Bring American Communists Out of the Shadows — and Closets

Review of San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area, 1919–1958 by Robert Cherny (University of Illinois Press, 2024) and Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s by Bettina Aptheker (Routledge, 2023)

When I was eight, two men in dark suits and fedoras stopped me on my way home from Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, California. “We want to talk to you about your parents,” they said. My mom and dad had warned me this might happen and told me how to respond. “You have to talk with them,” I said.

I don’t know if the FBI agents ever actually went to our house. I doubt it. My parents had been visited before, and they told the agents they had nothing to say. Talking wasn’t the point of stopping me anyway. It was to send a message: You’re vulnerable. We can hurt you. Be afraid.

Fear was something I grew up with. It’s why I’m an Oakland boy, not a Brooklyn boy. Our family left New York City the year the Rosenbergs were tried. My dad, head of his printing and publishing union, was blacklisted. We got in the car and drove across the country to the Bay Area, where he’d found a job in the printing plant of the University of California. I was five. Two years later, the Rosenbergs were executed.

For better or worse, my mother laughed when she told me stories about those years. She’d been given the job of Alameda County organizer for the Communist Party after they found an apartment in West Oakland. When she had meetings with the party’s district organizer, Mickey Lima, they’d go out to the end of the Berkeley fish pier, where they were sure they couldn’t be overheard.

She was frustrated to leave New York. In the years before we drove west, she’d begun teaching…