Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love

It is well known that many of the best-known queer writers of the 1930s were involved with leftist politics. Why, then, has there been no extended examination of this striking juncture of dissident sex and socialism? What, for instance, does it mean for Sylvia Townsend Warner to call for Stephen Spender to be "purged" from the Communist Party? What if Christopher Isherwood was far more engaged with Communism in Berlin than he later claimed? How do we account for the marked homophobia of much anti-fascist writing, even in queer writers such as Katherine Burdekin? How are the dominant sexual politics of Home Front Britain epitomized by the wartime essays of George Orwell informed by the shifts in leftist cultural strategy of the late 1930s? And how do queer leftists' incessant itinerancies and investments in Communist internationalism provide new ways of interrogating both the transnational turn in queer studies and the internationalist aspirations of contemporary gay rights discourse? "Good Comrades" addresses these questions, among others, to transform current narratives of midcentury literary, cultural, and intellectual history from a queer Marxist perspective.