Labour Research (November 2010)

Reviews

The red in the rainbow

Sexuality, socialism and LGBT liberation

Hannah Dee, Bookmarks, £7.00 special offer from Bookmarks (rrp £7.99)

This inspiring story of the fight for sexual liberation travels across continents and centuries, uncovering a radical struggle from the 1969 Stonewall riots against police brutality to the mass movement against apartheid in South Africa that achieved the first inclusion of LGBT rights in a country’s constitution.

It charts the crucial role that socialists and the working class have played in resisting oppression — the red in the rainbow — and how they have been key to winning advances for LGBT people.

The book relates this struggle directly to the wider challenges we face today for human liberation — from the Con-Dem cuts, the economic crisis and the threat of the BNP and English Defence League, to building an effective coalition of resistance. It is however, a journey that is incomplete. In Britain and across the world there are still attacks on people because of their sexuality and gender identity.

Yet this is a remarkably hopeful account of the way women and men have made history even in the most difficult circumstances. It should be read by every activist who aspires to win a world free from oppression and to realise the unfinished dream of liberation that so many have fought for.

Reviews contributed by Bookmarks, the UK’s leading socialist bookshop. Order online at www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk


This information is copyright to the Labour Research Department (LRD) and may not be reproduced without the permission of the LRD.