Brown / THE LESBIAN AND GAY MOVEMENT IN ARGENTINA “Con discriminación y represión no hay democracia” The Lesbian and Gay Movement in Argentina

Lesbian and gay activism now circles the globe, but it is vastly understudied. Not even the latest syntheses of contemporary social-movement theory discuss lesbian and gay movements to any significant degree (see McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 1996). Even the most important works on “social theory” tend to ignore sexuality (Warner, 1993: ix). A lack of activism cannot explain this deficiency, since formal lesbian and gay organizations have existed in the United States since the 1950s and have become prominent in North America and Western Europe in the past 30 years. During the past decade, many developing countries have become the sites of burgeoning movements as well. Lesbian and gay organizations now exist in every country in Latin America, some of them dating back to the mid-1980s (Drucker, 1996: 92), yet only one of the major volumes on social movements in Latin America addresses sexual orientation or identity (see MacRae, 1992, on Brazil). Argentina hosts a lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement that is sometimes quite visible and results in concrete political advances, such as the inclusion in 1996 of a clause in the municipal constitution of Buenos Aires that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In this