ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the personal story of Daniel Guerin was read as an attempt to bring together two sides in a life-time’s struggle such as commitment to radical working-class politics and his apologetics for homosexuality. His sexuality informed his politics that it was erotic excitement at young working-class males that led him into the syndicalist movement in the 1930s. Guerin himself had kept away from the closed homosexual community in the 1920s and 1930s where he had met his sexual partners in ‘normal’ bars, young heterosexuals, happy enough, for a small fee, to seek sexual release through homosexual acts, but mortally offended should there be any suggestion that they were homosexual. He believed that homosexual passivity was despised because it entailed playing the female role. He began to grasp that the quality he most admired through its machismo articulation0 became as oppressive to homosexuals as to women.
