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A communist pioneer of gay rights
ANGUS REID and TOMASZ KITLINSKI tell the story of Harry Whyte, a working-class voice who defended homosexuality in Soviet Russia from a Marxist perspective – and whose arguments resonate today

THE masses are not intolerant of gay people. This assertion is the crux of the socialist case against homophobia. 

When you can grasp that intolerance doesn’t come from the masses, you can recognise that it is a choice and a form of ideological oppression. 

This how the argument was made to recognise and defend gay people in revolutionary Russia. 

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