This recent invitation to a “Socialist Singles Mixer” sponsored by the Democrat Socialists of America’s New York City chapter occasioned a minor moral skirmish on X. It was discovered that the hosting nightclub, Silo, was themed around Tel Aviv rave culture and hence carried the taint of Zionism. After some cursory digging, however, the Twitter commentariat concluded that, in spite of Silo’s nominal connection to the settler-colonialist project, it was okay for DSA to hold its event there because the owners are anti-Zionist Jews — i.e., the Good Kind.

This sort of ideological purity sweepstakes, and the latent racism it trails in its wake, are unsurprising to anyone who like me has fallen down the rabbit hole of twentieth-century Leftist history. As some readers know, I come by my interest in these matters honestly as the granddaughter of a prominent American Communist.

My grandmother, Josephine Nordstrand, right.

But something else stood out for me in this socialist purity spiral: its paradoxical promise of transcendent romance, or at least easy sex, in combination with a kind of homogenous political wholesomeness. A “Thot” — acronym for “That Ho Over There” — is a promiscuous woman, and a “Trot” is a Trotskyist, a believer in the ideals of Leon Trotsky, liquidated by Stalin for his insistence on worldwide revolution when Stalin favored Russian centralization of Communist power. Although it was roundly condemned and driven underground by the global Left in the mid-twentieth century, Trotskyism apparently lives on among the young idealists of DSA, even if the very word conjures up images of failed utopia. As a writer on the subreddit r/TheDeprogram, a kind of clearinghouse of anti-capitalist thought, explains:

Trostkyism (at least modern western interpretations of it) is very easy to idealize without needing to worry about details, a utopia of communism for all as we all stand arm-in-arm and overthrow the capitalist world! . . . But once you actually ask the question "how does this work, mechanically?" it falls apart. People love to imagine this glorious revolution, but don't want to ponder on any of the logistics as that's boring and doesn't allow them to view themselves as a hero . . . So it's very appealing to the average western liberal who is somewhat disillusioned by the system . . . It requires very little input from the user.

Vivian Gornick, 1970s.

But meeting up with other believers in radical utopianism is not necessarily a bad way to find romantic partners, and it’s hardly novel. Vivian Gornick’s classic study The Romance of American Communism includes many stories of comrades who joined the CPUSA in the hope of meeting girls, especially those who might be open to the notion that free love was a liberatory tool of anti-capitalism. My own mother believed that her mother, Josephine, had become a Party member because she was “skinny and Jewish-looking,” and thus, at least by my mother’s reckoning, had a hard time meeting boys.

Having read my grandmother’s extensive FBI file, I can attest that this is not the reason she joined the Communist Party. Josephine became a Communist because she believed that it was the best hope for ushering in a new Golden Age of liberation for the oppressed; she believed, you could say, in the promises contained in the beautiful socialist hymn “The Internationale.” She described herself to an FBI informant as a “red-hot Red,” and she even changed her name from Esther to Josephine in honor of Joseph Stalin.

But though she was married three times, I do not think that Communism brought her love. In fact, according to the account of activist John Gilman, it seems to have brought her and those around her more than their fair share of romantic trouble.

Description of an incident in the life of Josephine Nordstrand as related by John Gilman. I had been told growing up that Josephine had gone underground to avoid a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee. I don’t know which of these accounts is true; perhaps they both are.

I wonder if love and utopianism must necessarily cancel each other out. I recently read that Edmund White, the éminence grise of gay belles lettres, has produced a late-in-life memoir of free love in another lost Golden Age. As John Maier observes in his review:

White’s prolific sexual career took place during the “golden age” of homosexual metropolitan promiscuity. This was a time for “tribal love”, a time for exchanging the shackles of “grim American “morality”” for shackles of more specialist kinds, a time — as White reports in one of the antique strings of camp verbal play he has hoarded from the era — for “falling heels over head in love.”

Maier concludes:

Though it bears pointing out that many of those who lead less adventurous sex lives than Edmund White might be disappointed and unfulfilled, attempting to double-down on the opposite sexual strategy is no guarantee of securing what’s of value in life either. Helplessly caving to impulse might seem to provide a handy model for liberation. But it is an obviously fallible one.

Edmund White (photo by Colin MacPherson)

White, though married to a younger man, writes that he is constrained to employ still younger men to provide him with his preferred variety of thrill. It’s a strange inversion for an 85-year-old man in a utopian subculture that prizes youth and beauty above all. And it makes me think of the untimely death of a dear friend — really more like a brother — who was always the ephebe, or at least ephebe-adjacent, in a series of relationships with older men. On reaching fifty, no longer the cute young thing, he turned to a regimen of punishing workouts punctuated by purportedly performance-enhancing drugs and died of a heart attack in his sleep. By this time he lived alone, and it was several days before his body was found.

Soprano Therese Grob (Heinrich Hollpein, c. 1835).

And I think about Franz Schubert, unable to marry his intended, the soprano Therese Grob, because of the utopian aims of a still-earlier totalitarian regime. The Chancellor of Austria-Hungary, Klemens von Metternich, enacted the punitive Marriage Consent Act in 1815 in the hope of reducing the number of dependents on the state, which had declared bankruptcy after the Napoleonic Wars. The Act permitted marriage only to men with an income deemed sufficient to support a family. As an irregularly employed assistant schoolteacher, Schubert fell outside of this category. Therese Grob married a baker, and Schubert died of syphilis at 31 (erstwhile attempts to prove a gay identity for the composer have pretty much been put paid to).

One of the aspects of Schubert’s music that makes it so devastatingly moving is the formal restraint he imposes upon grief and loneliness. If the romantic efforts of utopian social thinkers and sexual liberationists have failed to free us from the loneliness of late-stage capitalism, perhaps a mixer for Thots and Trots might stave it off for awhile. But in the meantime, here is something better. Happy Valentine’s Day!