“I Embody a Daily Revolution”: Mexico's Gay and Lesbian Left and Central American Revolutionary Solidarity, 1978–1985

Abstract This article explores the important and never-before-examined intersections between the activism of members of Mexico City's gay and lesbian Left from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s and their participation in the vibrant movement of solidarity with Central American revolutions in Mexico in those same years. As gay men and lesbians faced police harassment, blackmail, 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, many came together to support what they regarded as the watershed antiauthoritarian and anti-imperialist revolutions of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. They did so in part as a form of protest against the repression that they faced at home, in a country governed by a single party, and demanded both “socialism without sexism” and liberation for all oppressed people, everywhere.