The lesbian-gay movement in our country has come a long way to get to this day
The objective of this text is humble, since it only intends to make a very brief review of what was the Movement that led the Pride March that every year wears colors, forms of being and an immense and festive diversity to the City of Mexico, the same one that feeds from contingents from all over the country.
Since before 1968, there were already very isolated groups of people who, just from their isolation, reflected on the need to bring their lifestyle to light and to approach human sexuality as an important issue for the country. But it was only in the middle of a march that same year in the then Federal District, to protest the recent student massacre, that a tiny contingent of homosexuals dared to become visible. Saying this today seems a trifle, but for the time it was not at all. Quite the opposite.
From this historic and extremely brave little group, there arose another somewhat larger group, this time particularly organized, that would come out in the form as an independent march to the streets in 1979 to shout loud and clear “yes, we exist, we are here, and yes, we are homosexuals. ” That group would ultimately be divided into two, one called the Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action (FHAR) and the other Lambda Group of Homosexual Liberation.
Lesbians
It was in 1975 when, for the first time, the word lesbian appears in a newspaper of national circulation. The Excelsior covered a note about the International Tribune for Women, organized in the Federal District, where an Australian girl had taken the floor proposing that the table discuss “the right of women to lesbianism (sic)”.
The context was propitious, because that year had also been organized in our country 4 toWorld Congress of Sexology and the Lambda Group had participated sending a document denouncing the repression of the system not only in the political sense, that which institutionalized a whole Revolution, but denouncing, in the same brutal sense, the institutionalization of heterosexuality itself.
The heterosexual feminists did not support the homosexuals in this event, so the lesbians reinforced their activism by joining the National Front for the Liberation of Women and the National Front Against Repression; From there they dedicated themselves to open up the sexual debate in unions (SITUAM, STUNAM) and in political parties (PRT and PCM). Links were established with other movements, as well as certain relationships with some media while strengthening the organized work that each year improved the logistics of the Pride March.
LGBTTTI
In 1982 a Committee of Lesbians and Homosexuals arose that supported the candidacy of the first woman who competed for the presidency of the Republic. A difficult year in economic terms and with little openness to development and the winds of change, 1982 would be the year in which, despite the great momentum with which it was born, the Movement would begin to blur. There were characters and currents whose fiery confrontation began to show overt division.
Nonetheless, from other trenches, lesbian groups reinforced the influence of their discourse by taking advantage of the bridges laid and their contact with Latin American feminists.
Against all odds, the strength of his work is such that in 1987 the First Encounter of Latin American and Caribbean Lesbians was held in Mexico. Result? The National Feminist Lesbian Coordinator was born, that is, the first women openly defenders of the free sexual option in 1990.
The Lesbian-Feminist Movement acquires a global relevance and its echo will resound in large-scale events such as the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 and the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, putting sexual rights as a fundamental issue in almost all discussions.
Putos or Gay?
We have already mentioned the two most important groups that emerged, and like many other groups of activists from other movements that fought for different issues, the homosexual liberation was not exempt from major divisions as a result of the inevitable influence of the then called Cold War.
Thus, the homosexual vanguard fell into a division and a chain of eternal discussions that made it lose sight of its true objective, a reality that only led it to deepen the differences in strategy and approach among its most representative leaders.
The FHAR and Lambda simply fractured, they were unsheathed. The first was placed in the radical wing, Marxist, and the second in the more moderate, Western-style wing. Both worked with cells and committees that threw out important civil organizations. The Colectivo Sol, a group to fight against AIDS, came out of the FHAR.
The Condomóvil is the famous vochito “VW BUG” that emerged from that Collective and that currently represents an association that not only distributes condoms but also performs rapid tests for HIV detection and sex education workshops.
Cálamo, on the other hand, was the first civil association that had the courage to go to register as an openly homosexual association in the history of Mexico. In institutionally homophobic times. And this came from the Lambda Group.
In short, these groups were increasingly engaged in confrontations and debates that, in any way, in the end, tried to answer the same question: what should be the Mexican homosexual liberation? What are we?
The FHAR said that “the crazy” must be that, some crazy (always men, here did not fit the women) whose aspect of an ugly worker, brown, transvestite, challenger, and demolition should be the norm, otherwise, Mexican homosexuals They would be ashamed of themselves. They would be something like homophobes for not dressing as a woman in the plan “A güevo, I’m fucking! And that! What are you looking at? Any farts, bastard? “
For Lambda, that could not be imposed to the letter, that was not the only way out of the closet, because there is not only one way of being homosexual and homosexuality not only had to be conceived only and exclusively male, so the manifestations of that preference could be very diverse and different from each other.
In the end, polarization and radicalism made the debate go down a lot to concentrate, for example, to see how truly working or how bourgeois it was. The characters of the movement, intellectual or not, were confronted one day and the other also by the world of Jotería, by that way of approaching and of categorizing the whole reality in feminine, all the time. Those who remained in that reality were radicalized even more, and those who did not, were made invisible, everything, without ceasing to criticize each other.
The exit of the clóset, flag and vital objective of then, for example, and its great political importance for true liberation of the society ( remember Milk), was, therefore, adrift.
HIV and the Movement
One of the main street slogans of this peculiar Movement for the Liberation of human sexuality was the inalienable right to pleasure.
Unlike other homosexual liberation movements in the world, the defense of orgasm as a fundamental right was the synthesis of a whole political approach of the Mexican.
There were innumerable actions that were carried out to talk about it. The subject was already being deepened in a moderate way when, without saying a word, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, HIV, appeared in the panorama in 1980. And, like other epidemics in other times around the world, it gave rise to the most conservative and backward sectors of the country will condemn that “promiscuous and sinful” struggle for the badly named, dirty, devious and damned pleasure.
Even the national world of science got on the train of social condemnation by calling the epidemic botepronto, thus, without any concrete scientific justification and seriously recognized, “the pink pandemic”, as they claimed that all the fatalities of the virus were homosexual. And if this happened among the scientific community …
All the sectors, all the groups, all the world entered the celebration of the sidification of homosexuality. Maybe that’s why, whoever did not call himself, identify himself or assume himself as gay was allowed sexually, in his very particular private worlds, everything and did everything, and, thus, the proliferation of HIV thereafter experienced a vertiginous growth without precedents … brutal!
Thousands of gay men, above all, succumbed to the infection and ironically the vanguard of the Liberation Movement was forced to put aside their ideological differences and strategy to agglutinate in terms of the new and dangerous enemy. In fact, it was like that, in the midst of the total institutional abandonment and with the most ferocious and exacerbated discrimination that can be remembered, as the Mexican homosexuals embarked on a difficult and bitter struggle without truce.
It was so that groups such as Cálamo and AVE expanded their vision beyond political activism by offering the first protected sexuality workshops. In fact, from Cálamo came the first Mexican triptychs where he explained how to properly put on a condom. The first health campaign for the community, well!
Cultural Revolution
In the 80s and 90s, for what was already written, there was a true Cultural Revolution, because the demands of that primitive Gay-Lesbian Movement, linked to the reflections of several freethinkers, gradually led to an opening at several levels in broad sectors of Mexican society, so rooted in certain customs and hypocrisies of their own historical conservatism.
The time has passed. There are thousands of people killed by the disease and hate murders that nobody remembers. And, nevertheless, there have been great battles. At present, many rights that would escape the imaginary of the 60s of the last century are being exercised in various parts of the country, and with the pertinent modifications to the Federal Civil Code and the Constitution, with the backing of the judicial power, today in various parts of the country It is a reality of equal marriage.
We have already had formal representatives of the community in Congress. Today LGBTTTI people can kiss on the street, today they can build and build their loves under a million schemes and without fear, today they can be legally of another gender, today they can shape families in diversity, today they can have or adopt children, today they can cross-dress, today they can work, talk and talk not only about clubs, contests, costumes, politics, attacks in the country and elsewhere, and chaos … Yes, today we can, if that pleases us.
And yet, yes, today, 2109, paradoxically, hate crimes are also on the increase, today the shameless calls for the exclusion of the different continue, nowadays it is more blatant the close relationship of religious and political leaders, the unfinished discrimination, the paradoxical close homophobia of homosexuals with power, between intellectuals and politicians, the eternal criticism of the March for being sometimes very unruly and desmadrosa or very political and rogue … a huge oblivion and, above all, a renewed and absurd division that has even reached scenes of betrayal (last year, a couple of lesbians tried tooth and nail to reach the Senate, one from the public and the other from the sewers, making dark pacts with partisan characters, going over the candidacy of a leader of the historical movement), which, for that matter, We will remember that yes, yesterday there was and that today there is a March, a Pride , as many now call it … that festive echo of a once great and forerunner Sexual Liberation Movement in our country.
There is still a lot to do. There is much to reflect and learn. We are everywhere. Despite its conservatism, even in this new federal government, we are. We have been accumulating too many errors, but also the advance represents a gigantic jump.
Today let’s dance, congratulate ourselves, let’s kiss.
Source: El Sol De Mexico
The Mazatlan Post
