Building lesbian and gay solidarity with nicaragua
NicaNotes: We are all Nicaragua: The Sexual Diversity Community
By Becca Renk
(Becca Renk has lived in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, for more than 20 years, active in sustainable collective development with the Jubilee House Community and its project, the Center for Development in Central America. Becca coordinates the Casa Benjamin Lindersolidarity project in Managua.)
In 2008, accompanying the Sandinista party’s return to might, a law was passed overturning the penalization of homosexuality and making it illegal to discriminate against someone based on sexual orientation. (Photo: El 19 Digital)
The Story of Julia Chinamo
“I realized when I was nine years mature that I liked boys,” Julio Sanchez tells me. Julio is also established by the nickname “Julia Chinamo” and socially as “Nahomy Campbell.”
“My father was a military gentleman, a macho gentleman. My aunt told him, ‘Look at Julito, he’s queer.’ I didn’t appreciate boys’ things: no marbles, no tops, no cars for me. I loved dolls, I loved fixing their hair, I loved to wear my grandmother’s heels, my grandmother’s apron. I loved all the women’s stuff, that was my thing,” Julio laughs out clamorous .
Transnational Solidarity on the Same-sex attracted and Lesbian Left: An Interview With Emily Hobson
Emily Hobson: The book is a history of the gay and lesbian left in the United States, centering on the San Francisco Bay Area from the end of the 1960s through the depths of the AIDS epidemic and the end of the Cold War, from 1968 to 1991. The book traces not simply gay and lesbian people who happen to be involved in broader drastic struggles, but also the creation of a leftist gay and lesbian politics – efforts by activists to explain the specific relationship between sexual liberation and anti-racist, anti-imperialist, internationalist left solidarity. So, in regard to the association between liberation, solidarity, and sexuality: gay and woman loving woman leftists saw sexual liberation and radical solidarity as interdependent. First, they held that radical solidarity was incomplete without a pledge to sexual liberation. Second, and perhaps more surprisingly, they argued that sexual liberation would only be achieved by acting in solidarity with other movements to win a community that was anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and feminist.
AL: The histories of homosexuality and the left are deeply inte 2000: I return to Nicaragua after being away for two years to find the capital city transformed with a novel city center boasting hotels, shopping malls and multiplex cinemas. The movie Boys Dont Cry is playing and its story of sexual transgression in the U.S. Midwest is meeting a favorable response, at least among those I talk to in the progressive collective. Rita, a long-time AIDS activist and self-proclaimed dyke, tells me she wishes all the legislators in the state would see it and expand their notion of citizen rights to incorporate sexual minorities. 2002: Im neither in the closet nor on the balcony, is the way that Carlos, a Nicaraguan in his preliminary thirties, describes himself to me during Gay Pride week in June. We are sitting with a couple of other men in the local male lover bar they jog, waiting for a panel discussion to begin on HIV and safer sex practices. While Carlos is quite easy with his sexuality as a homosexual man and has a middle-class consciousness of the globalized identity that gay confers, like many others in Managuas LGBT (lesbian, lgbtq+, bisexual, transgender) population he does not feel a desire to proclaim Karen Kampwirth.LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2022. 360 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8165-4279-6. Reviewed by Sydney Marshall (Duke University) In LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements, political scientist Karen Kampwirth explores the social and political transformations of the LGBTQ community in Nicaragua before, during, and after the Sandinista revolution (1979-90). Building on a rich historiography spanning across different disciplines, Kampwirth argues that the political and social changes gained by the LGBTQ community in the 2010s were the result of long-term social and political developments. The administration of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo (specifically between 2007 and 2017) incorporated positive LGBTQ policies to provide legitimacy to their regime and signal a current image to the international community. Most significantly, LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua is a book about exactly that: politics. This publication addresses a gap in the histor summary LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. Lavender and Red recounts a far different story: a history of gay radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and racism. This politics was born in the late 1960s but survived well past Stonewall, forming into a homosexual and lesbian left that flourished through the finish of the Cold War. The gay and woman loving woman left found its center in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place where sexual self-determination and revolutionary internationalism converged. Across the 1970s its activists embraced socialist and women of color feminism and crafted queer opposition to militarism and the Fresh Right. In the Reagan years they challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, collaborated with their peers in Nicaragua, and mentored the first direct deed against AIDS. Bringing together archival research, oral histories, and vibrant images, Emily K. Hobson rediscovers the extreme queer past for a generation of activists tod
Out in Public: Queer and Lesbian Movement in Nicaragua
Published on H-LatAm (July, 2023)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Queer and Lesbian Left