Peter Drucker

Dr. Peter Drucker, a graduate of Yale (BA magna cum laude in history, 1979) and Columbia (PhD in political science, 1994) Universities, previously served as programme co-ordinator in New York for National Mobilization for Survival (1989-91). He has been IIRE Co-Director since 1993. He is the author of Max Shachtman and His Left (1994) (available from Prometheus Books).

Drucker's teaching and research at the IIRE includes work on the origins of national and ethnic identities and conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, and the history of radical political thought and movements. He has turned his attention recently to the history of sexuality and the European socialist left. A paper he gave in October 2001 on the sexual attitudes in the mid-1920s of leading Dutch Marxists Henriette Roland Holst and Jacques Engels can now be downloaded from the website of the International Institute for Social History.

Different Rainbows

Dr. Drucker has been lecturing since his arrival on staff in 1993 about liberation movements of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in the Third World. In 1994 his research took form as an IIRE Working Paper, in 1996 as an article in the London-based New Left Review. In 1998 and again last year he worked to include Third World participants and highlight Third World issues at the IIRE's Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Strategy Seminars.

Now he has edited and introduced a pioneering anthology on Third World gays and the left, called Different Rainbows.

Even before publication the book evoked high praise. Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and the unofficial dean of US lesbian/gay studies, called it "a unique, long-needed, and immensely valuable book" whose "significance cannot be overstated". "The essays ... are brilliantly bound together by the book's editor", he added. Urvashi Vaid of the NGLTF Policy Institute, one of the most prominent figures on the US lesbian/gay left, called it "essential and engagingly written". More recently John D'Emilio has decribed Drucker's introduction as 'one of the best analyses yet written of gay identities and politics on a global scale'.

Drucker's conclusion argues, "Full lesbian/gay equality requires Third World liberation in a broader sense: liberation from poverty and dependency." He suggests that Third World movements are beginning to forge a new model of "liberation without ghettoization", which lesbian/gay movements in developed capitalist countries can also learn from.

Among Different Rainbows' other authors are Dennis Altman, whose book Homosexual Oppression and Liberation was a founding text of the movement, and Margaret Randall, a long-time radical activist in Mexico and Cuba whose interview with Nicaraguan lesbian Sandinistas is reprinted in the book. Other articles in the book discuss Mexico, the Brazilian Workers Party, Latin American lesbianism, post-apartheid South Africa, India, Kenya and China. Different Rainbows is now available in Spanish under the title "Arco iris diferentes" from Siglo XXI Editores in Mexico City. For ordering information please click on http://www.sigloxxieditores.com.mx/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2171.

For those friends of the IIRE who are interested, Different Rainbows is now available directly from the IIRE at special bargain prices. Subscribers to the IIRE Notebooks for Study and Research can now receive a copy just by counting it as an single issue towards their subscriptions. If your NSR subscription has not yet expired, no money need change hands; just send an email message to iire[at]iire.org saying that you are an NSR subscriber and wish to receive Different Rainbows. Non-NSR subscribers can order and pay for Different Rainbows as follows: