The Politics of Sexuality in Latin America: A Reader on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights

Out in Public: Gay and Lesbian Activism in Nicaragua

Out in Public Gay and Lesbian Activism in Nicaragua Florence E. Babb : I return to Nicaragua after being away for two years to find the capital city transformed with a new city center boasting hotels, shopping malls, and multiplex cinemas. The movie Boys Don’t 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 community. Rita, a longtime  activist and self-proclaimed“dyke,” tells me she wishes all the legislators in the country would see it and expand their notion of citizen rights to include sexual minorities. : “I’m neither in the closet nor on the balcony,” is the way that Carlos, a Nicaraguan in his early thirties, describes himself to me during Gay Pride Week in June. We are sitting with a couple of other men in the local gay bar they run, waiting for a panel discussion to begin on  and safer sex practices. While Carlos is quite comfortable with his sexuality as a gay man, and has a middle-class awareness of the globalized identity that gay confers, like many others in Managua’s  (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) population, he does not feel a need to proclaim his identity loudly. 274 : At a weekly Sunday service of the gay Metropolitan Church in Managua, the young pastor named Alberto speaks of “God’s love for everyone, rich and poor, gay, straight, lesbian, and bisexual.” The dozen assembled men—including several I know as renowned drag queens, here wearing street clothes—and a couple of women pass a candle from one person to the next, saying “God loves you as you are.” They take communion and Alberto gives thanks to the jornada, in reference to Gay Pride Week, for allowing the  community to speak out about human rights. They conclude their mass with guitar music and flirtatious dancing on the patio. A few days later, some of these same individuals are present when I give a talk based on my research on lesbian and gay politics and culture in Nicaragua. The venue is Puntos de Encuentro (Gathering Points), Nicaragua’s largest feminist nongovernmental organization (), and I am addressing the small community of activists and their allies. The audience includes women and men who work in other s, such as Xochiquetzal , which offers services relating to health, sexuality, and . After I finish, a lively conversation ensues about whether there is truly something that can be called a“movement ” in the country. Later, a reporter asks whether I would say that it is “normal” to be homosexual and whether human rights should extend to the homosexual population . I don my anthropological hat for the occasion and assure the well-meaning man that homosexuals are normal and deserving of full rights to social inclusion.
These are a few of the many private and public responses to an increasingly vocal and visible gay and lesbian presence that I have encountered in Nicaragua since . As a foreign researcher and observer of the public emergence of an  community and social movement since the Sandinistas lost the  elections, I had expected to find some resistance to my participation in the charged discussion.What I have found, to my surprise, is a passion for debating the local, national, and transnational aspects of gay culture and politics with as broad and international a group as possible. To understand the current context, however, one needs to look back at the changes that have occurred over the last twenty-five years. The revolutionary Sandinista National Liberation Front () government (–) provided an opportunity for disenfranchised women and men to become players in the social drama transforming much of the country in the s. Along with agrarian, health, education, and legal reform, gender equality became part of the agenda.And the new constitution of  included women’s rights under the rubric of protecting the family as the basic unit of society. The inclusive vision of the Sandinistas did not extend, however, to a nonheteronormative conception of the Nicaraguan family and society. When lesbians and gay men began organizing in the second half of the s, the Sandinistas were not preOut in Public / 275 pared to extend their revolutionary vision to this new constituency by supporting their call for social recognition and civil rights.As in other socialist-oriented societies, homosexuality was regarded as part of the “decadent” bourgeois past, and...