism and exploitation in the United States.

Chinese workers had a history of anarcho-syndicalism. In the late 1920s, a Chinatown branch of the Communist Party was organized, and it met until the start of the Korean War. In the 1930s, the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid Association was organized by laborers returning from the Alaska fish canneries. It held classes in Marxism and published writings by leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Min Qing, the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, had both men and women officers and spread radical ideas among students. The Chinese Daily News and the Chinese Pacific Weekly were only two of the many newspapers that promoted progressive community politics.

When the revolution triumphed in China in October 1949, Chinese Communists in San Francisco organized a celebration with guests from the ILWU and the California Labor School. It was attacked by forty right-wing nationalist thugs. As the Cold War developed, Chinese leftists were hounded by the FBI, while the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched a campaign to terrorize the community, revoking the citizenship and naturalization of hundreds of people. It focused especially on left activists. At least two were deported. Four members of Min Qing were prosecuted for immigration fraud, and in 1962 left-wing journalist and Min Qing member Maurice Chuck was sent to prison.

One of San Francisco’s biggest Cold War trials was that of William and Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman. They published a magazine, China Monthly Review, in China during the Korean War, listing the names of POWs and exposing the use of chemical and germ warfare. In 1956, after they returned to San Francisco, they were charged with treason. The government was forced to drop the charges five years later.

Political and legal defense was always a big part of Communist Party activity, including the defense against deportation. Cherny describes the trials of ILWU founder Harry Bridges in his biography Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend, but the party’s anti-deportation work was also widespread. Though absent from San Francisco Reds, this work grew critical as deportation became a key weapon in the government’s fight against Communists.

In 1933, the party helped to create the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, which had its headquarters in New York. It had an East Bay subcommittee and a Los Angeles office, and it provided deportation defense throughout the Southwest. One celebrated case was that of Lucio Bernabe, an organizer who went to work for the CIO’s Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers union in the 1940s. After that union was destroyed in the right-wing purge of the CIO, Bernabe became a leader of fruit workers in the South Bay in ILWU Local 11. Immigration authorities accused him falsely of entering the United States illegally, and his case ground on for years.

Cherny’s tight focus on San Francisco (although broadened to include the 1933 cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley) means he doesn’t look at the party’s activity in the counties surrounding the city, where Mexican and Filipino farmworkers were concentrated. Those communities, however, also had a strong presence in San Francisco itself.

In the late 1940s, party members participated in organizing the Asociación Nacional México Americana (ANMA, or the National Mexican American Association), a pioneering anti-racist and pro-labor group with chapters throughout the Southwest. According to Enrique Buelna’s The Mexican Question: Mexican Americans in the Communist Party, 1940–1957, Mexican American members participated actively in forming the party, including those in the left-led Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Party members felt ANMA “would merge both the culture and heritage of the Mexican people with the struggles for first class citizenship.”

According to Bert Corona, ANMA’s organizer in Northern California, chapters brought food and support to strikes by braceros in the exploitative contract labor program for growers. Some braceros even organized chapters of their own, facing inevitable deportation as a result.

The San Francisco chapter had three hundred to four hundred families, and there were others in Richmond, Oakland, Hollister, Santa Rosa, Napa, Stockton, and Watsonville. ANMA was put on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations, and its members eventually joined other organizations, including the Community Service Organization led by Cesar Chavez.

Omitting Mexicans and Latinos from San Francisco Reds amounts to more than a lack of acknowledgment of certain people and organizations. It’s a historical oversight, as sections of the Communist Party in San Francisco were the products of the political development within those communities, defined by immigration and national origin.

Justin Akers Chacón makes the case in Radicals in the Barrio that a stream of radical, anti-capitalist thought and activity among Mexicans in the United States extends back to the rebellions following the War of Conquest of 1848. Anarchists and socialists organized the Mexican Liberal Party in US barrios in the years prior to the Mexican Revolution. The decision of many to organize in the US Communist Party was a product of that political development and of the communist movement within Mexico itself.

Akers Chacón criticizes the idea that Mexican farmworkers were only interested in effective organization and not radical politics, writing that they “had their own radical politics that did not have to be taught by Communists, but rather were compatible.”

A similar process developed among the Filipino migrants who came to the United States following the brutal colonial war of 1898, in which the United States seized the Philippines. Abba Ramos, a Communist who worked as an organizer for the ILWU, explains that

The manongs [a term of respect for older Filipinos] who came in the 1920s were children of colonialism. They were radicalized because they compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos’ own quest for freedom, with the harsh reality they found here.

Ramos was born on a sugar plantation in Hawaii into a radical union family. When FBI agents came to his parents’ home and told them their union was led by Communists, “my father said ‘if winning better wages and making us equal here is Communist, then we are too.'”

Ramos learned radical ideas from Filipino Communists, who migrated between work in Alaska canneries and field labor in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley. As Filipina historian Dawn Mabalon wrote, “Many of the members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the strikes of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and were tough leftists, Marxists, and Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own militancy.”

Because it consisted of people who moved with the work, their radical network existed wherever they were. During part of the year, many lived in San Francisco’s Manilatown. The militancy of the International Hotel housing battle in the 1970s, perhaps the city’s most famous tenant uprising, owed to the fact that it was the place where many manongs lived at the end of their lives. This radical Filipino history is woven into the history of Communism in San Francisco, but missing from San Francisco Reds.

Queering Communist Party History

Bettina Aptheker’s Communists in Closets takes a very different approach to the Communist Party’s history. In recounting the lived experience of gay and lesbian Communists, she gives a deep look into their position in the party, and especially the way the development of their political ideas interacted with their sexuality, open or closeted.

Aptheker’s book contains several shorter accounts that support four long expositions describing the lives of four exceptional individuals. This she combines with historical material about the party’s denial of the existence of gay and lesbian people in its membership, especially following the watershed Stonewall rebellion. During Stonewall and its aftermath, young activists formed radical organizations like the Gay Activist Alliance, debated emerging concepts of gay and lesbian liberation, and appealed for support from the party. They were rejected with a stony silence.

Aptheker begins by describing her research process, heavily dependent on the personal archives of her chosen subjects and oral histories produced by herself and others. The tone of Aptheker’s book is more personal than Cherny’s, as she references her own personal struggles and experiences in coming out. She also expresses her love and admiration for the people she meets through personal networks and through her research.

One smaller biographical vignette concerns Maud Russell, who lived in China before joining the US party and returning to do political work. Aptheker describes her long partnership with Ida Pruitt, who was born and lived in China for many years herself. Aptheker can only speculate about whether they were lovers. She judges Russell’s support for the violent Cultural Revolution as a contradiction to her life of “loving and compassionate service.” However, Aptheker adds, “I also know how many Communists, including myself, denied the atrocities in the Soviet Union, for example, because of a blinding emotional commitment to a political ideal that was not the reality. In my case, and perhaps in Maud’s, this emotional need was connected to a secret lesbian sexuality.”​​ To live in the closet is to live in fear of exposure and social ostracization. Perhaps that fear can enhance a person’s attachment to sources of stability, security, identity, and belonging.

Other short biographies range from artist Elizabeth Olds, about whose sexuality Aptheker again can only speculate, to composer Marc Blitzstein, to Dr W. E. B. Du Bois’s adopted son David Graham Du Bois. More contemporary figures include Victoria Mercado, who grew up in a Watsonville farmworker family and worked on Angela Davis’s defense before her murder at thirty. Marge Frantz grew up in the South, helped found the Civil Rights Congress, and ended her life teaching with Aptheker and Davis at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The book’s description of the eccentric living arrangements between Frantz, her husband Laurent, a well-respected constitutional lawyer, and her lover Eleanor Engstrand show that life for Communists and former Communists could be as bohemian as any.

The book’s major contribution consists of four biographies: Harry Hay, Betty Millard, Eleanor Flexner, and Lorraine Hansberry. The intersection between Marxism and the politics of being gay in America is most evident in her account of the radical politics of Harry Hay, whom she calls “most decidedly a Communist revolutionary.”

Hay was a Communist Party activist through the 1930s and ’40s, joining street actions from the San Francisco general strike in 1934 to the animator’s strike at Disney studios in 1949. He taught courses at the California Labor School with titles like “Music . . . Barometer of the Class Struggle” and “Imperialist Formalism.” And as the Cold War started, Hay began bringing gay Communists together, eventually organizing the Mattachine Society, in which he tried to combine class politics and gay identity.

Aptheker describes the political theory Hay eventually elaborated, in which he asserted that gays and lesbians were a “historically oppressed cultural minority,” as a concept that evolved out of his educational work in the Communist Party. “There were no women in the membership of the original Mattachine Society,” she notes, but “the photographer Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006) often attended Mattachine meetings and joined in their intense political discussions.” Bernhard, an open lesbian, was a mainstay of gay and lesbian subcultural events and was widely celebrated for her photographs of the female form.

Apetheker writes:

As a Marxist scholar of unusual innovation, Harry was trying to argue that gay and lesbian people, because of their persecution and outsider positioning, had the potential to develop a particular consciousness of themselves that could also be a radical or revolutionary understanding of class and racial oppression. . . . Hay thought that gays and lesbians as an oppressed minority experienced the material conditions to make for a specifically gay consciousness distinct from that of the dominant society, and that such a consciousness held revolutionary implications.

Hay patterned this train of thought on the way the party had come to define African Americans as a people who suffer racial and national oppression, distinct from and in addition to their exploitation as workers. “He thought such an oppositional gay consciousness had a culturally revolutionary potential for upending all of society and its conventions.”

The Mattachine Society was a civil rights organization as well, and mounted the first successful legal challenge to police entrapment of gays and lesbians (with a lawyer from the National Maritime Union). In his theoretical framework, Hay regarded entrapment as the “weak link” in the capitalist oppression of his community. Neither the cases nor his expositions got any coverage in the left press however. After organizing the Mattachine Society and coming out as a gay man, Hay resigned from the Communist Party in 1951 because of its ban on gay membership. The party then expelled him to prevent him from rejoining.

Betty Millard also, not without controversy, used the analogy of black oppression in one of the Communist Party’s first attempts to theoretically define the oppression of women. Millard wrote two essays in the party journal New Masses, which were then published as a pamphlet called “Women Against Myth.” In it, Millard sought to weave together a Marxist and feminist analysis. “The way Betty structured her arguments,” Aptheker explains, “also revealed what I would call a queer sensibility in that her lived experiences as an independent woman and a lesbian, however closeted she was, allowed her to see that ‘woman’ and ‘femininity’ and the constraints on women’s lives were the purely (convenient) social constructions of male supremacy. There was nothing natural about them.”

Millard began by deconstructing the way language incorporates the inferior status of women. In using her essay for her course, I can imagine the expressions on the faces of those sheepish young men as my mother tells them that, when they curse with the word “fuck,” their expression of anger and aggression has its roots in violence against women.

In “Women Against Myth,” however, Millard describes the boredom of housewives as a “deadlier kind of lynching.” Claudia Jones challenged her middle-class orientation, and Millard changed “deadlier” to “quieter” but didn’t retract the comparison. Both Jones and Millard articulated the triple oppression of black women through the intersecting systems of domination: race, class, and gender. Jones wrote to Millard, “Does not the inferior status stem now as in the past primarily from women’s relation to the means of production?” Aptheker notes that Jones “did not include sexuality as a key part of the system of domination.”

In 1949, amid this ferment, Louise Patterson organized a national conference on “Marxism and the Woman Question” at which Jones was the lead speaker. My mother’s courses in subsequent years must have followed and been influenced by this debate. She idolized Jones, and used as a text her clarion call “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Jones was indicted under the Smith Act for writing another article, “Women in the Struggle for Peace and Security,” imprisoned for a year in 1955, and deported to the UK when she was released. Millard went on to represent the Congress of American Women internationally, until it was destroyed in the McCarthyite hysteria.

Aptheker describes in moving detail the emotional trauma and roller-coaster experience of Millard and her other subjects as they try to come to terms with their sexual orientation. Eleanor Flexner, who wrote the first scholarly history of the woman suffrage movement in the United States, lived with her lover Helen Terry “in real harmony and mutual enjoyment” for three decades. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Aptheker says, “was encouraged, nurtured and mentored by Black Communist artists and a collective of Black Communist intellectuals and activists,” but nevertheless suffered paralyzing depression and loneliness. Her liberation came with acknowledgment of her lesbian sexuality.

In the book’s final section, the Communist Party finally ends its ban on homosexuality. Aptheker presents contemporary portraits, for example of Rodney Barnette, an activist in Angela Davis’s defense, a Communist warehouse worker, and San Francisco’s first black owner of a gay bar. We also meet Eric Gordon, who today reports on culture for People’s World, and Lowell B. Denny III, who cofounded Queer Nation, a left-wing political movement that took direct action to combat discrimination against gays and lesbians. After Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in 2014, Denny joined the Communist Party, and today also writes for People’s World.

Communists in Closets ends with Angela Davis, Aptheker’s comrade, coworker, and friend for most of each other’s lives. Davis speaks about her long romantic relationship with Gina Dent, a colleague in feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and celebrates their work together organizing the prison-abolition organization Critical Resistance. “I am fine with queer” as a personal descriptor of herself, Davis tells Aptheker, “but I prefer anti-racist and anti-capitalist” as self-identifiers, since they describe the heart of her political work. That lifetime of work was honored last year when the San Francisco longshore union, ILWU Local 10, made her its third honorary member, joining Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.

Aptheker recalls Davis’s 2009 speech before an audience that gave her a “warm, loving welcome.” She discarded her notes to tell them they had to embrace transgender people as part of “our movement,” regardless of whom it made uncomfortable, insisting that “we must constantly expand our idea of freedom.”

A Fuller Account of Life in the Party

Both Cherny and Aptheker include great detail in the presentation of their arguments. With Cherny, we get the broad strokes of party history in San Francisco, albeit with some blank spaces. With Aptheker, we get deep insight into the trials of individual members — beyond San Francisco, but applicable to many San Franciscans — as they seek to realize their political ideas in an environment of repression, not just from the power structure they oppose but also from their own party.

The figures on their stages are mostly (though not entirely) leaders and organizers. Through them, we see a lot of the history of the Communist Party’s policies and political strategy, and the cost to those who were out in front. But behind leaders were the ordinary party members who made it all work. They got signatures on the petitions. They staffed Camp Seeds of Tomorrow, the summer camp for the children of party members and their friends. People like Bob Lindsey, who sat behind the counter of the bookstore on San Jose’s First Street, or those who staffed the one on Bancroft Way in Berkeley, or the one in Downtown San Francisco.

I think of my parents, who were not national leaders or important people in the sense that many are in these two books: My mom in her classes, and later writing children’s books. My father as he sought a job that could keep our family going in the wake of the blacklist, even if it meant moving across the country.

In Tribute of a Lifetime, published by the Committees of Correspondence after the party split in 1992, I found a piece that to me sums up this kind of contribution. The party had an expression that honored the ordinary work of political organizing. As party member Alice Correll described it:

From the time I was recruited into the YCL [Young Communist League] in 1937 I have been a Jenny Higgins [men were called Jimmy Higgins]. I was the one who kept the books, collected the dues, baked the casseroles, washed the fund-raiser dishes, and always paid my dues (the secret of my popularity!). In Seattle, in New York City during the wide open Browder period, later in San Francisco when we met only in tiny “cells,” I have always been a private in the army. Where would the sergeants and the generals be without us?

David Bacon is a California writer and documentary photographer. A former union organizer, today he documents labor, the global economy, war and migration, and the struggle for human rights.

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