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.