From Mexico City to Buenos Aires
1960s: Youth demand lesbian, gay rights
Lavender & red, part 61
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Apr 27, 2006 9:51 AM
The rising resistance of national liberation
movements in the 1960s around the globe—from Asia to Africa, North America
to South America—many of them led by communists, helped inspire a militant
era of battle for gay liberation.
The year 1968 saw struggles for
people’s power. In South Vietnam, the National Liberation Front’s
Tet Offensive, which surprised and battered the Pentagon force, was the turning
point in the war. In France, a student struggle generated a workers’
general strike that shook the capitalist government. In the U.S., rebellions
ignited in Black communities in more than 100 cities as word spread of the
assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
In urban areas throughout
Latin America—from Mexico City to Buenos Aires—a rebellious student
movement defied repression to insist on greater freedoms in countries
economically and often politically dominated by U.S. finance capital.
As
the wave of youth rebellion rose, it lifted the demand to end
“lesbian” and “gay” oppression. (The quotation marks are
recognition that these sexual identities and the social realities in which they
exist are not universal.)
Mexico was a particular political milestone.
There, the demand for gay liberation did not arise in the same way it had in the
U.S.—where brutal police raids on transgender/lesbian/gay people in bars
or restaurants sparked spontaneous rebellions on both the West and East Coast
during the 1960s. Nor did a small group demanding same-sex rights have to
struggle to bring their grievances to the larger left-wing political
movement.
In Mexico in 1968, the demand for “gay” liberation
was a dynamic component of the student upsurge, articulated from within its own
leadership. Lesbian and gay Mexican@s organized to make “gay” rights
one of the many demands voiced by a huge and courageous student protest in
Mexico City.
Solidarity cemented unity
The student movement
rocking Mexico in 1968 was part of the deepest political upsurge since the
Mexican Revolution, observes Max Mejía in his essay “Mexican
Pink.”
An upcoming segment of this Lavender & Red series will
provide more details about the subsequent Tlatelolco massacre and mass arrests
of youth and workers on Oct. 2 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas during the 1968
Olympic Games in Mexico City, specifically focusing on the role of the CIA.
Mejía explains, “The demands of the 1968 student movement
included those of an entire generation of Mexican youth. Outstanding among the
demands were political freedom and also sexual and personal freedom. Gays and
lesbians were among the movement’s activists and main leaders.” The
movement “expressed women’s desire for freedom, as well as
gays’ and lesbians’.”
Mejía stresses the way in
which solidarity cements political unity. “Their presence under the banner
of solidarity with other oppressed people—political prisoners, workers,
peasants—earned support and sympathy for their cause. Their daring
behavior and their repeated exposure of abuses gained them the support of the
feminist movement and the left, changed the attitude of the traditional yellow
press, and won over prominent intellectuals. Most important, they convinced a
wide sector of society of the legitimacy of their
demands.”
Mejía concluded that the struggle won
“greater public visibility of Mexico’s gays and lesbians; support
for their exposure of police abuse from a broad sector of public opinion;
legitimation of the struggle for civil rights; and the emergence, through the
influence of their example, of other gay groups in several cities, most not ably
in Guadalajara and Tijuana.”
‘Desire and
militancy’
In his essay, “Desire and militancy: lesbians,
gays and the Brazilian Workers Party,” author James N. Green offers an
over view of the lesbian and gay rights movement in Brazil.
Green
recalls, “Brazilian gays and lesbians were living under the most
repressive years of the military dictatorship which ruled the country from 1964
to 1985. ... Although homosexual men and women were not specifically targeted by
the dictatorship, the increased numbers of military police in the street, the
arbitrary rule of law, and the generalized clamp-down on artistic and literary
expression all created a climate which discouraged the emergence of a Brazilian
lesbian or gay rights movement in the early 1970s.”
In Argentina,
however, Green notes that a group of 14 men in a working-class Buenos Aires
suburb met in 1969 to form Nuestro Mundo (Our World), the country’s first
gay rights organization. “By 1971 six divergent Argentine groups had come
together to form the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de Argentina
(Homosexual Liberation Front of Argentina).”
That year, the Frente
de Liberación Homosexual formed in Mexico. And in 1974,
“lesbians” and “gays” in Puerto Rico had founded
Comunidad de Orgullo Gay (Gay Pride Community) and published the newspaper
“Pa’ Fuera.”
Next: 1960s in U.S.—police
brutality meets resistance from coast to coast.
lfeinberg@workers.org
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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