The radical journalist and activist Doug Ireland died this weekend at age 67. This essay by Ireland was first published in the Winter 2009 issue of New Politics.

In 1865, while Marx, in Holland, was playing the Victorian parlor game “Confessions” with his daughter Jenny, when asked for his favorite maxim he replied, “Nihil humani a me alienum puto” or “nothing human is alien to me,” a dictum he had lifted from the second century BC Carthaginian slave-turned-playwright Terentius.

Unfortunately, this admirable and inspiring attitude was never extended by either Marx or Engels to same-sexers. Well before the invention of the word “homosexual” by Karoly Maria Kertbeny in 1869, the correspondence of Marx and Engels is riddled with what we would now characterize as unmistakable homophobia of a vicious character. When the pioneering German homosexual liberationist Karl Ulrichs sent Marx one of his books on the subject, which Marx forwarded to his collaborator, Engels described Ulrichs’s platform of homosexual emancipation from criminal laws as “turning smut into history.” Marx, in commenting on Karl Boruttau’s Gedanken über Gewissens Freiheit (Thoughts on Freedom of Conscience), disparaged the author as “this faggoty prick” (Schwanzschwulen). The homophobia of Marx and Engels has been meticulously documented by Hubert Kennedy of San Francisco State University, Ulrichs’s US biographer, in his essay “Johann Baptist von Schweitzer: The Queer Marx Loved to Hate,” which is included in the anthology Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left, edited by Gert Hekma, Harry Oosterhuis, and James Steakley (Haworth Press) and is also available online.