The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State

Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship

David Paternotte, Manon Tremblay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409410669
• eBook ISBN: 9781317025832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

By analyzing the relationship between lesbian and gay movements and the state, this ground-breaking book addresses two interconnected issues: to what extent is the lesbian and gay movement influenced by the state and, to a lesser extent, whether the lesbian and gay movement has somehow influenced the state, for instance by altering forms of sexual regulation. Given the diversity in national trajectories, this book covers fifteen countries. This enables the volume to shed light on different kinds of relationships between these groups and the state, as well as on the way they have evolved in recent decades. The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State: Comparative Insights into a Transformed Relationship fills an important gap in the literature on lesbian and gay activism. However, this book also provides important and innovative insights into broader issues in international political science, public policy and comparative politics, as well as issues in social movement studies. These include the role of the state in constructing citizen identities, the heteronormative way in which many traditional citizen entitlements and benefits were constructed, state - civil society relations, judicial activism, the impact of federalism, and the increasing globalization of sexual identities.

Chapter 1 Argentina: A Queer Tango between the Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State

Jordi Díez¹

¹ This chapter draws largely from data obtained through in-depth personal interviews from May to September 2009 in Argentina. A total of 45 activists and government officials were interviewed. This research obtained ethics approval according to guidelines established by the government of Canada on research on humans. Funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315556178-2

Introduction

Following the submission of a judicial appeal by Alex Freyre and José María di Bello to the denial of their marriage licence application, in November of 2009 a Buenos Aires judge handed down a historic ruling arguing that Argentina’s civil code prohibition of gay marriage was unconstitutional and ordered the city’s administrators to issue the couple a marriage licence. Despite the surprising decision by the city’s right-wing mayor not to appeal the ruling, on the eve of their wedding another judge issued an injunction ordering the city’s administration not to issue the marriage certificate on grounds that the previous judge did not have competency to rule on that area, thereby annulling the marriage. Flanked by gay and lesbian activists and numerous prominent politicians, the couple gave a highly emotional news conference, explaining how their right to marry had been taken away by a legal technicality, and they vowed to fight on. It appears that they were meant to make history: the socially progressive governor of Tierra del Fuego decided to intervene and ordered her province’s civil register’s office to honour the first ruling despite the fact that it had been made in a different jurisdiction. On December 28, 2009, Freyre and di Bello finally wedded in the Western Hemisphere’s southernmost city, Ushuaia, becoming the first same-sex couple in Latin America to have contracted marriage.

These dramatic events represented the beginning of important victories in the struggle waged by Argentina’s Lesbian and Gay (LG) movement to challenge the traditional definition of marriage; a struggle that culminated with the reforms to the Civil Code approved by the Argentine Congress in 2010 that allowed for gay marriage nationally. The reforms made the country the first in Latin America, and the second in the hemisphere, in which this right has been extended to its entire citizenry. These victories are the result of the significant changes that Argentina’s LG movement has undergone. From being a movement whose members had not long ago struggled simply to obtain legal recognition for the first gay and lesbian organization, the movement has managed to place Argentina at the forefront of gay rights in Latin America, and the world, by forcing the state to expand the very definition of citizenship in unprecedented ways.

What explains such change in a relatively short period of time? There is no doubt that part of the explanation lies in the internal dynamics that have played out within the movement over the years, a movement that, as the oldest LG movement in Latin America, has undergone important changes. However, it is impossible to understand the evolution of the Argentine LG movement and its fight for gay rights without looking at the intersection between the movement and the state. In this chapter, I answer the guiding question of this volume – to what extent is the lesbian and gay movement influenced by the state – by arguing that the LG movement’s objectives and more general characteristics of its collective action in Argentina have been shaped by the state in three areas: the country’s institutional framework which is characterized by strong federalism; the judicialization of politics that has taken place since the mid 1990s; and the relative availability of government allies. Nevertheless, while literature on social movements emphasizes the important role political opportunity structures play in shaping social movements (Kitschelt 1986, Tarrow 1998, Tilly 1978), scholars have also drawn our attention to factors such as ideas, discourses and international forces (Della Porta and Diani 2006). In the case of the Argentine LG movement, it appears that the state has influenced the movement significantly, but that perhaps equally as significant have been both the type of democratization the country has undergone and the influence the international GL movements have exerted on the articulation of the movement’s demands. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first provides a brief overview of Argentina’s LG movement. The second looks at the impact the country’s type of democratization has had on the movement. The last section examines the relationship between the movement and the state and analyses the impact the latter has had on the former in three areas: federalism, the judicialization of politics, and alliances between state and non-state actors.

Evolution of the Movement

Argentina has the oldest LG movement in Latin America. Inspired by the Stonewall riots, and despite being under a military dictatorship, a group of homosexuals, led by Héctor Anabitarte, founded the first gay group in the region in 1969: Nuestro Mundo (Our World). As was the case with LG mobilization in Latin America, the Argentine movement emerged from within the revolutionary Left which sought to bring about substantial political change. As such, Nuestro Mundo was mostly formed by left-leaning individuals, many of whom belonged to the youth wing of the banned Communist Party. However, the stifling environment created by constant police harassment and repression made it impossible for the group to grow beyond a handful of individuals. In August 1971, members of the group joined forces with social-science students and faculty from the Buenos Aires University to form the clandestine Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front, FLH). While decisively middle class, the group incorporated individuals with various perspectives on social change, from anarchists to members of religious organizations. The group’s objectives were directly influenced by the discussions similar groups were having in the US and articulated a discourse based on the need to liberate homosexuals from repression. However, because of the political situation in Argentina, the discourse was framed around the need to liberate homosexuals from repressive structures that included the authoritarian regime as well as imperialism (Bazán 2006: 293–304).

The 1976 military coup devastated the movement. The military regime that emerged, which was particularly brutal, prohibited all forms of collective action as it set out to ‘cleanse’ society through the elimination of ‘subversive’ left-wing opposition. It declared homosexuality to be one of the many types of subversions to be fought. The harassment, imprisonment, torture and murder of homosexuals became government policy during this darkest period of Argentine history and the movement completely disappeared. While very limited spaces, both public and private, existed for fleeting sexual encounters during the dictatorship, it was simply impossible for homosexuals to socialize, let alone organize; the priority became mere survival. Many activists decided to halt their activism for fear of persecution and many others chose to exile themselves internationally.

The repression exerted by the military dictatorship on Argentine homosexuals was profound. It is estimated that approximately 400 of them disappeared and accounts of grotesque physical abuses perpetrated against them abound (Brown 2002). But the dictatorship had more than a physical effect on gays and lesbians in Argentina as its brutality deeply marked the movement. Democratic politics provided gays and lesbians with new spaces to socialize and several bars and clubs opened but police forces continued to raid them and harassment was a common occurrence. Scarcely three months after Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989) was sworn in as the new elected president of the new democratic era in 1983 approximately 50 activists were detained in the gay club Balvanera (Jáuregui 1987: 201–2).

A month after the Balvanera raid, a group of approximately 150 gays and lesbians decided to hold a meeting to establish Argentina’s first LG organization: Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA, the Argentine Homosexual Community). Energized by mass mobilization within the larger context of democratization, these individuals sought to create public awareness of their continued repression. As such, soon after the formation of the CHA, two prominent members of the organization agreed to be photographed, embracing, on the cover of a national magazine, Siete Días, for an article entitled ‘The Risks of being a Homosexual in Argentina’. The article galvanized gays and lesbians, many of whom decided to express publicly, through a series of interviews with national media, cases of abuse. The publicity gained through these public interviews further encouraged other Argentine homosexuals to join the movement. The early goals of the CHA, as established by its constitution, were to acquire office space, to publish an information bulletin and to provide legal services to the larger gay and lesbian community.

At its inception, the CHA’s broader strategy was to achieve its various goals and objectives through the articulation of demands through a discourse framed around the link between democracy and human rights. Perhaps nothing illustrates this approach better than the decision of CHA members to run in May 1984 an advertisement in the daily, Clarín (the most widely read daily in the country) that read: ‘with discrimination and repression there is no democracy’ (Brown 2002: 124). The movement’s framing of its struggles around the need to deepen democracy through the respect and expansion of human rights shaped the articulation of its demands, strategies and activities during its first 15 years after the return of democracy. The struggle was therefore mostly characterized by the fight for negative rights (the right to be left alone). One of their main objectives was the repeal of legal provisions that allow police forces to detain individuals for displaying public acts that counter ‘good moral behaviour and customs’ (Códigos Contravencionales).

The LG movement strengthened during the 1990s as numerous organizations proliferated. However, the CHA, having decided to pursue its goals through the political arena, was the most visible. The mid 1990s marked an important turning point in the movement’s evolution. Through effective pressure from LG groups, the City of Buenos Aires enacted a new constitution in which discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation became illegal and, in 1998, introduced reforms that saw the deletion of the legal provisions used by the police to detain GL citizens. However, while homosexuality stopped contravening the law, transvestism did not and, as a result, the movement experienced a significant split as members of the transgendered community were forced to continue to focus their struggle on the acquisition of negative rights. With their own battle won on this front, and as civil unions became top of the international movement’s agenda, prominent LG leaders shifted focus to pursue obtaining civil unions in the city of Buenos Aires. With significant political skill and taking advantage of the divisions among the political elites the 2001 economic crisis brought about, the movement was successful in having the city approve civil unions in 2002, making it the first jurisdiction in Latin America to do so.

Since 2002, the movement suffered another important division mostly as a result of the adoption of gay marriage as a political objective by an important number of activists. After the 2002 civil-union victory, the CHA, among other issues, decided to pursue civil unions at the national level using similar political strategies. However, in 2007, a new organization, Federación Argentina de Lesbianas, Gays, Bisexuales y Trans (FALGBT, Argentine Federation of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals and Trans), funded by Spanish LG NGOs – such as Fundación Triángulo (Triangle Foundation) and the Agencia Extremeña de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarollo (Extremaduran Agency for International Development and Cooperation) – emerged and adopted marriage, not civil unions, as a political objective. While the FALGBT has pursued several other policy objectives (such as reforms in social security), gay marriage has become their most visible demand.

Democratization and the International Dimension

Argentina’s LG movement has been significantly influenced by the type of democratization the country has undergone. As with much else in the politics of the country, social movements have been indelibly shaped by the transition away from one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the region. Literature on Latin America has emphasized the role transitions to democracy have played in the type of relationships that are established between state and society (Karl 1990). Political opportunities arise in countries undergoing significant social and political change and democratization contexts play an important role in how social movements decide to articulate and advance their demands. This has certainly been the case in Argentina (Bonner 2008). Democratization profoundly influenced the early phase of the evolution of the LG movement as its emergence took place within a context of wide social mobilization and democratic transition. Both the saliency of human rights and broad social mobilization – which have been at the core of Argentine politics since democratization – have allowed the movement to frame its demands within larger political debates in the 1980s. But questions of what kind of rights the state should advance to citizens have continued to be central to Argentine politics and have not been limited to the early phases of democratic transition. Indeed, Argentine politics in post-transition Argentina has been importantly characterized by a continued public negotiation between state and society on the content of citizenship. Such negotiation has included socio-economic rights. The unprecedented dismantling of the welfare state that Carlos Menem (1989–1999) brought about with the introduction of neo-liberalism meant a shift from a corporatist type of citizenship to a neo-liberal one in which the state abdicates the responsibility to guarantee rights as the market is expected to provide socio-economic goods. While his economic programme received support from some sectors of society, it was fiercely opposed by sectors within the labour and other movements who contested the new definition of rights. In effect, human rights organizations in Argentina incorporated socio-economic rights into their struggle and managed to place them at the centre of national debates (Bonner 2008: 142–48). The public negotiation of citizenship was given renewed impetus with the arrival of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) in 2003. Kirchner declared that human rights would be given priority and followed through with a variety of key decisions. Most notably, he requested an annulment of the amnesty laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s that had produced obstacles to the prosecution of perpetrators of abuses during the dictatorship. President Cristina Fernández (2007–2011) has continued to keep them atop the public agenda.

This negotiation of the content of citizenship in Argentine politics has certainly shaped the movement’s articulation of various demands. Examples abound. Since the decision of the National Administration of Social Security in 1998 that the widows of deceased same-sex partners could not have access to pensions, LG activists have argued that such action violates the expansion of socio-economic rights to every citizen in Argentina. The agency expanded pension rights to same-sex couples in August of 1998. Further, the argument that inequality is irreconcilable with full citizenship rights has been at the core of FALGBT’s pursuit of gay marriage and not civil unions. Its leaders have argued that the pursuit of civil unions would create two types of citizenship. But, perhaps more importantly, the negotiation of citizenship also seems to explain the relatively early success in the acquisition of their demands when compared to other countries in the region and, indeed, the Global South. The adoption of civil unions by the city of Buenos Aires in 2002 exemplifies...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Argentina: A Queer Tango between the Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State
• 2 Australia: Parties, Federalism and Rights Agendas
• 3 Belgium: The Paradoxical Strength of Disunion
• 4 Brazil: From AIDS to Human Rights
• 5 Canada: The Power of Institutions
• 6 India: From Tensions to Transformation
• 7 The Netherlands: Depoliticization of Homosexuality and Homosexualization of Politics
• 8 Poland: Sovereignty and Sexuality in Post-Socialist Times
• 9 Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia: Arrested Development!
• 10 South Africa: Opportunities Seized in the Post-Apartheid Era
• 11 Spain: Building Reciprocal Relations between Lesbian and Gay Organizations and the State
• 12 United Kingdom: Changing Political Opportunity Structures, Policy Success and Continuing Challenges for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Movements
• 13 United States: Multi-Institutional Politics, Social Movements and the State
• Conclusion
• Index