It is today often presumed – by, for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary – that the term ‘queer’ only began to be reclaimed with pride in the 1980s. But as queer historians have long recognised, this is in fact inaccurate, for a more or less defiant use of this term as a self-descriptor dates at least as far back as 1939, to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. It is, therefore, not so much an anachronism as a historical imperative to affirm the 1930s as queer. Indeed, given the prominence of a particular group of left-wing writers, including Isherwood himself, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, the 1930s have often been categorised as a ‘pink decade’: as, in other words, foundational for twentieth-century queer literature, politics, and culture in Britain.

Ned Beauman's novel The Teleportation Accident (2013) features a queer Englishman named Rupert Rackenham, a bisexual ex-public schoolboy, hanger-on to the Weimar Berlin cultural scene, and clearly a composite for the “Auden gang.” Always toting a Leica camera (the favored make of the group), Rackenham stalks Berlin for material, ruthlessly exploiting the cultural scenes he encounters for journalistic and novelistic copy. But Rackenham's claim to any form of photographic record is false: his camera case is empty, hollowed out to stash the cocaine he sells to make cash. Beauman's recent depiction is perhaps the most satirically biting in a series of representations of the Auden group's supposedly parasitic relationship to Weimar culture, and more specifically Christopher Isherwood's apparently apolitical camera-eye gaze, a mere alibi for unbridled hedonism. Indeed, Isherwood's long stay in the city has become paradigmatic for an opposition between the frivolous pleasures of Weimar sexual freedom – “Isherwood's Berlin,” as it has come to be known – and the serious business of interwar German politics, at which, so the story goes, the hedonistic Isherwood gazes either passively or exploitatively.

Indeed, Isherwood's famous statement of self-instrumentalization, “I am a camera,” is at once the most cited and the most misread phrase in his authorship. It has commonly been seen as a trope for Isherwood's detached, “passive” documentary method, often involving a crude conflation of Isherwood's narrator with his authorial position. Labeling the queer writer a passive observer, this interpretation insists upon the superficiality of Isherwood's leftist commitment in the 1930s, bolstering the view of his “parlour socialism” advanced by Isherwood himself in later life. On one level this is rather surprising, given the solidly Marxist credentials of the two other best-known contemporary exponents of the camera-eye trope: John Dos Passos and Dziga Vertov are hardly generally considered to be “dazzled spectator[s] of commodity culture,” as one reading of The Berlin Stories (1935–9) remarks of Isherwood's authorial perspective. Even sophisticated discussions rearticulate a sense of Isherwood's wavering political commitment. Michael North rightly points out that Isherwood's camera-eye does not reveal a belief in the camera as “dispassionate and disengaged,” and yet he still argues that, for Isherwood, “observation was almost essentially distinct from action,” separating Isherwood from more “confident” practitioners of the documentary style. And in the most extreme, most glaringly heteronormative version of this position, the supposed passivity of Isherwood's camera-eye obviates the possibility of observation itself.

Accounts of the “failure” of 1930s radical politics often alight on Auden's famous lines from “September 1, 1939,” “The clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade.” Auden's apparent denunciation of the 1930s on the eve of war has been taken to index his despair at the failure of the political itself, his lines “not universal love/but to be loved alone” expressive of the necessary malfunctioning of any collectivist project in the face of individualism. The supposed cowardice of Auden and Isherwood's move to the US in 1939, much decried at the time, has typically been mobilized in support of this view. But there are a number of reasons for resisting reading these lines as a failure of the political per se – not least because in his hitherto unexplored unpublished diary of that week Auden laid out earnest plans for political reform through a form of socialist democracy. Rather than delving into the wide-ranging debates about Auden, America, and the Political that have been the subject of so much scholarly focus, I would like to draw attention to the equally political modalities of queer life explored in this poem. Curiously, the poem's queer valences have remained relatively unexamined, even in Richard Bozorth's excellent study, Auden's Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (2001).

The “dive” in which the poem is set was the Dizzy Club, which Auden visited on September 1, 1939. As he recorded in a diary entry: “Went to the Dizzy Club. A whiff of the old sad life. I want I want.” Here Auden complains about a certain form of queer sociality, cast as graspingly promiscuous, marked by sadness and the past. And yet, the previous month he had begun a relationship with Chester Kallman. Falling for the young American, Auden earnestly hoped that the relationship would prove monogamous and began to refer to it as a “marriage” (Auden's hopes of exclusiveness were not fulfilled, but the two men remained lifelong partners). While “September 1, 1939” might convey the sense of an ending, the expiration of the hopes of the 1930s, or indeed despair at the impossibility of queer life, its negations call forth an emergent mid-century sexual identity: the respectable homosexual.

Katharine Burdekin's dystopian novel, Swastika Night (1937), is set 700 hundred years after total Axis victory. The Jews have been extirpated, Nazis and Japanese fascists rule supreme over the entire world, and women have become reproductive chattel: forced to shave their heads, held in prison camps, they are no longer the objects of male sexual or romantic interest, which is turned in on itself in a violently masculinist homoeroticism. The novel opens with a speculative identification of Nazi triumphalism with queer male desire:

This passage – and Burdekin's project in the novel as a whole – may initially appear strange in its intertwining of a notoriously homophobic regime with the queer male gaze. However, it is in fact paradigmatic of mid- to late 1930s British dystopian visions of fascism, and of the sexual politics of Popular Front literature more broadly. From the fantastic dystopias of Rex Warner and Ruthven Todd to more sober critiques of fascism by Winifred Holtby or Storm Jameson, Popular Front literary production incessantly deployed a vigilant homophobia as a key weapon in the antifascist struggle.

That the dystopian novel should prove a particularly important genre for the development of this heteronormative sexual politics is perhaps unsurprising. For the shock of the antifascist dystopia is, at core, the shock of the aberrant, the pathological that relies upon an implicit sense of social and sexual normality.

George Orwell's characterization of England as a “family” in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) must surely rank among his most infamous statements of Anglocentric Gemeinschaft peddling. Perhaps aware of this, later in life Orwell listed this text as one of a list of four book-length works he did not want republished, alongside A Clergyman's Daughter (1934), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and The English People (1947). It might seem an act of critical churlishness to pay too much attention to this list; it is also important, as Stefan Collini cautions, not to set too much store by Orwell's most famous patriotic pronouncements in The Lion and the Unicorn. And yet, attending to Orwell's reproductive anxieties may prove telling in more ways than one. Read alongside lesser-known materials from the Complete Works, and his famous assertion that “if there was hope, it lay in the proles” (original Latin usage: offspring), these texts reveal a deep-seated preoccupation rarely commented on in Orwell studies: the national birth rate. From the eponymous clergyman's daughter's pathologized asexuality, Gordon Comstock's obsessive hatred of birth control in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, to The English People's brutal recommendation for the government to “make childlessness as painful an economic burden as a big family is now,” Orwell persistently frets over the reproductive capabilities of the English nation.

The modern nation state always requires ideologies and practices of population, necessarily synthesizing forms of national and sexual normativity in its ongoing process of self-constitution. The key episode in Britain pre-dating Orwell's working life was the combination of homosexual panic and reproductive anxieties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, driven by degeneration theory, Boer War jingoism, and the Wilde trial; the longer, broader history of these imbrications could be traced through the development of Foucault's concept of population, a line of inquiry adumbrated in Security, Territory, Population (1977–8), and continued in his famous analyses of biopolitics. What is distinctive about Orwell's particular synthesis of patriotism and reproductivist heterosexuality is that it is made on behalf of a specifically English “democratic socialism” ranged against both Communism and moribund Toryism, and thus must be seen as an important precursor to the national imaginary of postwar welfare-state Britain – the definitive moment of pronatalist patriotism in twentieth-century British history.

Communists are queer creatures. Emerging around the middle of the nineteenth century, they are at times shunned by polite society, at others increasingly incorporated and appropriated. They make loud, proud speeches scandalously proclaiming their identity; they hold secretive and cliquey meetings; they are bohemians and misguided moralists; they rant, they rave, they demand attention. Theirs is not only a politics of the factory floor, but of the street, the smoke-filled room, the bar – and, we might add, the bedroom. “Tearing away the decent drapery” of capital to parade its freakish constitution of human interiority, and driven by a solemn madness to endlessly diagnose, correct, and abjectly celebrate their own deviations, Communists must surely rank among the foremost perverts of modernity.

Many have, of course, tried to put the record straight. While the performative power of The Communist Manifesto (1848) has been rightly celebrated, there is also a certain defensiveness at work from the very start, an anxious desire to “counterpose to the horror stories of communism a manifesto of the party itself.” Marx and Engels go on to counter claims of Communist sexual immorality with a little sexual panicking of their own: “Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of the proletariat at their disposal, not to mention legally sanctioned prostitution, take the greatest pleasure in reciprocal seduction of married women.” This indictment of bourgeois family life and its traffic in women is a powerful heuristic for radical sexual politics – to be further developed by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and by various strains of Marxist feminism – and also serves a tactical purpose in allaying fears and recruiting new adherents. However, this counter-moralizing movement also instantiates a foundational tension for Communist, and more broadly Marxist politics; a tension always overdetermined by questions of sexuality, whether or not explicitly raised, because it operates within and against a paradigm of moral scandal.

The question is: how can one answer accusations of moral turpitude without replicating the terms of such condemnation and thus upholding elements of bourgeois life? The signature maneuvers of Communist politics can be re-charted along the lines of this reverse discourse.

Largely neglected for many years, the past two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in Sylvia Townsend Warner from literary historians drawing on feminism and queer theory, yielding some groundbreaking readings of her work. However, this recent scholarship has not taken account of her archive, instead largely relying on William Maxwell's and Claire Harman's heavily-edited published correspondence and diaries, volumes that systematically downplay Townsend Warner's commitment to and involvement in Communism. For instance, the letter I cite in the Introduction remains unpublished in full, no doubt because of the clear, troubling allegiance to Communism it displays. In this 1937 letter to a prominent fellow Communist Townsend Warner calls for Stephen Spender to be ejected from the CPGB, and that they should “make it look like a purge.” Even though the term primarily denoted expulsion from the Party rather than execution as it is commonly taken to mean today, this is shocking language indeed; but a full consideration of Townsend Warner's life and work in the 1930s must surely take into account the extent of her commitment to Soviet Communism.

The first challenge faced by any attempt to re-evaluate Townsend Warner's politics in the 1930s is therefore archival. The problem is twofold: first, the extent to which published editions of Townsend Warner's letters and diaries paint a misleading picture of her life and work in this period, for very obviously anti-Communist reasons (Wendy Mulford's excellent critical biography is an exception to this tendency); and, second, the sheer scope and size of her archive at the Dorset County Museum. Accordingly, this chapter takes shape from the most salient letters and diary entries that have been excised from William Maxwell's and Claire Harman's published editions. Paying particular attention to those texts which bear, as Maxwell remarks, “the irritating tone of the newly converted,” or, to put it more charitably, the boldest statements of Communist commitment, I reconstruct Townsend Warner's cultural politics in the 1930s from a series of redacted or excised documents of her political allegiances and affiliations. I have paid particular attention to an extensive series of letters sent to two close friends and fellow CPGB members, Julius and Queenie Lipton, which barely feature at all in the published edition of the letters and which provide a particularly rich account of intimate, everyday political commitment.