Yesterday, I was reading an essay by John D’Emilio titled “Capitalism and Gay Identity” from The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader and found it quite an interesting read.

In brief, I would say that the essay points out that the LGBTQ+ movement has created a myth around identity that we view the past in, which limits our perspective. For example, there is the idea that if every gay man and lesbian in America came out, that gay oppression should end. Or that gay men and lesbians have always existed and always will exist. But while these arguments serve positive functions, they are also limiting us for it doesn’t include institutionalized ways that homophobia is reproduced.

So, the essay makes the argument that gay men and lesbians have not always existed and that they are instead a product of the development of the free-labor capitalist system. Before wage labor became widespread, family was a self-sustained economic unit where the survival of each member in the family depended on all the other members. Women and men were required to have many children, in part because children were necessary to help run the economic functions of the family. While people exhibited homosexual behavior, there was no “social space” in the colonial system of production that allowed people to be gay.

With wage labor, the family slowly lost its independence as a self-sustained economic unit because you could buy things you need with wages. Instead, the family took on a new significance as a unit that provided not goods, but emotional satisfaction and happiness. Wage labor socialized production, which allowed people to treat sexuality not as an imperative but as something to establish intimacy, promoting happiness, and experiencing pleasure. Capitalism created the environment which made it possible for gay men and women to have relationships with each other, for the formation of LGBTQ+ communities, and for politics based on sexual identity. These ways of living could develop because capitalism allowed people to survive beyond the confines of a heterosexual family. There are more LGBTQ+ people today than in the past because material conditions allow more people to choose it for themselves.

The essay then claims that capitalism is the same system which made it possible for gay identity to emerge as well as the system which seems unable to accept gay identity. This is because wage labor in the capitalist system has taken away the economic functions which used to tie family members together, weakening the forces that keep people in families. However, capitalism also promotes the idea of the family as a source of emotional security where our need for stable, intimate relationships is satisfied. The family unit is more vulnerable, and the LGBTQ community have become the scapegoats for the social instability.

Finally, I have suggested that the relationship between capitalism and the family is fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material foundation of family life, making it possible for individuals to live outside the family, and for a lesbian and gay male identity to develop. On the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least long enough to reproduce the next generation of workers. The elevation of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that a capitalist society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and homophobia. In the most profound sense, capitalism is the problem.

The essay then goes on to suggest the following solutions:

• Instead of treating children as belonging to parents, give them personal autonomy, particularly in their own sexual expression and choice.
• Instead of calling for a return to the familial structure of the past, we need to dissolve the boundaries which isolate the family and provide more socialized or community-oriented services. For example, instead of the parents being wholly responsible for raising a child, there should be community or worker-controlled day care.
• Create more social structures beyond the nuclear family which provide a sense of belonging, so that the family unit has less significance, so that being in a family is less likely to make or break our emotional security.

I think the idea of creating more social structures outside of the family is interesting, and I can’t help but think of the forum that I manage, t/suki as some of my ideas about how to build the community of t/suki involve creating more places where people feel like they belong. Polyamory also comes to mind, as my exploration of it has revealed social relationships that aren’t quite nuclear families but are something in-between friends and lovers. To me, these things seem like social structures beyond the nuclear family.