Third World gays fight back
The lesbian/gay movements that took off in Latin America in the 1970s stalled in the early 1980s. Blame AIDS, hard times, repression and the rise of the right.
A resurgence began in the late 1980s. And not just in Latin America. The movement has spread to new regions and new constituencies.
Lesbian and gay liberation * and human rights activists. During the March 1996 March for Memory, Truth and Justice organized by Argentinian NGOs, lesbian/gay groups bore witness to the destruction of the Argentinian gay movement of the early 1970s and carried a banner that read "Police
Thousands of people in the Third World are joining lesbian/gay movements. They sometimes borrow from movements in imperialist countries. But they are also highlighting distinctive identities of their own. Peter Drucker IN THE THIRD WORLD AS ELSEWHERE, sexual nonconformity is often seen as a threat, and lesbians and gay men can be scapegoats. Periods of crisis often intensify anti-gay repression. Since crises hit dependent countries harder, witchhunts in the Third World can be virulent.
Ironically, some in the Third World associate same-sex eroticism with the resented West. In fact, laws used to attack gay people are often leftovers from colonialism. Laws against sex between males on the books in much of Africa and Asia today are copies of an old British law repealed in Britain in 1967. Liberia's and Puerto Rico's anti-gay laws also remained in force after their US models began to be repealed.
Suppression of indigenous sexualities by imperialism has helped conceal authentic Third World same-sex traditions. sourism" from richer countries is by contrast all too visible, mostly male-female but someimes male-male; it has become a potent symbol of exploitation. In reality the sex rade's customers are usually mostly Third World people themselves, and crackdowns asually victimize sex trade workers more than customers or pimps. But even the domestic sex trade is sometimes a veritable slave trade. This has helped root anti-gay prejudice in popular consciousness. Third World regimes can exploit these prejudices, and attack lesbians and gay men as carriers of alien influences.
In reality Third World lesbians and gay men are rediscovering their countries' own traditions. This became clear, for example, when Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe banned the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) from the August 1995 Zimbabwe International Book Fair, condemning gays as un-African. Same-sex relationships are a longstanding tradition among shamans of Zimbabwe's majority Shona people. The public's reaction to Mugabe's ban "must have been a thorn in (his) flesh: the stand was literally paved with flowers". GALZ's membership reportedly doubled over the next several months. The book fair's organizers, who had yielded to Mugabe's ban in 1995, defied it in 1996, and the ban was overturned in court. Only an attack by thugs linked to Zimbabwe's ruling single party succeeding in driving GALZ from the 1996 fair. Souls have no gender
Same-sex relationships in India have also found points of support in indigenous sexual traditions. When for example two Indian policewomen married each other in 1987 in a Hindu temple, they were purged from the police. But they were later reinstated: the police commissioner cited the Hindu definition of marriage as a "union of two souls" and said that souls have no gender!
The most vicious attacks on gays in the Third World have come from the most unpopular dictatorships. Between them, the Chilean, Argentinian and Brazilian juntas murdered thousands of gay people from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. The memory of these killings lives on among lesbian/gay brutality = today's dictatorship". Continuing arbitrary arrests of gays and raids of gay gathering places in Chile since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship have generated international protests.
Same-sex eroticism has also been targeted by fundamentalist and communalist movements. Despite Iran's centuries-old same-sex traditions, its fundamentalist regime has justified a barbaric anti-gay campaign as anti-Western. Christian and even Buddhist fundamentalists have a similar approach, as shown for example by anti-gay raids by Bangkok's fundamentalist governor in 1987. Repression breeds resistance
Anti-gay repression has increasingly been met with lesbian/gay resistance. The lesbian/gay movement exists today in dozens of countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa. At an accelerated pace since the 1980s, lesbians and gay men are organizing in the Third World. They often redefine the concepts of "gay" and "lesbian" by rooting them in their own cultures and adopting or inventing words in their own languages.
Resistance to repression has been a particularly important factor in the rise of lesbian/gay movements in the Third World. Lesbians and gay men there have sometimes mobilized in defense of communities that are still barely emerging; self-contained, safe and accessible gay neighbourhoods in the Third World are rare. These communities' fragility helps explain why the first wave of Third World lesbian/gay liberation beginning in Argentina in 1969, Mexico in 1971 and Puerto Rico in 1974 proved so vulnerable. The young movements found it hard to contend with economic adversity, like the Argentinian hyperinflation of the early 1970s and the Mexican debt crisis. While the dictatorship killed off the Argentinian movement after 1976, groups elsewhere in Latin America were weakened by police crackdowns, AIDS and the struggle for economic survival.
But after a few years lesbian/gay movements began to move forward again. The Argentinian movement, refounded after the dictatorship's fall, is now stronger than ever: a national gathering in April 1996 brought together 170 participants representing 20 different groups. The Brazilian movement too is large, diverse and once more on the rise. New movements have taken advantage of openings in Uruguay, Chile, El Salvador. in fact in every Latin American country except (apparently) Paraguay.
November 1996 #282 13
Lesbian/gay movements of the second wave that began in the late 1980s are different in some ways from earlier movements. Asia is catching up with Latin America in lesbian/gay politics; so is South Africa. Lesbian groups have become more important almost everywhere than they were in the first wave, thanks perhaps to women s increasing role in the wage economy and the resilence of feminist movements. AIDS, which helped decimate the first wave, is very often a key issue for the second wave.
Southeast and East Asia's economic growth since the 1980s may help explain why new groups have formed particularly there. Since 1992 an Indonesian Gay and Lesbian Network has grown up as an umbrella for dozens of groups. Lesbian/ Gay Pride events have grown large in the Philippines lately, and the movement is gaining strength in Thailand. Just in the past year a gay group was founded in Sri Lanka. So far the political and ideological climate has imposed limits on the new Asian groups, however. The left is weaker in their countries than in Latin America and the space for political organızing narrow. Activities nave so far consisted less of marches and demonstrations than of lower-key kinds of organizing.
Third World lesbian/gay movements sometimes differ from North American or European movements because sexualities they are defending are different. While samesex erotic behaviour exists almost everywhere, across boundaries of time and culture, its forms vary considerably. Different forms of same-sex sexuality existing in the Third World today are unique products of unique histories, beginning from the different indigenous sexualities that existed there before the age of European world conquest. The Islamic world (like ancient Greece, Rome, China and Japan), for example, has been characterized by forms of same-sex sexuality in which dominant men have sex with younger or lower-status males. Many precolonial African and American cultures, by contrast, had forms of "transgenderal" samesex eroticism, in which some people adopted social and sexual roles of a different gender: transgender men could be other men's wives,
European rulers often persecuted indigenous Third World same-sex eroticism. But both traditional forms of sexuality and forms that developed more recently are important in Third World subcultures and movements today. For example, transgenderal sexuality rooted in traditional 14 International Viewpoint
Dahomeyan and Yoruba religions of West Africa came on slave ships to the Caribbean and Brazil, where it has persisted underground in Christian-dominated cultures. Many gay people in Haiti find identities and a degree of acceptance in the "voudun"
gay Brazilians do in "candomblé" and gay Cubans in "Santería".
Cape Malay people who came from Indonesia to South Africa's Cape are popularly believed to be the founders of the transgender "moffie" subculture in the Cape's "Coloured" community. Around Johannesburg there are transgender "skesanas". , mostly among men of Zulu background-though it was the skesanas' butch "injonga" boyfriends who led the 1992 Johannesburg Lesbian/Gay Pride March.? The gay conquistador
Forms of same-sex sexuality that first appeared in Europe have also taken root in the Third World. Europe has its own transgenderal traditions, which arose with the decline of teudalism and the rise of towns. Beginning as early as the fourteenth century, transgender men formed sexual undergrounds in many European cities. Their kind of transgenderal sexuality, which came to Latin America with the Spanish and Portuguese, was different from indigenous Third World transgenderalisms: it was mostly urban; cut off from rather than linked to traditional family structures; associated with prostitution more than with marriage; and condemned by instead of part of the dominant religion. This European-originated, we metade not only transvestit transsexuals, but women who are called "butches". "machas" or "colonels" and men who are called "fairies", "locas", "bichas" or many other names.
Transgender people lived in South and Southeast Asia for millenia before Europeans arrived: "hijras" in India, "kathoeys" in Thailand, "waria" in many regions of preIslamic Indonesia, and transgender shamans in the Philippines before the Spanish conquest. These indigenous traditions are important for lesbian/gay identities and movements today: in Indonesia, for example, organization of "waria" began in the 1960s with official government sponsorship. But as capitalism has taken hold, transgenderal forms have grown away from their traditional roots. Transvestite beauty contests and brothels were probably not part of Asian traditions, but they have become common in Asia now as well as Latin America. Sexuality and class
Third World same-sex sexualities sometimes differ from what Europeans and North Americans recognize as "gay". Not that transgenderalism has been unimportant in European and North American movements: it was tranvestites who sparked the Stonewall Rebellion! But history in the advanced capitalist countries has pushed a different form of same-sex sexuality to the fore. With the bourgeois revolutions, industrialization and urbanization, sexual undergrounds grew quickly, notions about romantic love and desire spread, and the number of people able to live independently on their wages increased. These changes gave rise late in the nineteenth century to the concept of "homosexuality" "which for the first time included not just transgender people but all people who took part in same-sex activity. The transgenderal pattern, polarized between "masculine" and "feminine" partners, gradually gave way to a more "reciprocal" pattern. At the same time, the new pattern marked off lesbians and gay men in a new way from the majority, now explicitly defined as "heterosexual". Reciprocal lesbian/gay sexuality spread at first mainly among middle-class people and only later in the twentieth century among working-class people. But by now it is hegemonic in the lesbian/gay communities of Europe, North America and Australasia, where transvestites and transsexuals are often marginalized or excluded. Gay in the ghetto
Reciprocal lesbian/gay sexuality has come later and more unevenly to the Third World, probably because of later growth of cities; more traditional roles for women; fewer social programmes, leading to greater dependence on families; and low incomes, which make it difficult to live or spend time in commercialized gay neighbourhoods. Economic dependency seems to have delayed the emergence of lesbian/gay communities, and helped shape communities that look somewhat different from those in advanced capitalist countries: somewhat less commercialized, somewhat less ghettoized, and sexually distinctive.
These differences between dependent and imperialist countries are especially marked among the Third World's working-class and poor populations. Middle-class people are more likely to be aware of and imitate European and North American trends; the working class and poor are more likely to stick to older, transgenderal forms. Middle-class Indonesians are more likely to call themselves "gay" and reject identification with lower-class "waria" , for example. Peruvian lesbian "machas" have suspected middle-class feminists of trying to turn them into "femmes". These class differences are not necessarily eternal—in the US working-class "fairies" co-existed at least into the 1940s with middle-class "gays"-but they can be long-lived in the Third World. Lesbian/gay communities there include both transgenderal and reciprocal sexualities. The more this diversity is accepted, the more room there is for working-class and poor people in the movement. Lesbians and feminists
Women are always overrepresented among the poor, and the Third World is no exception. Where it is difficult for women to survive economically apart from men, it is difficult for them to survive as lesbians. Where working-class and poor lesbians dr manage to survive in the Third World, the tend to adopt transgenderal forms similar an
those adopted by working-class and poor gay men. "Butch/femme" relationships seem more common in the Third World today than in Europe or North America. In countries where women are married off young, lesbian couples are likely to have children from earlier heterosexual marriages, with all the financial and legal problems that can bring.
These women sustain themselves by building rich lesbian subcultures: for example, sports brings together butch lesbians from Peru to
Soweto to India. Asian lesbians
In East and Southeast Asia, women's growing economic role seems to have created new possibilities for lesbians. Lesbian groups with feminist roots are an important aspect of the new Asian organizing, for example in Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan. In India the rise of public lesbianism after the 1987 marriage of two policewomen provoked debates in feminist groups. Feminists faced with the issue of lesbianism are likely at first to fear the stigma (as if feminists did not face enough prejudice already. But they usually come to understand that lesbians' struggles an important part of their own.
Argentinian lesbians' role in the women's movement was shown in March 1996, for example, when dozens of lesbians from several groups marched as a lively contingent on International Women's Day. The International Lesbian Information Service helped make sure that lesbian issues were prominent at the 1985 UN women's conference in Nairobi, and again ten years later
In the Third World as elsewhere, love between women is often seen as sexuality escaping male control, and repressed accordingly. Many forms of women's oppression can in fact be seen as in part ways of repressing lesbianism; enforcement of heterosexuality for women can be seen "as a means of assuring male rights of physical economical, and emotional access"" Female genital mutilation in some parts of the Islamic world, for example. can be seen as among other things a form of insurance against lesbianism, all the more necessary in polygamous households where women are segregated together. AIDS and organizing
Among gay men, AIDS has become an organızing issue in many countries. In Costa Rica, for example, when AIDS provoked raids on gay bars, mandatory testing of public employees, a rash of anti-gay propaganda and even murders of several gay men in 1987-88, a wave of organizing produced four lesbian/gay organizations and mobilized hundreds of people. AIDS "became the main stimulus for gay organization in the country"* AIDS activism has continued to grow in Latin America, with a Guatemalan gay group forming around AIDS issues in
1989, Act Up groups arising in cities like
Buenos Aires, and the Chilean AIDS
Prevention Council challenging discrimination against HIV-positive workers. In
Asia, Pink Triangle in Malaysia began in
1987 in response to AIDS, while Action for
AIDS in Singapore and the Fraternity for
AIDS Cessation in Thailand (FÁCT)
emerged in 1989 as their countries first largely-gay public groups. In Africa, an openly gay AIDS foundation has recently been founded in Kenya. The eleventh International AIDS Conference in Vancouver in
1996 confirmed that with anti-AIDS drugs becoming more effective, funding for treatment in the Third World is the most important and most shamefully neglected requirement for avoiding millions of needless Solidarity and its discontents
The International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) and International Lesbian Information Secretariat (ILIS) have supported Third World groups both morally and financially. This solidarity has proved most fruitful when it has led to Third World lesbians and gay men organizing their own regional networks, as in Latin America and Asia. Lesbian networking at the 1983 Latin American Feminist Gathering, the 1985 Nairobi conference, and the 1986 ILIS conference helped lead to Latin American and Caribbean Lesbian Gatherings in 1987, 1990 and 1992, as well as the first Asian Lesbian Network conference in 1990. There have also been Asian gay conferences in 1986, 1988 and 1990 and a Caribbean lesbian/gay conference for the first time in 1996, with 14 countries represented. Lesbian/gay people inspired by regional conferences have founded new national groups, which in turn strengthen the regional networks.
Sometimes the disproportionate wealth and influence of lesbian/gay groups in imperialist countries can lead to tensions. Latin America and the Philippines are particularly open to European and North American influence, and also justifiably sensitive about it. One Mexican lesbian has commented, "We want lesbians from the U.S. and Canada because we import your theories. When a political movement happens in your countries... we know eventually it's going to reach Mexico.*
Sometimes Third World lesbian/gay immigrants return to their countries of origin with new ideas and experiences. Those who stay often organize in solidarity with people back home, like the US lesbian/gay Latino/as who helped pay for the first Latin American lesbian conference, or the lesbian/gay South Asians in North America who founded South Asian lesbian/gay organizations in 1985-86 that spread in a year or two to South Asia itself. This too sometimes leads to problems. When Puerto Ricans and other Latinos from Act Up New York came to Puerto Rico to
Lesbian and gay liberation * organize around AIDS in 1990, tensions arose with Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico. At the Asian Lesbian Network conference in 1990, tensions over the participation of Asian women from Europe and North America led to the creation of a separate group, Asian Lesbians Outside Asia. Lesbians, gays and the left
The left's role was important from the first decades of the lesbian/gay movement. The Bolsheviks, adopting the position staked out by German Social Democrats, decriminalized same-sex eroticism in the Soviet criminal code in 1922, and took part in the pro-gay rights World League for Sexual Reform throughout the 1920s. But given that Soviet Russia had no lesbian/gay movement, the new regime's policies were in some respects contradictory; and the left worldwide regressed on sexual politics from the 1930s on. The Soviet regime was anti-gay from Stalin on; the Chinese regime from the beginning. Stalinist and Maoist parties in the Third World not only justified Soviet and Chinese repression, they argued for similar repression in their own countries. While the rise of lesbian/gay movements and the falling prestige of the Soviet and Chinese regimes made progress possible, the tradition of bigotry is still not dead. Sendero Luminoso in Peru has reportedly executed lesbian/gay people, for example.
Even the Cuban revolution, which inspired a generation of non-Stalinist leftists, helped associate the left with anti-gay persecution. Cuba's Stalinist Popular Socialist Party actively promoted anti-gay policies and US imperialism backed a counterrevolutionary underground that ensured that "private space was invaded as never before"" With many gay people confined to camps in Cuba in 1965-67 and still barred from the party and the professions in the 1970s, leftists elsewhere who identified with Cuba often kept their distance from lesbian/gay liberation. In Argentina in 1973, for example, when right-wing posters linked the Fourth International-affiliated ERP to homosexuality and drugs, the left responded by chanting, "We're not faggots, we're not junkies." Cuba has grown more tolerant since the 1980s: drawing on more enlightened East German sex education materials, ending forced quarantine for people with HIV, permitting gay-positive images in plays and movies, making possible a more visible lesbian/gay community and even (since 1994) attempts at organizing an open gay group. And the left elsewhere in Latin America now thinks more
In the 1970s, popular upsurges against dictatorships converged with waves of lesbian/gay organizing and fostered more pro-gay thinking among radicals. Uprisings in Argentina in 1969 and 1971 coincided
* Lesbian and gay liberation with the rise of lesbian/gay organizing. The Brazilian Workers Party (PT) adopted progay programmes from its origins in the late 1970s: PT support has helped pass gay rights ordinances in several of Brazil's major cities and push a same-sex marrage law forward in parliament. The Mexican lesbian/gay movement, which brought thousands into the streets in the late 1970s, linked up with the PRT (Mexican section of the FI), which ran lesbian/gay leaders on its slate in the 1982
The Nicaraguan revolution also ended up having a positive impact. At first the FLN was hostile towards the country's same-sex subcultures. In 1987 harassment by the interior ministry helped break up lesbian/gay group that included FSLN members. But lesbian/gay Sandinistas— encouraged by FLN clashes with the church hierarchy, the rise of a women's movement, and solidarity from the US lesbian/gay Victoria Mercado Brigade-managed to change the climate. In 1988 the ministry of health backed a gay-organized AIDS collective. In 1989 there was an open lesbian/gay contingent in the revolution's tenth anniversary celebration. Though the FSLN's 1990 defeat was a setback, in other ways it led to new openings: as one lesbian FLN activist said, "When we lost the election ... that's when I began to HAVE a personal life." ' The first public lesbian/gay pride celebration took place in 1991, and the FSLN was the backbone of the fight against the Chamorro government's 1992 proposal for a new anti-gay law. Nicaraguan lesbian/gay organizing was echoed in El Salvador, where lesbians with roots in the FMN formed a group.
The lesbian/gay movement also converged with the national liberation movement in South Africa, where lesbian/gay organizing began in black townships after the 1976 Soweto uprising. The treason trial of gay ANC member Simon Nkoli led to a split in the lesbian/gay movement: the radical Gay and Lesbian Organization of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) and Organization for Lesbian and Gay Action (OLGA) were born. Nkoli's open gayness and European and North American lesbian/gay solidarity helped lead to OLGA membership in the United Democratic Front in 1990. The ANC came out in support of lesbian/gay rights in 1991, and- made South Africa the first country in the world to write lesbian/gay Towards liberation
So far, despite the experiences of early revolutionary Russia and Sandinista Nicaragua, no revolution has fully embraced lesbian/gay liberation. But as lesbian/gay movements advance in the Third World, the left is learning. Lesbian/gay movements for their part have to challenge capitalism in order to achieve full liberation, since only a massive transfer of wealth from North to South and rich to poor can create the material prerequisites for sexual freedom: jobs to free youth from dependence on traditional families or the sex trade, housing to give relationships the space they need, health care in order to stop AIDS, and much more. Together the left and lesbian/gay movements can enable Third World struggles to grow over into a global struggle and struggles against sexual repression to grow over into ghettoization characteristic of European and North American lesbian/gay communities, Third World movements could shape new Time to act
For now those who favour sexual liberation must seek out, learn about, learn from and actively support struggles that arise in their countries. The possibilities and tasks of lesbian/gay liberation in Third World countries will vary: they cannot be deduced from any overarching strategy or dictated from the outside by any political organization. But in general, sexual radicalism has to go together with coalitionbuilding, and unitary revolutionary organizations have to be built alongside independent lesbian/gay movements. Elements of a programme for lesbian/gay liberation that are likely to be appropriate (at least in part) in many Third World countries can be tentatively suggested:
• Encouragement of self-organization and self-determination of oppressed people as key to the solution of ANY
• As steps toward the liberation of women in general and lesbians in particular:
women's right to work, equal pay, and economic independence; women's right to marry according to their free choice, or not to marry at all, and to divorce freely;
women's freedom to have or not have children, with or apart from men, and to keep their children if they choose to leave men; women's right to be in public, dressed as they choose, without harasend to female genital
• An end to fundamentalist and compersecution, movements uniting gays with others who suffer from it; separation of the state from religion;
• In keeping with AIDS activists' 1989
Montreal manifesto, creation of an international fund for AIDS prevention, education and treatment in the Third World, funded from the North and controlled in the South, particularly by people with
HIV:
• An end to repression or harassment of sex workers; alleviation of pressures pushing people towards the sex trade by giving them the means to live as they choose; • An end to police harassment, violence and extortion; an end to discrimination based on people's sexuality or gender role; • Building of links among lesbian/gay movements in the Third World; freedom of international movement and communication, including asylum rights for people persecuted for their sexuality and equal immigration rights for same-sex partners; and • Transformation of families through recognition of diversity, including equal recognition of same-sex relationships.
Meanwhile, we have to to fight within the left. In the words of Mexican Fourth Internationalists, we need to "live in everyday alertness" so as to resist "the influence of the oppressive ideas, attitudes and practices of Notes New Left Review recently published another article by Peter Drucker, "In the Tropics There Is No Sin': Sexuality and Gay-Lesbian Movements in the Third World", NLR #218, July/August 1996, pp. 75-101. He is currently editing Same-sex sexualities and popular struggles in the Third World, an anthology forthcoming from Gay Men's Press, London, in 1998. 1. This article uses the words "lesbian" and "gay" to refer to people organizing around same-sex sexualities in the Third World, as people in the Third World often do themselves. But it will make clear that same-sex sexualities in the Third World are not necessarily the same as in Europe or North America. 2. Mark Gevisser and Edwin Cameron eds., Defiant Desire, Johannesburg, 1994, 28, 3. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence" (1980), in Ann Snitow et al. eds., Powers of Desire, New York, 1983, 183, 191. 4. Jacobo Schifter Sikora, La Formación de una Contracultura, San José, 1989, 119. In many parts of the Third World AIDS is spread mostly by heterosexual sex.
"Ist Latin American and Caribbean lesbian conference", Rites (Sept. 6. Lourdes Arguelles and B. Ruby Rich, *Homosexuality, homophobia and revolution", in Martin Duberman et al. eds., Hidden from History, 447-48. Ian Lumsden's Machos, Maricones and Gays, Philadelphia, 1996, is an excellent history of lesbians & gays under the Cuban revolution. 7. Margaret Randall, "To change our own reality and the world", Signs v 18 n 4 (summer 1993), 921 8. Max Mejía, "Introducción", in PRT, Liberación Homosexual, Mexico, 1983, p.4.