Introduction: Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally

Transnational Homophobias, Queer Activist Interventions

While gay rights are now often marked as “Western,” the Global North does not stand outside a contemporary global biopolitics that constructs a shifting cast of sexual and gender dissidents as threats to nation, family, culture, religion, morality, and health, and that often operates transnationally; in fact, it is arguably central to this biopolitics. Michael J. Bosia and Meredith L. Weiss argue in their introduction to Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression that rather than simply being an organic, locally rooted cultural phenomenon, homophobia can be a proliferating political strategy: “We consider political homophobia as purposeful, especially as practiced by state actors; as embedded in the scapegoating of an ‘other’ that drives processes of state building and retrenchment; as the product of transnational influence peddling and alliances; and as integrated into questions of collective identity and the complicated legacies of colonialism.”¹ There has been a good deal of media focus—thanks in no small part to the research of Rev. Kapya Kaoma² –on the specific role of right-wing US Christian groups in fomenting, funding, and even scripting homophobia in the Global South, to be used in the way that Bosia and Weiss describe by political and religious leaders.³ This tactical deployment of homophobia might be understood as part of what Amar calls the “security archipelago,”⁴ private and state formations produced by “intercontinental flows of security practices and protection discourses”⁵ that both create and target sexualized populations that might not always be recognizably LGBT.⁶ The discourses of morality and family values are familiar weapons against queer subjects, but new laws to enable the “war on terror,” interrogation techniques, and surveillance technology can all enable the persecution of sexual dissidents across the world.⁷ Meanwhile, the designated enemies of the security archipelago are just as capable of mobilizing sexual and gendered stigmas for political ends, so that one might understand the forms of sexual torture used by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib and the photographs the soldiers took and circulated as homophobic “technologies” similar to cellphone videos of executions of purportedly gay men by the so-called Islamic State.

Political homophobia has an unstable relationship to the popular homophobia it attempts to incite, and “sex panics” can have complex genealogies. Two very different examples offer histories of the production of homophobia in which the US is implicated. Firstly, the current high levels of violence against same-sex loving and gender non-conforming people in El Salvador cannot be fully understood without exploring how the country was destabilized first by the US interventions of the 1970s and 1980s, and then by Obama’s deportation of gang members from the US whose violent gang culture emerged from US prisons.⁸ Secondly, Vanessa Agard-Jones examines the rise of anxiety around homosexuality and sexed embodiment in the Caribbean island of Martinique—a French “overseas department”—in the context of the heated debates over same-sex marriage in France, and most crucially, Martinicans’ new knowledge of the contamination of the island with Chlordécone. This insecticide was originally made in the US and has been banned in both France and the US since 1979, but it was used until 1993 in Martinique by the small group of planter families that dominate farming on the island. As Agard-Jones puts it:

Martinique has the highest rate of prostate cancer in the world, a statistic that many see as being linked to chemical pollution . . . . [C]hlordécone has been the source of an emergent gender and sexual politics on the island, where local suspicions about the contamination’s relationship to male effeminacy include new convictions about what some are calling a “genocide by sterilization” and a new hospital-based initiative to document intersex births.⁹ (190)

In this case, the “supply chain” of this contemporary sex panic is material, global, and entangled in imperial, capitalist histories.

Contemporary renditions of this biopolitics can be understood as attempts to contain the proliferation of protest against both authoritarianism and the effects of neoliberal economies around the world—the contagious, modular nature of the Indignados in Spain, the Chilean Winter and the Arab Spring, the Occupy movements from London to Hong Kong, Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and Black Lives Matter in the US, to name just a few of the locally staged, globally transmitted, and mutually inspiring forms of protest that have emerged over the past decade, alongside and intermingled with mobilizations around sexual and gender dissidence. We are thinking, for example, of the queer leadership and emphasis on intersectionality in the Black Lives Matter movement;¹⁰ or the participation of visibly LGBT people in the Turkish Gezi Park protests in 2013, and the subsequent, unprecedented participation of straight activists in Istanbul’s Gay Pride march;¹¹ or the important role played by Spanish transfeminists in the Indignados movement;¹² or, in a different mode, Saleem Haddad’s 2016 novel Guapa, which narrativizes young people’s experience of anomie, revolution, and renewed repression in the contemporary Arab world from the perspective of a young gay man.¹³ Queer sexuality is placed at the center of the desire for a different society. Guapa ends with the narrator’s decision to protest once more with his best friend, a fearless drag queen, and leaves the reader with a vision of other queer modes of existence—melancholy couplings and collectivities—as remaining spaces of political possibility:

But in the midst of this decaying, burning city, there are pockets of hope. It can be found in the tiny dark rooms in underground bars, where women with short hair cheer on men in dresses. It can be felt in the abandoned cinemas where anonymous strangers fall in love if only for a few moments, and in the living rooms where families crowd around, drinking sweet black tea and Skyping their homesick relatives so that together they can watch the long, rambling talk shows that go on all night. Despite the interrogation rooms where men in uniform crack clubs and electric wires on the naked body of someone’s son or daughter…there are still pockets of hope in the streets of this city.¹⁴

The presence of Skype and homesickness in the scene Haddad sketches above—which emphasizes “pockets of hope”—indicates the pervasiveness and importance of transnationalism to these political formations, or structures of feeling. To write a novel is itself, of course, a form of political action that, like music or photography, travels across borders.

Although the question of activism across national lines necessitates the examination of what we might call international organizations and state-to-state projects, as some well-established approaches to the study of transnational networks prescribe,¹⁵ many of our contributors are interested precisely in border-crossings at more intimate, affective, aesthetic, and informal levels—that is, through “lateral and nonhierarchical network structures” typical of “minor transnationalisms.”¹⁶ Illustrating an approach to transnationalism that “can be less scripted and more scattered,”¹⁷ for example, Elizabeth L. Engebretsen traces the ad-hoc strategies of queer/tongzhi Chinese activists to bypass state control and to utilize foreign actors in her contribution to this issue. Such forms of lateral bonding in “minor” transnationalisms can also be understood as a sort of queer “social remittance.”¹⁸ Sociologist Francesca Polletta calls LGBT activism an example of “awkward” social movements because of the need to address not just the state but religion, family, and cultural representation, troubling the distinction between culture and politics.¹⁹ Work on queer activism has asked other awkward questions, such as what counts as a political act, and who is excluded when we stick to conventional definitions of politics.²⁰ In The Queer Art of Failure, cultural critic Jack Halberstam challenges conventional notions of success and failure in the context of work on affect that re-thinks a host of feelings conventionally understood to be politically unproductive: “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.”²¹ In contrast to this, the concepts of desire and pleasure are increasingly important to queer African studies, as a counter-discourse to the prevailing narratives of suffering associated with Africa. In the South African feminist journal Agenda, for example, Zethu Matebeni and Thabo Msibi discuss the importance of cultivating knowledge and narratives about sexual pleasure, as well as other forms of self-naming and world-making: “Given the contexts in Africa where sexual and gender non-conformity is responded to with criminalisation, victimisation, violence and even death, it remains crucial to find alternative ways that forge spaces for diverse existence.”²² Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’ work on the “transloca(l)” Puerto Rican trope of sinvergüencería, shamelessness, is an important example of the revalorization of an affect not usually understood as politically useful.²³ In contradistinction to both gay pride and queer shame as North American registers of feeling, sinvergüencería is a strategy for negotiating shame in a racist, homophobic environment: “To be a sinvergüenza is to have no shame: to disobey, to break the law, disrespect authority (the family, the church, the state) and in a perverse and curious way to be proud of one’s transgression, or at least lack a feeling of guilt.”²⁴ Similarly, in this issue, Jasmine Rault recovers the notion of relajo as a Mexican-specific queer decolonial activist and performance practice. These are all forms of queer activism that help us to think activism outside traditional hierarchies and formulas of political action, what Thoreson calls in his contribution to this special issue, “alternative tactical frameworks.”

Importantly, the experience of transnationalism undermines, too, the distinction between “Global North and South” that we have been drawing. Immigrant and diasporic queer people in North America and Europe have been at the forefront of activism that crosses state lines: the Baltimore-based Kuchu Diaspora Alliance, for example, is a non-profit directed by Victor Mukasa, an exiled transgender man from Uganda; the organization advocates for African LGBT refugees and asylum seekers and offers direct support to LGBT refugees who have fled Uganda for Kenya.²⁵ What look like “domestic” political questions, meanwhile, might be reconfigured when thought through diaspora, migration, or transnationalism. Aren Aizura, for example, has argued that the current focus in the US on policing gender non-conforming subjects is deeply connected to the panic about borders generated by the war on terror and anti-migrant rhetoric.²⁶ We might better understand, then, the recent slate of US state laws targeting transgender people in public bathrooms in relation to the panic about Syrian refugees as terrorists in disguise. Fears about people that cross boundaries and the legibility of “foreign” bodies are at work in both instances. Karma R. Chávez in her essay in this issue reminds us that, even if “queer migration politics are confined to singular locales, . . . [they] simultaneously point at and outside the boundaries of nation-states.” In this regard, we in the Global North have a great deal to learn not only about the globalized genealogies of homophobia and transphobia in which we are implicated, but from forms of queer activism generated from the Global South and its diasporas—activism that might offer alternatives to methods of transformation in the West.

In fact, histories of activism that move from Global South to North—as well as other directions—already exist, and many forms of Global South queer activism preceded or emerged simultaneously with developments in North America and Europe.²⁷ Contemporary neo-imperial gay activism operates on a temporal assumption that this is the first time questions of sexuality have emerged as a flashpoint in the rest of the world, and of course, that the Global South lags behind the progressive modernity of the North. As Ruth Vanita points out in her essay for this issue, the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in Britain was contemporaneous with the scandal in India over Pandey Bechran Sharma’s articulation of a homosexual sensibility in his 1927 short story collection Chocolate; simultaneous and entangled sexual modernities were forged through imperial histories and beyond.²⁸

A notable example of this sort of historical multidirectionality of transnational activism comes from the Spanish-speaking world, specifically the South-North connection between Argentinean and Spanish gay activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Organized gay activism in Argentina dates back to 1967, when, as pioneering activist Héctor Anabitarte Rivas documents, a group of working-class, communist gay men met to discuss how to confront police persecution under Juan Carlos Onganía’s dictatorship (1966-1970).²⁹ Their meetings led them to found the first official Argentinean gay liberation organization, Grupo Nuestro Mundo, in early 1969, significantly before the Stonewall Riots later that year.³⁰

Likewise, in late 1960s Spain, under the right-wing dictatorship of Francisco Franco and in a country still considered underdeveloped, a middle-class gay Catalonian lawyer who was to become a pioneer gay activist, Armand de Fluvià, kept abreast of international gay activism by subscribing in a clandestine way to the famous French gay magazine, Arcadie, and by surreptitiously consulting the international press at the British and the American Institutes in Spain, learning of the Stonewall Riots and becoming aware of an emergent gay activism.³¹ With the passing in 1970 of the much feared Spanish Law of Social Danger and Rehabilitation that targeted homosexuals for internment in “rehabilitation camps” and reeducation via the application of emetic and electroshock therapies,³² de Fluvià sprang into action and founded the first gay liberation organization in Spain, Agrupación Homófila por la Igualdad Social (Homophile Group for Social Equality [AGHOIS]).³³ Through his underground transnational network, he became aware of the Argentine Grupo Nuestro Mundo and other international groups, such as the transnational network of gay liberation organizations coordinated by US lawyer Robert Roth, founder of the Cornell Student Homophile League in the 1960s and later of the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce. It was de Fluvià’s contact with Argentinean activists Rivas and Ricardo Lorenzo Sanz—also a founder of Grupo Nuestro Mundo—that would give impetus to the Spanish gay liberation movement.³⁴ At the height of the Argentinean “Dirty War” in 1976, this transnational activist connection would prove a lifesaver for Rivas and Sanz, who fled persecution and near death by exiling themselves to Spain (then on the eve of becoming a nascent democracy after the death of Franco in 1975). These two experienced Argentinean activists continued to collaborate with and participate more directly in Spanish LGBT organizing.³⁵ These early transnational activist connections highlight how, in response to homophobic and transphobic pressures, activists have always looked for support networks, models, collaborations, and affective ties beyond their national confines. Our contributors in this issue further expand on these histories of transnational queer activism and offer a new agenda for developing globally connected but locally based strategies for furthering sexual rights.

1. Michael J. Bosia and Meredith L. Weiss, eds., Global Homophobia: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 2-3. [↩]
2. See Kaoma’s 2009 report, “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia,” Political Research Associates, December 1, 2009, http://www.politicalresearch.org/2009/12/01/globalizing-the-culture-wars-u-s-conservatives-african-churches-homophobia/#sthash.c8dGzttZ.dpbs, accessed May 5, 2015. [↩]
3. To their credit, combatting this form of transnational hate-brokerage from within the U.S. has been one of the elements of HRC’s international program. [↩]
4. Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). [↩]
5. Ibid., 7. [↩]
6. For example, the global push to end sex trafficking aims to protect vulnerable women and children, but critics argue that it has intensified the criminalization of sex workers and enlarged the reach of policing and surveillance across national borders. See, for example, Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (New York: Routledge, 1988); Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffner, eds., Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity, (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labor Markets, and the Rescue Industry (London: Zed Books, 2007). [↩]
7. The recent secret sale of mass surveillance technology by Britain’s largest arms company, BAE, to the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Algeria and Morocco, which was exposed by the BBC, is an example of how “techniques” travel across the security archipelago. See Rob Evans, “BAE ‘secretly sold mass surveillance technology to repressive regimes,’” The Guardian, June 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jun/15/bae-mass-surveillance-technology-repressive-regimes,accessed July 6, 2017. Police in these countries already use cell phones, Facebook, and online dating sites to monitor and to entrap men having sex with men. [↩]
8. The causes of the current wave of anti-LGBT violence in El Salvador are, it goes without saying, complex, and include the legacy of the right-wing death squads of the 1970s and 80s. See J. Lester Feder, “The Savior of the World Watched as These Trans Women Disappeared,” Buzzfeed News December 27, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/the-savior-of-the-world-watched-as-these-trans-women-disappe?utm_term=.ryL6X4KPn1#.oeDX8kNbK0, accessed May 2, 2016. Visibly queer El Salvadorians face violence from police, but the new presence of large-scale organized crime is significant. According to Sam Tabory, “[a] 2012 report on Sexual Diversity in El Salvador from the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley cites instances of gangs requiring new members to carry out attacks against members of the LGBTI community as part of their initiation.” See Sam Tabory, “Police, Gangs Major Perpetrators of LGBT Violence in El Salvador,” Insight Crime, April 26, 2016, http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/police-gangs-major-perpetrators-of-lgbt-violence-el-salvador-activist. Accessed 5 May 2016. We are indebted to Carlo Zepeda for his as yet unpublished MA thesis at the University of Miami on the experience of gay and gender-nonconforming men in El Salvador in shedding light on this context. [↩]
9. Vanessa Agard-Jones, “Bodies in the System,” Small Axe 17:3 No. 42 (November 2013): 182-192. [↩]
10. Two of the three female co-founders of the movement, Alicia Garza and Patrice Cullors, identify as queer—the third, Opal Tometi, is Nigerian-American—and the Black Lives Matter Network’s self-description explicitly “affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements. It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.” “About the Black Lives Matter Network” (http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/), accessed May 2, 2017. [↩]
11. The annual gay pride march provided an opportunity to assert the right to public space after protesters had been evicted from the park, as well as new forms of political alliance. As the New York Times reported on this moment, saturated with hopes that have since been overwhelmed: “‘No one feels alone any more after the Gezi protests,’ said Meryem KoyuncuIgili, who was walking arm in arm with her husband, Metin, as they marched in their first gay rights parade. Mr. Igili held a banner that said ‘Even if we are gay,’ a message that a person’s sexual orientation should not matter. ‘It’s, after all, not just L.G.B.T. members, but all of Turkey under oppression,’ Ms. Igili said.” See Sebnem Arsujune, “Protests Squelched, Gay Rights March Brings Many in Turkey Back to the Streets,” The New York Times (June 30, 2013) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/world/europe/protests-squelched-gay-rights-march-brings-many-in-turkey-back-to-the-streets.html?_r=0, May 5, 2015 A recent piece by Sherry Wolf characterizes the current situation as a “queer emergency,” in which Erdogan is targeting Kurds, leftists, and LGBT activists as he consolidates his power in the wake of the attempted coup. See Wolf, “Turkey’s Queer State of Emergency,” Jacobin, May 25, 2017, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/erdogan-repression-washington-visit-repression, accessed May 29, 2017. [↩]
12. On intersectionality in the Indignados movement in Spain, see Marta Cruells López and Sonia Ruiz García, “Political Intersectionality within the Spanish Indignados Social Movement.” Intersectionality and Social Change (October 7, 2014): 3-25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X20140000037001, accessed October 26, 2014. [↩]
13. Saleem Haddad, Guapa: A Novel (New York: Other Press, 2016). [↩]
14. Ibid., 337. [↩]
15. Transnationalism, emerging as an academic concept in the 1990s and discussed for the first time in Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller and Cristina Szanton Blanc’s 1994 book, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, has been used to shift the emphasis in migration studies from official institutions to the “everyday practices of migrants engaged in various activities . . . [such as] reciprocity and solidarity within kinship networks, political participation not only in the country of emigration but also of immigration, small-scale entrepreneurship of migrants across borders and the transfer and re-transfer of cultural customs and practices,” Thomas Faist, “Diaspora and transnationalism: What kind of dance partners?” In Rainer Bauböck and Thomas Faist, eds., Diaspora and Transnationalism: Concepts, Theories and Methods (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2010): 9-34, 11-9. [↩]
16. Françoise Lionnnet and Shu-Mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2. [↩]
17. Ibid., 5 [↩]
18. See Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 54-69. In Levitt’s definition, “[s]ocial remittances are the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from host- to sending-countries communities (. . . ). Ordinary people, at the local level, are also cultural creators and carriers. Migrants send or bring back the values and practices they have been exposed to and add these social remittances to the repertoire, both expanding and transforming it. Later migrants bring this enhanced tool kit with them, thereby stimulating ongoing iterative rounds of local-level global culture creation.” Ibid., 55. [↩]
19. Francesca Polletta, “Mobilization Forum: Awkward Movements,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 11.4 (December 2006):475-500. [↩]
20. Coming out of disability and queer studies, Johanna Hedva, for example, challenges the assumption that politics must be made through public action by asking, “What modes of protest are afforded to sick people—it seemed to me that many for whom Black Lives Matter is especially in service, might not be able to be present for the marches because they were imprisoned by a job, the threat of being fired from their job if they marched, or literal incarceration, and of course the threat of violence and police brutality—but also because of illness or disability, or because they were caring for someone with an illness or disability. I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight.” Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine. The Not Again Issue, (January 24, 2016), http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory, accessed March 2, 2016. [↩]
21. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2-3. [↩]
22. Zethu Matebeni and Thabo Msibi, “Vocabularies of the Non-Normative,” Agenda 29: 1 (2015): 3-9. [↩]
23. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, “Gay Shame, Latina-and Latino-Style: A Critique of White Queer Performativity.” In Michael Hames-Garcia and Ernesto Javier Martinez, eds., Gay Latino Studies, a Critical Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 55-80. [↩]
24. Ibid., 72. [↩]
25. See “The Kuchu Diaspora Alliance-US (KDA-US) is an Initiative for LGBT Africa by LGBT Africans in the Diaspora,” http://www.kuchudiasporaalliance.org/#!who-we-are/cj8s, accessed May 25, 2017. [↩]
26. As Aizura eloquently puts it, “Borders—the state line, the airport, customs—are spaces where those who do not ‘belong’ are separated from those who do. Borders police a body’s ability to signify as citizen/human rather than ‘alien.’ At the border, it is imperative to produce the right papers and look or act as if we belong—even, paradoxically, when we are sure that we do. In the current global political climate, it should surprise no-one that anxieties about borders are everywhere: no less in mythical panics about barbarians/‘terrorists’ storming the bastions of corporate and state power than at the level of micropolitics—specifically, the gendering of bodies.” Ibid., 289. [↩]
27. As Jarrod Hayes argues, locating Stonewall as the sole origin of queer activism overlooks other sites of historical emergence: “US queer activists might . . . look to the tropes of queer resistance to colonialism, neocolonialism, and post-independence nationalized oppression in Algerian cultural politics for sources of inspiration for a renewed antiimperialist queer politics,” “Queer Resistance to (Neo-)colonialism in Algeria.” In John C. Hawley, ed., Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001): 79–98, 94. [↩]
28. See Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). [↩]
29. See Héctor Anabitarte Rivas, “Confesiones de un militante homosexual y comunista,” Clarín, February 8, 2013, http://www.clarin.com/sociedad/Confesiones-militante-homosexual-comunista_0_862713872.html, May 1, 2016. We thank Jorge Luis Peralta for providing this source (Peralta 2016, personal communication). [↩]
30. See also Néstor Perlongher, “Historia del Frente de Liberación Homosexual,” in Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Balgorria, eds., Prosa plebeya. Ensayos 1980-1992 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones COLIHUE, 1997): 77-84. [↩]
31. Armand De Fluvià, “La perspectiva de un pionero.” In Juan A. Herrero Brasas, ed. Ética y activismo. Primeraplana: La construcción de una cultura queer en España (Madrid: Egales, 2001): 80-85, 81-82. [↩]
32. Just as gay liberation groups were establishing transnational connections to fight homophobia, homophobes were also working across borders, borrowing persecution and “reeducation” techniques from each other, prefiguring today’s “security archipelago.” In this sense, it is telling that first-world democracies, like the US, fascist dictatorships, like Argentina and Spain, and communist regimes, like the USSR and Cuba, all were deploying the same insidious practices, such as electroshock and emetic “therapies,” internment in mental institutions, censorship, and ostracism. [↩]
33. This group changed names several times to reflect its change in ideology from mildly Catholic and monarchical to communist and republican. See Gema Pérez-Sánchez, Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to La Movida (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007) for a summary of AGHOIS evolution and Spanish gay activism around the end of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy. Also see De Fluvià’s first-person account of his activist years in Armand De Fluvià, El Moviment Gay a la clandestinitat del franquisme (1970-1975) (Barcelona: Laertes, 2003). [↩]
34. Anabitarte documents this 1970 contact between AGHOIS and Grupo Nuestro Mundo in Héctor Anabitarte Rivas, “Semblanza: Armand de Fluvià.” In Juan A. Herrero Brasas, ed., Ética y activismo. Primeraplana: La construcción de una cultura queer en España (Madrid: Egales, 2001): 86-87. [↩]
35. See Jorge Luis Peralta, “No te hagas la loca: El debate ‘homosexual’ sobre la masculinidad en Argentina y España.” In Rafael M. Mérica Jiménez and Jorge Luis Peralta, eds., Las masculinidades en la Transición. (Madrid: Egales, 2015): 79-101, 80. Peralta also documents how these Argentinean activists were well aware of various global queer intellectual currents of the period, actively engaging with the work of French Guy Hocquenghem, Italian Mario Mieli, and Australian Dennis Altman (Ibid., 81). [↩]