“I Embody Revolution”: Mexico’s Gay and Lesbian Left and Central American Revolutionary Solidarity, 1978–85

In the summer of 1979, two watershed moments in concurrent struggles for liberation took place within weeks of each other: on June 29, Mexico City’s first gay pride parade took place, attended by thousands. Two and a half weeks later, Anastasio Somoza’s dictatorship in Nicaragua was toppled by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Both were regarded as landmark events by many leftist activists in Mexico, and for some, they were also understood as critical triumphs within the same, larger struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people. Indeed, many Mexican activists worked actively for both causes simultaneously. This paper explores the intersections between the activism of Mexico’s radical gay and lesbian left in the late 1970s-mid 1980s, and Mexico’s vibrant movement of solidarity with Central American revolutions in those same years. Based on archival sources, including secret police surveillance of activists, and oral histories, I examine this unique, under-studied moment of revolutionary fervor and optimism in Mexico in the late Cold War period, in which the gay and lesbian left played a critical but previously largely unrecognized role. As gay men and lesbians faced police harassment, raids and other forms of state violence, and as labor organizers, human rights activists, socialists and communists adjusted to a shifting and uncertain political landscape within Mexico in the late 1970s, many came together to support what they regarded as the critically important anti-authoritarian and anti-imperialist revolutions of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. I demonstrate that they did so in part as a form of protest against the repression they faced at home, and that the Mexican state’s own support of Central America’s exiles and revolutionaries in those years opened an unusually free space for solidarity activists to openly condemn authoritarianism and to demand freedom and liberation for all people, including Mexicans.