Original subtitles

*Homosexual Liberation Front (1973)* Once, one of us dreamt about a place.

It was open and full of space.

There was an avenue called Libertad.

Instead of exploiting one another, people loved each other.

No-one attacked anyone

because everyone made love with whomever they felt like.

Adults behaved like children and they caressed each other.

Everyone dreams of a place like this, without oppression.

A life worth being lived.

With love, with true love; crazy, full love.

Without exploitation.

However, that dream has nothing to do with real life.

It’s a society of oppressors and oppressed people.

The capitalist oppresses the worker. The father oppresses the son.

The male oppresses the woman. The straight oppresses the gay.

Exploitation is perfect, it’s perfect that women are inferior beings

and that homosexuals have no right to exist.

Otherwise they will be sent to jail, to a psychiatric institution or to be shot.

Marginalisation and silence.

Sex and Revolution

I was born dead.

Doctors at that time recommended smoking to open the lungs.

My mom smoked a lot.

My mom went to childbirth smoking.

She had a problem in childbirth.

The doctors couldn’t get me breathing. I had no vital signs whatsoever.

I was considered dead.

I don’t know how long I was left like this

but I do know that an aunt, who was doing her residency at that clinic

walked into the room and started slapping me again and again until I began to cry.

When I was nine, mum and dad split up. I was the only child at school whose parents had separated.

Everyone stared at me as if I had done something weird.

And my dad, even weirder, three months after the separation, committed suicide.

We found out later he had kept his bipolar condition a secret.

He acted like a teenager who would never grow up.

I had just turned nine and my brother seven. And my brother kind of lost it.

From then on, his life was troubled because he had been my father’s favourite.

For as long as I can remember, I have always liked men.

I found the male body wonderful, beautiful.

I liked boys, even grown-up men.

There was a man who used to wear a suit to the office, and once I grabbed his leg and started stroking it.

I was four or five years old.

I was taken away from him, and I yelled: I want to hold that man’s leg!

No-one ever explained things to me back then.

I started to realise I shouldn’t do it, but no-one explained to me why not.

And the growing up process was tough because, from childhood, I had to learn to hide my feelings.

I remember the family scandal when I played with a doll.

The first memories I have with a degree of eroticism, of desiring someone else

of being with someone, were always with a boy.

So it was as natural for me as breathing.

As children play, the teacher watches and may become concerned about a particular child’s behaviour.

From then on, it’s a daily task to explore the root of this problem.

I never considered it weird, but from a certain time, in second grade

being somehow effeminate, not taking part in boys’ sports

not being violent, having clear gay characteristics

made me realise it was wrong to be like that.

And my dad would look at me, thinking: ‘What have I done wrong to get this?’

But he never said anything.

Somehow, by trial and error

I began to realise that the way I was wasn’t the way others wanted me to be.

I was teased because of my effeminate behaviour.

I was too much of a girl and I was told to ‘be more manly’. I didn’t fit in.

My mum used to beat me up to make me different, change my attitude.

But I didn’t change. I was too much of a girl.

I was already a girl.

In secondary school one of my brother’s friends squeezed my back hard

and called me fag, fag, fag”..

The pain made me cry.

We were the three secondary school gays, bullied by everyone.

"To be a fag is shit, cause to be a faggot is horrible.”

"Men were born to bang women, women need to be fucked.”

Sex as violence was publicly accepted at that time for the sexuality of both men and women.

Chauvinism was a type of culture, and women participated as much as men

saying, "that man is not manly enough”, “that man is kind of limp. ”

I was in secondary school when I remember waking up in tears

and calling my brother to tell him "I like boys."

My godfather recommended me to go to therapy.

My relationship with sexuality started at an early age.

As a young boy I used to have those kinds of games with my friends.

Playing doctor and that sort of thing.

I was born this way.

The thing is, as a young boy, I wasn't aware that it wasn't totally ok.

In my teenage years, there was always some inner torture

and it was more difficult to conceal it.

It was my best kept secret, even though it was no use to me.

I knew inwardly I had been born defective.

I used to have nightmares of being chased.

I lived with huge guilt for what I was going through.

I knew there was something wrong with me and I had to change.

I had a powerful will to do something, but will has nothing to do with it

on the contrary, it's counterproductive.

I even ended up with a duodenal ulcer as a result of all

the stress, since I didn't know what to do with my life.

I had suicidal fantasies every day.

Not everyone has suicidal thoughts every day.

I found it very hard because I didn't understand anything, I had no information.

If I had known then what we know today it would have been reassuring.

I'd had an incident. When I was 15, I was caught in a situation

and because of it I ended up visiting a shrink.

It was a dreadful experience.

I think he believed that men are made the hard way.

Once, after the session, we left his office, walked down the street

and into a large sports shop where he bought me a punching ball.

Obedient as ever, I set up the punching ball at home and I hit it

because I believed it would heal me.

The thing was that I was completely rejecting what was happening to me.

I wanted to get rid of it.

When I was 20, I fell in love with a younger boy

who never knew about my feelings.

It was devastating for me.

It meant I had taken the last missing step.

Being just a purely sexual matter is one thing

but if love is at stake, an unattainable love…

This was hell because of the suffering involved.

Sex and Revolution Manifest, Homosexual Liberation Front, 1973.

Child sexuality is explicitly denied by the ideology of the system.

Even when this sexuality objectively exists, it is mutilated.

Child sexuality shows the sex object and the variety of impulses

which encompass the human libido.

From that perspective, it is the most authentic side of life.

And this huge flow of potential libido energy

has to be sidetracked towards the social goals of insane jobs.

Dominant classes transform free sexual energy into insane jobs

because they need it for exploitation and insane production.

Libido domination and sexual repression during childhood

ends with its reduction to specific body parts: genitals.

Actually, the whole body is capable of contributing to sexual pleasure

but the domination society needs the most number of body areas

to be assigned to work.

Genitalization is destined to remove from the body its pleasure generator function

in order to turn it into an instrument of deranged production

leaving sexuality with only the essential reproductive role.

That's why the system severely condemns

all forms of sexual activity

that aren't the penis-vagina type

regarding them as pathological deviations or perversions.

In order to chain human beings into deranged work

it is necessary to cripple them by reducing their sexuality to the genitals.

The castration of sexuality aims at introducing

the typical system of domination into the minds, within its thoughts.

A human being who makes the object of domination their own sex drive

will be regarded as a repressed and controlled individual in social scenarios.

A human being who makes the object of domination their sex drive

is undoubtedly ready to take the role of the controller

and/or the controlled.

I would prefer you were a murderer than a homosexual!

Psychiatric Hospital

Until 1973, homosexuality was diagnosed as a psychiatric disease

Gays and lesbians were locked up in psychiatric hospitals and underwent surgery

to remove the 'evil' from them.

Lobotomy,

uterus extraction,

egg extraction, clitoris extraction.

Castration, vasectomy

and pudenal nerve surgery

to remove all pleasurable feelings connected to orgasm.

Electroshocks, hormonal treatments, chemical treatments

to cancel the sex drive or induce vomiting.

Aversion and repulsion therapies.

No-one was cured.

Most patients fell into depression, self-harming or suicide.

The luckiest ones only went through hypnosis therapies

group therapies or psychoanalysis.

The Catholic Church and its 285 million devotees

still believe homosexuality is a disease that needs to be cured through psychiatry.

In Argentina, lobotomies have been carried out

namely the removal of brain parts to heal homosexuality.

It seems that a person incapable of thinking can't be gay.

These surgeries, worthy of Nazi concentration camps

were overseen by both Dr. Márquez, University of Buenos Aires temporary dean

and psychiatrist of the Military Hospital

and Dr. Lionet, current University of BA dean and neurosurgeon.

The former diagnosed and the latter operated.

Onganía Dictatorship 1966/70

Dictator Onganía was an active Catholic

who had appointed inspector Margaride.

He was in charge of controlling the sex life of citizens

their habits, and anything that deviated from public morality.

Police would suddenly break into motels to check if couples were married or not.

Catholic Church hunt tradition.

Obsessive surveillance over dress code.

Cary Grant's haircut was considered the only one suitable for the true male.

Cary Grant and his partner Randolph Scott.

Dictator Onganía was incensed when he saw

the Opera Bomarzo at the Colon Opera House, and banned it immediately.

He was outraged because the bulge of the male dancer's genitals could easily be seen.

In this chauvinist oppressive system

those individuals who do not fulfill the established sexual role: the homosexual

Are a danger to this sistem

Not only because they defy it, but because they reveal its oppressive role.

The desexualisation of the human body is a result of culture.

On this attempt to legitimise the ideology of the repressive exploitation system

we see the disease of culture

*Leonardo Castellani, Catholic Priest * Dear brothers and sisters

*Leonardo Castellani, Catholic Priest * If there is so much feith in the world

why there are so many calamities, so many atrocities

so much degeneration, so much disgrace and so many physical catastrophes?

In a new magazine called Extra, I read that in Buenos Aires there are

200,000 sexual degenerates or gays, and I regret to say this word here.

The only comfort is that this is happening in every city around the world.

In Rome, in St Paul's times, the same thing happened.

In his epistle to the Romans, St Paul refers to it as God's punishment for the pagans' atheism.

What's the link between atheism and homosexuality?

St Paul says that this corporal degeneration existed due to atheism

since atheism may be a psychiatric degeneration, thus one thing corresponds to the other.

What side has the Church always been on?

On this one:

everything that is unnatural is sinful.

Since we don't rule nature, we are just rulers of our will.

God rules nature.

Therefore, suicides against human nature are a crime.

Homosexuality, which is unnatural, is a crime.

Despite being not harmful to anyone, apparently.

Sex has the function to unite human beings in constantly renewed and creative ways.

The opposite means to reduce sex to only one of its possibilities:

reproduction.

That's why the chauvinist culture thinks of gays as degenerates

sick, abnormal, or deviants.

Gays actually vindicate all the free sexuality

repressed from childhood by the sexist domination system.

The same system that represses it in order to channel the sex energy

in the deranged production

is the same system defines what's good or bad

it generates guilt and bad conscience.

Gays are the scapegoat of sexual repression.

They get the most severe and immediate punishments.

In Argentina, attacking gays is a national sport.

To talk about homosexuality in Argentina

is not only pleasure, but also terror.

Those kidnaps, tortures, robberies,

imprisonments, and derisions

that gays have been through traditionally in Argentina,

preceded and may help to explain

the dictatorship genocide in 1976.

It's unbelievable to think that police attend special courses

to recognise gays and lesbians by the thickness of their ears.

What's wrong with homosexuality,

with sexuality in general in Argentina

for such harmless actions as licking the penis

or anus to cause such a scandal?

More specifically, the formation of the police,

social and family structures designed to persecute homosexuality.

There are two suspicious people prowling around that place.

It was impossible for two gays to meet up in the street on a pick-up plan,

because they would be instantly detected by this police set-up.

If two just-met gays were spotted, they would be separated.

They would be interrogated separately to find out if they had just met in the street

or if they were friends walking together.

It was outrageous, it was like a permanent Gestapo for gays.

Back then, the famous police edicts

like the 2H and others were in force.

These edicts were against disturbing the peace, and sexual incitement.

They hadn't been issued by a judge, though. They were police edicts.

Police were the ones deciding who should go to jail.

In 1969, a group of gays

gathered in a tenement on the outskirts of Buenos Aires

inaugurated the first attempt at a gay organisation in Argentina:

'Our World' group.

Its main goal was to eradicate the police edicts

and the application of edict 2H

that imprisoned gays in Devoto prison.

Transvestites used to live in Devoto prison.

All they wanted was to walk, live, exist, and be.

Its members were mainly activists of medium/low-class unions,

who were led by Héctor Anabitarte.

Héctor Anabitarte was also a Communist Party activist

who had been rejected by the Party

after coming out of the closet.

A gay in charge of young political school education

was considered a menace.

This situation diverted him from his main objective

that of generating debate within the Communist Party around sexual liberation

around homosexuality as part of sexual liberation

which needed to be part of the revolution.

He had also travelled to Russia,

where he asked how gays were treated there.

He was told: No, there aren't any gays.

-How come? -No, we force them to get married.

Those who couldn't get married were given degrading psychiatric treatment.

He had returned in shock from that trip

after realising that Russia wasn't the land of freedom he had imagined.

Laws against gay relationships also existed in the Soviet Union.

All this repressive apparatus was backed up by scientific concepts.

Psychiatric treatment was a kind of a torment.

Homosexuality was considered a bourgeois deviation,

an intrinsic degeneration of the capitalism that had to be fought against.

It was a degeneration caused by the insanity of capitalism,

therefore gays were insane.

Moscow, 24th of May, 1974.

The Soviet film director, Sergei Parajanov, has been sent to a work camp

for six years after being found guilty of homosexuality

and incitement to suicide, reliable sources said today.

The Russian director recently stood trial in Kiev accused of such crimes.

Homosexuality is a crime in the Soviet Union.

Sayat-Nova by Parajanov was censored.

Sometimes I wonder: Have I invented this or is it the truth?

It's simply the truth, but as I perceive it.

WANTED

Argentina in shock after first appearance of urban guerrilla. FAL kidnapped and liberated Paraguayan Consul.

I became an activist at FAL, Liberation Army Forces.

I was chosen as a general delegate in secondary schools.

I was only 16 when I was coordinating all the secondary schools

I organised a 50,000 student protest,

when streets were blocked and the whole city was paralysed.

One day, we were at a 17-year-old friend's birthday party.

One boy takes me away and asks me: Are you gay?

And I say: ´Yes, I'm gay, I like men.´

And he says: ´Why didn't you say anything?´

I say: ´I am treated badly when I admit it.´

And he says: ´In the political struggle gays are looked down on because they are traitors.

You are very valuable, but I doubt you'll make it.'

From then on they had me isolated, caught, cut-off.

I felt I was being held back because I couldn't participate in the same way the others did.

New York. Manhattan.

Gay bar ´Stonewall Inn.´

The night of the 27th of June, 1969,

the regulars became fed-up of police raids and decided to resist.

It had never happened before.

Astonished policemen called for more back-up units

after seeing gays from all over the city gathering at the bar door.

They were destroying police cars and assault vehicles.

Barricades and litter-bins were being set alight.

Continuous confrontations with the police.

There were shouts of ´Gay Power´ and everything was being smashed.

It took four days for things to calm down.

It was the first time in the world that gays rebelled

against a police and moral system that pursued gays.

The Stonewall riot gave rise to the first

gay liberation groups in the USA.

The Gay Liberation Front, which fought for a thorough social transformation,

organised, a year after the riot,

the first and largest Gay Pride march in history.

In Argentina,

in August 1971,

the union of Our World and a group of gay intellectuals inspired in the American Gay Power,

inaugurated the official Homosexual Liberation Front,

known by its acronym FLH.

FLH historic landmark of immense relevance

*Homosexual Liberation Front (1973)* Our movement emerges as a gay organisation

of both genres who are not willing

to be marginalised and pursued

just because one sexual orientation is practised.

This pursuit has a clear political root.

Sex itself is a political matter.

To this extent, the liberation we believe in cannot exist

in a system of economical domination,

such as the dependent Argentine capitalism.

The Homosexual Liberation Front is an anti-capitalist,

anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian movement,

which wants women's and men's liberation, oppressed by the patriarchy.

Debates start around the meaning of patriarchy domination within capitalism.

The document 'Sex and Revolution' by FLH is foundational.

It describes what the patriarchy is and explains

what this fourth feminist wave is proposing 50 years later.

*Sex and Revolution Manifesto* All private and public acts

end up being acts that fulfil a political function.

Every human being faces, from the day of his birth, a primary group:

the family, with the responsibility to educate and produce system-conditioned human beings.

In the family, the male has the absolute

economical, political and social power.

His objects of domination are first, the woman,

and secondly, the children.

The latter are the product-goods of the family factory.

In the family, similarly to other facets of social life,

the dichotomy is replicated: oppressors and oppressed.

This domination presides over each daily act.

Its essence is revealed in the male sexual power

over the female during intercourse.

Intercourse is a culturally structured institution for male satisfaction.

He has the legitimate right to enjoy sex whenever he feels like it.

The dominant male scenario in intercourse

is mirrored in everyday life.

Thus, the woman is reduced to an object of pleasure and reproduction.

For its part, the system imposes the obligation of doing the household chores

without any type of compensation, which unmasks the true situation:

domestic slavery.

In everyday life, the individual takes on the same roles found in the family.

He'll be the oppressive father, if male,

or the submissive mother, if female.

The father's authoritative figure is replicated in the policeman's figure,

the boss', the employer's, the State's:

System-bearing figures

that individuals will bow to, as they do to the father.

Therefore, the domination idea is passed on to each individual

within the family.

We, the gays and the women, are oppressed by sexism

in the heart of this capitalist society.

And the straight males are the oppressive group.

I'm still amazed at the political bravery and boldness,

as well as the conceptual certainty of that document.

Today being anti-patriarchal is mainstream,

being gay is mainstream.

However, at that time

it was very different.

The FLH, was the group I belonged to.

Homosexual Liberation Front

Being a front, it attracted many groups.

I used to be a well-behaved, but withdrawn and geeky boy.

One day I came across 'The Gay Liberation Book',

which made me realise that out of all the gay people I knew,

the most interesting were the ones who turned it into activism.

That was when I began my quest to find FLH,

which wasn't easy.

I was given a phone number. I called right away,

and was called to an interview.

It was a Saturday afternoon.

That night, they were going clubbing.

They invited me and I said yes.

That's how I ended up in a club in Lanús named Monali.

What an amazing thing. I'd never seen two guys dancing together.

Suddenly there were hundreds there and it was such a diverse range of people.

One of the great things about homosexuality is that it covers all ages, social classes, religions.

All types were there, from both rich and poor neighbourhoods.

It was always organised clandestinely in Greater Buenos Aires,

since police there were easier to bribe than Buenos Aires City police.

There were police raids every day.

Up to 400 people might be taken away in police buses.

Just horrible.

Our struggle was to do away with these police edicts

but they weren't abolished until 1996.

My story is set in 1973.

The Eros group, led by Néstor Perlongher,

was the largest within the FLH and I was involved with that.

Perlongher believed that when the time came to take power

and the revolution was manifested in all its glory,

gays would take part in a smaller revolt within the greater revolution.

The Eros group carried out the most revolutionary,

most explicit and most streetwise actions,

such as spraying messages on walls or walking into bars

and handing out leaflets before running away.

*Eros Group* Every week hundreds of gay imprisonments take place.

Why is that?

Because the bloody system of exploitation and domination is based,

ultimately, upon repressing the erotic potential of people.

Namely, if people loved each other,

they wouldn't exploit, take over, or kill.

Neither would they allow others to be exploited, taken over or killed.

The homosexuals, by showing through our sexual practice the actual

and concrete possibility of erotic pleasure not related to reproductive functions,

nor to the hierarchical vertical structure of marriage,

nor to the patriarchal family,

we gays pose a threat to unleash the wave of love upon a society

precisely based on repressing love.

That's why we gays are persecuted and humiliated outcasts.

Chauvinists can't bear our presence without sending us to prison,

killing, attacking or insulting us.

They are afraid of us.

They are afraid of our unlawful sexuality, of their own repressed,

denied and forgotten sexuality.

By making love, we gays, the disgrace to the family,

come out of hiding and start being ourselves,

questioning not only the mere foundations of the system that oppress us

but all kinds of oppression.

This struggle is about the recognition of our right to love the way we feel,

and about the end of police repression.

Grouped together in the FLH, we Argentine gays claim:

abolition of anti-gay police edicts; freedom to imprisoned gays;

a halt to political and sexual repression. That is Group Eros.

We didn't have access to the same gay community,

since people didn't agree with an explicit struggle.

The mindset was 'Behave well".

"If we don't offend, we'll be tolerated".

Many great gay intellectuals find no benefit in being part of a group.

Why become public if they are okay?

U.S.A. Feminists.

At that time the argentine left parties didn't take part in the debates

about sexual liberation, patriarchy and feminism.

A more basic debate about proletariat

and the revolutionary movement was happening.

The Homosexual Liberation Front began conversations

with the revolutionary Left movement.

However, the Left leaders weren't interested in sexual liberation.

They were aware of the repercussions of Fidel Castro's regime towards gays in Cuba.

The idea about gays needing re-education centres.

I guess they didn't know about

Fidel Castro's conception of those centres as prisons.

Gays would commit suicide; they would be raped by prison guards.

In 1965, Raúl Castro created

Military Units to Aid Production, which was aimed at those who

had taken the wrong path away from society to help them get back on track.

They were concentration camps,

to where most gays, lesbians, activists of the Cuban Revolution were sent.

Great writers such as Reynaldo Arenas,

who ended up hating the revolution

that not only sent all of them to prison but destroyed them physically.

In the Cuban Revolution!

Left-wing parties claim that homosexuality is a product of decaying capitalism.

*Sex and Revolution Manifesto*

Homosexuality existed long before capitalism,

since the original human libido doesn't scorn any of its possibilities.

Behind this left-wing parties' proposal,

lies the inability to formulate a new order, a truly new revolutionary routine.

The Homosexual Liberation Front proposes to start a revolution

that simultaneously annihilates not only the economic and political

system foundations but also its sexist ideological grounds.

Otherwise, the system of oppression will replicate automatically

after a revolutionary process that would only shake the political and economic spheres.

The official rhetoric was absolutely heteronormative and hero-worshipping.

In the '70s, guerrilla heroism

was a completely chauvinistic and heterosexual heroism

And that rhetoric permeated all.

It was prohibited to express yourself in a particular way,

to wear specific trousers, i.e. freedom of expression.

I was an activist in a political party.

I was a member of the Students' Union at my university.

Guillermo is an activist in the Socialist Party of Workers, with Trotskyist ideas

You censored yourself because you wanted to belong,

you wanted to be there.

Revolution was important, activism, the building of the Party.

And within the Party, this did exist.

One grows up fighting against a desire.

And there is a word for that.

The first homophobic, the greatest homophobic,

against the gay, is the gay themselves.

In the whole process of denying your sexuality,

you begin consolidating your own homophobia.

So, this is a filter for social relationships,

for your place in the world.

There were two books we consumed as junior party members,

both by Wilhelm Reich, a German Communist activist.

He wrote The Function of the Orgasm and The Sexual Struggle of Youth.

Man is the only biological species

that has destroyed his own natural sexual function.

That is what's wrong.

*The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich*

It turns man into a source of hatred, generating terrible disasters for humanity.

From the beginning of the patriarchal authoritarian culture

more than 4,000 years ago,

human beings have adopted a hostile attitude

towards what's alive within themselves.

They've stepped away from pleasure.

Duty has replaced the natural enjoyment of work,

and guilt has replaced the enjoyment of orgasm.

Sexually frustrated men and women define

the moral and social parameters of human sexuality.

This way is condemned to darkness; to a dirty, unhealthy life.

It is opposed to culture and development.

Sexual dissatisfaction and restrained sexual energy lead to neurosis.

Sexual repression serves the purpose of subduing human beings more easily.

The same way foal and bull castration subdues beasts of burden.

However, no one has thought about

the devastating results of that mental castration.

And no one can foresee what human society will face.

Among the hundreds of patients I treated and observed over many years,

not one single woman had experienced a vaginal orgasm.

Among men, 70% showed severe genital disorders.

We had two alternatives:

one was turning into the Sleeping Beauty

waiting for Prince Charming to wake us up.

*Homosexual Liberation Front*

The other was rebelling.

Rebelling is the only chance left for people to start living.

Protesting, claiming, vindicating our rights.

Making our dreams come true.

We recalled a Mario Benedetti quote:

'Prohibition is wonderful, permission is dire'.

We weren't the first ones, nor the only ones.

There were many people, most of the people were rebelling.

They were fighting for liberation and many of us were there, fighting.

We understood that sexual liberation was a vindication worth fighting for,

not forgetting that one can't be free while there are slaves around,

or in bed.

I was already an activist in Quilmes, south of Buenos Aires, in Berazategui.

I remember a group of comrades talking about the reason for the revolution.

We always concluded that it was art and sexuality.

To dedicate yourself to art and to lead a full and pleasurable sex life.

What I liked most about the FLH was the political involvement we were searching for.

We not only sought to liberate ourselves in order to live life without being attacked,

but also for the freedom of a whole society.

One of the slogans we had was living and loving freely in a liberated country.

We were struggling for that reason.

1973 was a really busy year.

Peronism proscription had ended after an 18-year ban of uttering the name Perón.

It was a huge move that meant Peronists could now participate in national elections.

In a meeting between Campora lawyers and the Homosexual Liberation Front,

it was proposed to create psychiatric hospitals to treat homosexuality.

It was the left-wing Peronism, they didn't understand each other.

However, the Homosexual Liberation Front knew the only possible alliance in politics

was to be found in Peronism,

since the other groups didn't have the same access.

So Peronism achieved a crushing victory with the slogan

'Campora to office, Perón to power'.

We were living Campora's springtime, and that was a really good time.

With springtime we mean that something really cool is going on.

There was a libertarian atmosphere and the Homosexual Liberation Front was a part of that.

By then, I was flourishing,

having figured out my sexuality and being able to start living well.

When Campora takes over, the most logical thing for us was to be there.

We have to come out and make ourselves noticeable -

it's the only way to get out from underground.

We have to get organised and take to the streets.

We arrived in Plaza de Mayo, a group of 15 bareheaded people.

We were isolated, because no one wanted to be around us.

An enclosed area.

Like a void around the Homosexual Liberation Front.

Suddenly no one wanted to get contaminated.

Our flag not only said Homosexual Liberation Front, but also May love and equality prevail.

And these are verses from the Peronist march.

The thing is that no one had vindicated them in that way.

It was the first time in the whole of Latin America

that a gang of homosexuals, like us,

took part in aclear political act such as the takeover of a president.

Our fight was actually to be accepted as political actors.

The national mindset was that a homosexual with social awareness

wasn't influential.

I always remember an act in the School of Law.

All the support organisations were read out,

and when the Homosexual Liberation Front was mentioned,

what happened?

Everyone burst out laughing.

Right-wing and left-wing parties,

including the most progressive left-wing party,

were actively anti-gay, posing different arguments.

Back then, a d ocument is issued by ERP called Morals and Proletarianisation.

Monogamy allowed, infidelity was punished.

Homosexuality was a bourgeois monstrosity that had to be fought.

Campora allows Perón to return from exile.

That's June 20, 1973. He landed at Ezeiza.

We welcomed him. We went there to welcome him

All roads were blocked, all closed,

the only way to get there was on foot, miles and miles.

We lined up on that road,

which got us noticed.

The people in front of us walked way up ahead,

and the ones behind us, knowing who we were,

walked way behind, so as not to merge into our group.

That was shocking.

Suddenly, instead of being the FLH, we looked like a group of lepers

nobody wanted to have contact with.

Instead of carrying banners, we should've got bells,

the same ones lepers used in the Middle Ages to announce their presence.

That was very hard,

I've just come out of the closet, just joined the FLH

and had no experience of that kind of treatment

I couldn't handle it,

and I didn't make it to Ezeiza.

I left the march because it was unbearable.

I've never been through something like that.

When they get to Ezeiza the massacre breaks out.

Right-wing Peronism against left-wing Peronism.

No casualties of the FLH in Ezeiza.

USA fosters the violent advance of fascism

and state terrorism in Latin America

to stop the left development.

All suppression of sexual reward brings about rage due to frustration.

It materialises in hatred, sadism, aggressiveness, and destructive tendencies.

The sadistic destructiveness of our times

is the result of the inhibition of natural loving life.

The orgasmically unsatisfied individual experiences anguish due to pleasure,

which is actually fear of pleasurable arousal and fear of a free and independent life.

They develop a fake character and

dread all kinds of spontaneous and excitable behaviour.

Driven by hatred and envy,

they become fierce enemies of progress.

That’s why the anguish due to pleasure is the foundation where the self-repressed individual

will recreate the denying ideologies of life: basis of dictatorships.

Or they lead to mass killings in the form of wars.

Military Coup D'etat In Chile, 11 September 1973

Anguish due to pleasure becomes a powerful source from which politicians

and conservative political parties extract their energy.

Their goal is to exert all possible kinds of reactionary political practices

to control the main working class.

There can't be permanent peace on Earth,

and all our efforts to socialise huma beings will be in vain,

while politicians and dictators with no idea of love continue controlling the masses

who are endemically neurotic and sexually sick.

There will be annihilation of life, whether through compulsive education,

compulsive social institutions or through wars.

In order to eradicate neurosis from the masses

we need first of all to eliminate the material needs of people

and guarantee an obstacle-free development of sexual happiness for each individual.

In this way, we will achieve an authentic democracy.

Society wasn't ready for us, for our vindications

The homosexual battle in Argentina

Activism wasn't ready at all.

And the right-wing Peronism accuses the left-wing Peronism

of being infested with drug heads and gays.

March Against The Military Coup D'etat In Chile

The first time I saw the Left speaking out overtly against homosexuality

was in the solidarity march with Chile,

when the left-wing Peronism - about 200,000 youngsters occupying 10 blocks

- were chanting ‘We aren’t fags, we aren’t junkies, we are FAR soldiers and Montoneros’.

Everyone sang and believed in this slogan.

Not surprisingly, they were the two bourgeoise degenerations

rejected by youngsters to make the revolution.

Not to end up on drugs and not to be gay.

I felt that being gay wasn't something I could choose;

I couldn't have chosen to like women instead of men.

Then I realised I was wrong, so I discussed it with my political organisation.

I was sent to therapy to be converted to a normal person.

'We aren't fags, we aren't junkies, we are FAR soldiers and Montoneros'.

That killed us.

Those words spoken by people with whom we'd tried to be comrades-in-struggle,

left us feeling isolated.

Left us out completely.

It slammed shut our fantasy of having a political involvement

within the current wave.

That's when the FLH shut down.

There was no other choice.

The government's tolerance towards right-wing para-police groups'

operations strengthens after the death of Juan Perón

and the takeover of his wife Isabel, surrounded by a fascist entourage.

Left-wing activists were killed daily.

The fascist magazine El Caudillo,

reported the authorities' calls to terminate gays and suggested lynching them,

in an open reference to the Homosexual Liberation Front.

For the first time the threat becomes a death threat.

For this reason, the Homosexual Liberation Front goes underground

because they believe they could be victims of the extermination plan.

At that time, a group of FLH activists step down

and propose the dissolution of the organisation.

Panic starts to spread.

Fascism has declared war on us.

*Homosexual Liberation Front* It poses the absolute annihilation of Argentine gays.

*Homosexual Liberation Front* It poses the absolute annihilation of Argentine gays.

Can gays pretend nothing is going on?

And allow ourselves to be taken peacefully away from our homes and killed like animals?

The Argentina Homosexual Liberation Front's answer is NO.

Only if we're united and use our personal fears for the benefit of all

will we manage to defeat the enemy and regain the human dignity being denied to us.

Only gay love and union can stop the fascist death machine.

Let's form control, organisation and propaganda groups.

Let's spray the FLH acronym on every wall in the country.

Those words and that bravery they are heroes to me.

Absolute heroes.

Daniel joins the People Revolutionary Army (ERP), a Marxist guerrilla organisation.

He's jailed in 1974.

I was kicked and beaten up on my way into the barracks.

I was hurled against the wall,

five guys were beating me up simultaneously

with boots, with weapons, with sticks, with everything.

I reached the cell in a mess,

but they kept torturing and beating me up.

I was forced to remain awake for 10 days, which was the worst of all tortures.

Three mock executions by shooting.

I survived because I had been jailed by the army, as opposed to Isabel Perón's Administration.

I was tortured in the most horrendous way for a month.

I was still alive, so I was taken to Magadalena Military Prison

and kept in solitary confinement, unable to see anyone, isolated.

The next decade of my life, from my 20s to 30s,

I would be in jail.

It was brutal. Ten years felt like an eternity.

You weren’t permitted to speak with anyone,

you weren’t permitted to see the sunshine,

you were punished for no reason and you had no visitors.

You had nothing,

it was just you with your body in an enclosed space with nothing else.

If you wanted to use the toilet, you had to shout for four hours

until you were taken there.

Ten years of your life.

All you could do was try to survive, not give up.

I instantly resorted to humour. I laughed at myself.

In 1975, during the famous strike in Villa Constitución,

we as the PST, a political party, launched a solidarity campaign and a strike.

That's when we were arrested and kidnapped.

We were a group of seven comrades.

We were robbed of everything.

We were taken to a base and tortured.

What saved us was the fact that we didn’t look like guerrilla members.

That September, eight comrades were killed in the La Plata massacre.

We were brave and carefree.

Merely handing out leaflets could lead to being beaten up or disappeared.

It was daily life,

you were aware you were living on the edge

and your only concern was how to hide any important data.

During the kidnapping, mock executions by shooting were performed.

At this point in my life I'm horrified to say

that I don't remember being distressed about it.

The Videla military dictatorship unleashed a systematic pursuit of every gay person.

This prevented all forms of organisation and forced us to focus on surviving.

The same day of the Coup D’etat I happened to pop by the Mail Office

to pick up a letter from my mother.

She told me the police had been in my hometown,

broken into her house, and had taken her to the station.

My mum was a school principal, it was a complete scandal.

To force my mum to give them my address,

my 12-year-old brother was given a mock execution by shooting squad.

So I had to leave my home in Berazategui.

We gays didn't know what would happen to us if arrested,

either we could be taken to the station or end up being shot.

Due to the general atmosphere and the fear,

gays were confined to private places.

In such a deadly atmosphere,

we gays needed to keep on fucking,

so we sought places we could go.

I think continuing to have sex was a way to fight against this deadly order.

That's why we continued looking for places away

from surveillance and morality brigades.

That's how we found public toilets.

We called the sexually-active public toilets Tea Rooms.

Hidden camera of Ohio Police (1962).

Utilised to condemn gays.

It turned out to be an excellent meeting spot for an initial sexual encounter,

to meet people or simply for satisfaction.

Especially the public toilets in train stations

where there were many passers-by.

It was like a theatre piece were each person had a role.

There was the morality policeman, the crazy young queen,

the fat queen, the ugly queen.

Everyone moved as if they were on a chessboard

with positions constantly changing.

During dictatorship years,

Tea Rooms were regarded as sordid or free places that had ceased to exist.

Brotherhood places.

Teenagers desperate to have their first sexual experience went there,

and so did I.

I was at secondary school and I remember seeing

some kind of activity at Belgrano R train station.

I used to peep.

I realised I could go there for sexual satisfaction.

You are really horny in your teenage years

and you don't know what to do.

You’re gay and you think you’re the only one on Earth.

Picking up on the street was dangerous from the activist point of view,

since many gays had disappeared.

Sexually attractive men were used as kings to seduce gays on the streets

and then kill them

There were no social networks nor gay clubs.

We relied on the vibe,

on our female intuition through sightings and codes..

You couldn’t just simply approach someone, you had to take a long detour.

So going after someone or being pursued

was dangerous due to plainclothes police officers.

There were other public places.

Some cinemas recreated a sex atmosphere, a place for making out.

Isabel Sarli movies were shown,

aimed at a lonely and horny male audience.

So queens would approach straight men.

The gay looking for the king.

There was a quest for the opposite.

It was a time when gays hadn't seized equality,

there weren't fully gay couples,

with gay domestication

and assimilation into liberal societies and democracies.

When writing about his life in the pre-Castro Cuba, Reinaldo Arenas says

that he didn't fuck with peers, i.e. gays, but he would fuck the father of a family.

It was always a quest for a mystery, a chance, a thing that was decoded.

It wasn't predicted nor foreseen.

At that time, during dictatorship years, our badge was wearing tits.

Taking to the streets in dictatorship years .

with inflatable tits

You had to have the balls to do that!

It was about surviving at that time.

Because many transvestites were found dead

and we didn't know how that happened.

Valeria Del Mar was kidnapped in a clandestine jail,

to be raped by policemen.

We were pushed out of the car.

There was a fat police officer at a desk who said:

'You brought the two bunnies we'd asked for'.

My friend Romina and I looked at each other

because we were only 20 years old.

We were taken to the back cells on the 2nd floor.

Valeria Del Mar was the only witness to report the robbery of a baby

who was given birth to by an arrested-disappeared in the dictatorship jail.

I was having a shower when I heard a woman shouting

‘Bring a towel. The baby is coming’.

I felt the birth, a baby was crying.

After the labour, a police officer said,

'Fill up this bucket and clean up your crap.'

And I saw a pale, dirty, bloodied woman.

I told her I'd help her fill the bucket.

The policewoman overheard me, came in, looked around

and said to the other officer:

'What is this fag doing here? Why didn't you tell me?'

The officer grabbed me by my hair, and pushed me shouting

'What are you doing here, you bloody faggot!'

I slipped on the girl's blood and was dragged back to the cell,

where I was dumped on the ground. I was dirty.

As I was being dragged,

I could see the other officer holding a baby.

The girl was there and I spent the whole day naked in the cell.

Valeria Del Mar survived. She was the only transvestite in a trial against the dictatorship.

The mother of the stolen baby remains disappeared.

Democracy returns in 1983,

political prisoners are released.

When I was released I felt like a baby thrown onto the streets.

We were given back the clothes we had worn when jailed

ten years before.

Old trainers, bell-bottom trousers,

which were the only ones I had for six weeks after my release,

and a t-shirt that still fits me ten years later.

I put those ridiculous clothes on

and I looked like I was dressed up for a Village People party.

Also, the t-shirt was completely psychedelic.

When people saw me in the street, they did like this…

I had been jailed in a world where everyone wore a suit.

I couldn't get what was going on now.

Men were wearing shorts, sleeveless shirts

and they greeted everyone with a kiss.

The world has turned gay, I thought.

Shirtless guys in parks sunbathing.

Today all these things seem normal to us,

but back in 1983,

someone who had been in a cellar for 10 years couldn’t believe his eyes.

San Francisco, 1977. Harvey Milk is

the first gay activist elected official.

The world regime started to change,

from the old suffering gay to another gay regime.

Though still not visible, a new time of media exposure had begun.

November 27, 1978 Harvey Milk is assassinated

by Dan White, his homophobic political rival

When democracy started, the police apparatus remained unchanged.

It was still unpunished.

The police were the same as in the dictatorship years.

The morality brigade was still working

and there was a specific interest in the pursuit of the gay community.

To stop police abuse, Carlos Jáuregui

creates the Argentine Gay Community (CHA).

In 1984, the National Commission for the Disappearance of People (CONADEP),

documented and published

the crimes in the dictatorship years in the book Nunca Más.

The President of the Argentine Gay Community,

Carlos Jáuregui,

explained many years later that the rabbi, Marshall Meyer,

one of the heads of CONADEP,

confirmed the existence of a record of 400 gay prisoners,

who were tortured, raped and disappeared

due to their sexual identity, during the dictatorship.

we were treated sadistically and violently the disappeared Jewish prisoners.

The rabbi also said these cases weren't included

in the Nunca Más book,

due to pressure from the Catholic Church.

Carlos Jáuregui, the first president of the Argentine Gay Community,

states that the media must also be central to our cause.

Risks Of Being Gay In Argentina

We will be educating through the media.

Regarding a minority as dangerous is the same approach

to the laws proposed in Nazi Germany in 1936.

Little by little society will get used to the images and the voice.

That's the way to remove the terror that surrounds us.

The idea was the visible gay,

the gay who could step out from the dark, from the catacombs,

make a place for himself - and change from the gay

who suffers due to his isolation into a gay who lives normally.

Rock Hudson laid the HIV issue on the table worldwide.

I began to panic because I had already started living with my sexuality

by the time Rock Hudson came out of the closet

in Hollywood to say he had the gay plague.

By 1985 the first echoes were coming from the USA and Europe.

The issue hadn't appeared in Argentina yet.

Two years later, in 1987, the first HIV tests were carried out

in the Argentina Gay Community.

From then on, we began living a time of great dread and discrimination.

Houses where someone with HIV had lived in were burnt down.

We used to live in terror because

it was considered a death sentence.

A form of termination through the bodies.

HIV epidemy is a hole in a generation,

and the gay struggle was a huge backward step.

Many things had been achieved,

but overnight we turned into the representatives of a world epidemic.

The pandemic that was immediately regarded as the gay plague.

Another casualty of the gay plague in Argentina

Discrimination at first was brutal.

It had hurt. I’d felt humiliation and an overwhelming grief

when I heard my friend’s brother, who’s a doctor, saying ‘Let them die alone.’

My friends began to die too.

One funeral after the other.

The whole support system stemmed from the organised gay groups.

Argentina included.

The Argentine Gay Community (CHA) was first to start work on it.

The first Spanish leaflet I remember,

explaining how to put on a condom, was published by the CHA.

We created a foundation called HIV Alternative Vision.

The first thing we did with donations

was to remodel Room 17 from Muñiz Hospital,

which is where at that time all the HIV-infected patients were taken.

In the main San Francisco paper, The San Francisco Chronicle,

there was a front page article saying

"Those who have been rejected...

...by the way they love...

...were showing the world the true meaning of love."

That was in relation to all the social work and service

given to the community by the gay organisations.

Here it was the same.

The CHA was the first one to act.

Our work was based on making people feel fine with themselves.

By doing so, their body would react better,

the immune system would be stronger.

The key was the preliminary work so the disease wouldn't explode.

The HIV virus takes the life of Carlos Jáuregui in 1996.

In 1992, Nestor Perlongher had died of HIV, a model of the Homosexual Liberation Front.

Every Thursday, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo march.

The FLH survivors were contacted by them.

We marched with the Mothers in Plaza de Mayo

and we finally arrived at the same place

we had been 40 years earlier.

We walked in their footsteps.

One last pep talk: We don't want to be persecuted,

nor caught,

nor discriminated,

nor killed,

nor cured,

nor analysed,

nor explained,

nor tolerated, nor understood.

We just want to be acknowledged.

In 2010 same-sex marriage bill is passed in Argentina.

It was the first Latin American country to do so.

In 2012, was recognises the right to have

a self-perceived sexual identity in the national ID.

Currently, millions of women fight against

chauvinist violence, gender equality and legal abortion.

Translated by Cesar E. Pretelli & edited by Gay Hollister caesartranslations@gmail.com