8. Nicaraguan legacies: advances and setbacks in feminist and LGBTQ activism*

Florence E. Babb

Following the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, Nicaragua became known around the world as a small Central American nation that had risen up against a long-entrenched dictatorship and the US imperialism that supported it. The 1980s began with high hopes and notable accomplishments, including in women’s rights, but later in the decade the US-funded Contra War divided the country and eroded the gains of the revolution. During this period, lesbian and gay Nicaraguans made their first public appearance after clandestine meetings and a brief, but notable, Sandinista effort to stifle their political organising. As a number of writers have assessed the meaning of the revolution’s legacy for feminism in Nicaragua, my main focus will be on its meaning for the LGBTQ community.¹ Most analysts agree that the revolution had both enabling and limiting effects. It is credited for such advances as having mobilised the population to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS, for enabling greater security through community support and the creation of women’s police stations, and for reducing crime so that we now see far fewer Nicaraguans than other Central Americans fleeing north.² Nonetheless, the Sandinista insistence on state-led development resulted in restrictions placed on autonomous initiatives for change, including those of gay men, lesbians and other sexual minorities.

* An earlier version of this work was presented as ‘Salir del clóset en Nicaragua: Identidades y políticas LGBT durante la revolución’ (Coming out in Nicaragua: LGBT identities and politics during the Revolution), Congreso Internacional, ‘Diversidad sexual en contextos de guerra’, Dirección de Diversidad Sexual, Secretaria Distrital de Planeación, Bogotá, Colombia, Sept. 2015. I am grateful to José Fernando Serrano Amaya and Cristina Rojas Tello for their invitation and commentaries. I also wish to thank Karen Kampwirth and Victoria González-Rivera for allowing me to read chapters from their manuscript in preparation, One Hundred Years of LGBT History in Nicaragua, a much-anticipated history of LGBT Nicaraguans over the past century. Shannon Walsh and Karen Kampwirth offered their much-appreciated comments on a draft of this work. For the research I conducted in Nicaragua from 1990 through to 2010, I received generous support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright Foundation, the University of Iowa and the University of Florida. Finally, I thank Hilary Francis for her invitation and encouragement to contribute to this volume.

1 LGBTQ refers to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender and queer. Although ‘queer’ has only recently come into wider use in Nicaragua, later in this chapter I discuss the appearance of Operación Queer in Managua. Among those who examine feminism and the legacy of the Nicaraguan revolution, see especially K. Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, and S. Heumann, ‘The challenge of inclusive identities and solidarities: discourses on gender and sexuality in the Nicaraguan women’s movement and the legacy of Sandinismo’.

This chapter will examine the particular ways in which LGBTQ Nicaraguans have mobilised during the last three decades and suggest that Nicaraguan ‘exceptionalism’ may account for both the positive formation of this social movement and for the ambivalence expressed by the Sandinista leadership when that movement emerged. Based on my ethnographic research spanning from 1989 through to the first decade of the new millennium, as well as the rich scholarly literature, I trace the way in which Nicaragua broke from its past as a Central American ‘backwater’ to play an active part in both national and regional LGBTQ culture and politics. Important to this development was the solidarity of feminists based in NGOs and social movements that supported sexual rights and AIDS education.

Notwithstanding the advances for gender rights, and (to a lesser degree) sexual diversity, during the decade when the Sandinistas first came to power, setbacks also arose during that time. Indeed, the florescence of civil society organisations and autonomous social movements found greater space for development in the neoliberal 1990s, though still more challenges have emerged in the post-2007 period since Daniel Ortega returned to power. During the past decade, the FSLN government has targeted feminists and other left groups that are critical of the government’s anti-democratic actions to quell dissent. Interestingly, transgender groups and NGOs received somewhat greater government support just as women’s rights were diminishing; still, LGBTQ Nicaraguans in general have continued to experience persistent homophobia and social exclusion. This chapter asks what the legacy of Nicaraguan exceptionalism should be considered to be when inconsistent practices and ambivalent outcomes around gender and sexual rights are observed in present-day Nicaragua.

The chapter will then consider the experiences of lesbian and gay and other sexual minorities in Nicaragua during the time of the Sandinista Revolution, with an emphasis on lesbian feminist centrality. It focuses on the war years, from the Sandinista mobilisation through the decade of revolutionary government and Contra War (pre-1979 to 1990). The chapter then outlines the background of the period during which I conducted research, 1989–2010, a particularly robust time for feminist and LGBTQ organising. The third section examines what the return of the FSLN government and of Daniel Ortega has meant in relation to the LGBTQ community since 2007, with commentary on some recent developments. The conclusion compares remarks on Nicaraguan and Cuban exceptionalism in relation to LGBTQ populations, and offers a brief assessment of how the LGBTQ experience provides a useful lens for illuminating national-level dimensions of change. Ultimately, I hope to shed light on the question of Nicaraguan exceptionalism by asking to what degree these recent developments may (or may not) be considered legacies of the Sandinista Revolution.³

2 For an assessment of women’s police stations and human security in Nicaragua, see S.D. Walsh, ‘Advances and limits of policing’.

The emergence of LGBTQ culture and politics in the Sandinista Revolution decade, 1979–90

The FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) formed in 1961 to confront the long legacy of the Somoza family dictatorship in Nicaragua. The Somozas were notorious for their cruel practices, backed by force over decades. Surprisingly enough, their politics around women and sexual minorities would be rather more liberal. As historian Victoria González-Rivera has shown, the years of dictatorship provided some space for an early women’s movement to emerge and for gay men and lesbians and others deemed sexually different to live their lives.⁴ After the FSLN had built a mass movement and triumphed in 1979, the new Sandinista government’s outlook on sexual difference or diversity was that it formed part of the decadent past represented by the Somoza dictatorship, in much the same way that homosexuality in Cuba was associated with the Batista dictatorship’s bourgeois past. While the new revolutionary leadership quickly carried out reforms to benefit women, they did not view sexual minorities as worthy of the same attention.

During the time of the guerrilla movement, awareness existed of gay and lesbian participants in the armed struggle, even if this was not spoken of publicly. The Sandinistas had built up a mass movement across diverse sectors of the population by the late 1970s and their attitude appeared to be that as long as gay men and lesbians supported the revolution, their private lives were tolerated. I have argued elsewhere that the revolution itself provided the opportunity for young people away from family to discover their sexual difference and to act on new desires.⁵ Still, they had to prove their commitment to Sandinismo and to keep their sexual orientation to themselves. This policy of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, which mirrored the general expectation in Nicaraguan society, continued into the 1980s when the Sandinista government was introducing a series of progressive reforms in the areas of the economy (land reform and state sector employment), popular political participation, education and healthcare. Lesbian and gay Sandinistas had to be satisfied with keeping a low profile in relation to their sexuality – and, in any event, their ‘personal’ and ‘private’ matters were viewed as secondary to, and a distraction from, the broad revolutionary struggle.

3 There are far too many contributions to the literature on feminist and LGBTQ politics, culture and history in Nicaragua to do justice to them here. I rely on my own past writing on the subject – F.E. Babb, After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua; ‘Out in Nicaragua: local and transnational desires after the revolution’; The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories – as well as other recent writings: V. González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979; Heumann, ‘The challenge of inclusive identities and solidarities’; E.K. Hobson, ‘“Si Nicaragua Venció”: lesbian and gay solidarity with the revolution’; C. Howe, Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua; K. Kampwirth, ‘Organizing the Hombre Nuevo gay: LGBT politics and the second Sandinista Revolution’.

4 See González-Rivera, Before the Revolution, and V. González-Rivera, ‘The alligator woman’s tale: remembering Nicaragua’s “first self-declared lesbian”’.

5 See Babb, After Revolution; and Babb, ‘Out in Nicaragua’.

During the first years of the Sandinista revolutionary government, health and literacy brigades, as well as brigades working in the coffee and cotton harvests, offered more opportunities for gay men and lesbians to find one another and, freed of family obligations, to explore their sexuality. Thus I contend that although Nicaraguans often live in large families with little privacy, revolutionary participation gave Sandinista supporters new opportunities for self-discovery and sexual awakening. Whereas gay historian John D’Emilio has written that in western capitalist societies it was the transition from agricultural economies to urban, industrial economies that freed young men and women to self-identify as gay or lesbian,⁶ I argue that revolutionary Nicaragua offered a very different context for the same sort of self-discovery. In both capitalist societies like the United States and socialist-oriented Nicaragua, a key element was that of newfound independence and the freedom to escape the prying eyes of family and traditional social norms. Testimonies of participants in the revolution relate that individuals would find moments in the fields during a cotton harvest or evenings free from duties with a literacy brigade to socialise and form romantic relationships.⁷

By the mid 1980s, a group of lesbians and gay men began gathering together in private homes to talk for the first time about their own interests and their experiences of discrimination and social injustice. At times more than 60 women and men gathered, and, significantly, women often outnumbered men. In 1987, the government became aware of their organising activities and a number of gay men and lesbians were called in for questioning by Sandinista State Security. Some 30 of them were briefly detained in prison but they were soon released as the Sandinista government sought to avoid the international disapproval that would surely follow should it come to light that they were denying rights to LGBTQ Nicaraguans. While state intervention quelled gay and lesbian political organising in the short term, it was not long before a number of individuals were becoming more brazen and coming out publicly.⁸

One way in which space was opening up for gay and lesbian activism came via the state as the government charged the health ministry, then headed by Dora María Téllez, a highly respected comandante of the revolution and understood by many to be a lesbian, with working to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Nicaragua’s model of mass mobilisation around healthcare and education facilitated its success in containing the spread of HIV, and several NGOs with international funding (including CEPSIDA and Nimehuatzín) began developing popular education programmes and workshops on safer sex alongside legal and psychological services. Condoms were distributed in gay men’s cruising areas and among students and sex workers, and publications addressed a host of issues around health and wellbeing.

6 J. D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and gay identity’.

7 V. González-Rivera and K. Kampwirth, One Hundred Years of LGBT History in Nicaragua (manuscript in progress). See also Thayer’s discussion of lesbian movements in Central America, where she notes the space for intimacy created within the context of revolution: M. Thayer, ‘Identity, revolution, and democracy: lesbian movements in Central America’.

8 See Babb, ‘Out in Nicaragua’, for more discussion, including references to other sources relating to these developments. Note that while I generally refer to LGBTQ Nicaraguans in order to be inclusive of diversity, I sometimes refer to gay men and lesbians when the historical record suggests that these two groups were most prominently involved.

In 1989, some 50 gay and lesbian Sandinistas, along with their international allies, marched openly in Managua’s tenth anniversary celebration of the Nicaragua revolution. Gathering together at the Plaza of the Revolution, they wore black T-shirts with pink triangles, signalling their readiness to make their identities known within the FSLN and the wider society. On that landmark date they were empowered to call for recognition of their rights to self-expression and to lives free of prejudice. That summer, when I made my first trip to Nicaragua, was a momentous time for LGBTQ organising in Nicaragua. Still, the broader context of the 1980s in Sandinista Nicaragua needs to be considered. Increasingly during that decade, the US-sponsored Contra War was dividing the country and undermining efforts to further the revolution’s ambitions to transform the society. More resources were devoted to defence rather than to social spending and families were torn apart by the ravages of the conflict and the loss of life. As pressure built and people longed for the fighting to stop, there was little opportunity or will to address social change in terms of the LGBTQ population. With the coming of the 1990 elections, most observers expected the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president; in retrospect, it was not so surprising that he lost to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro of the UNO coalition. The nation’s prolonged conflict caused many voters to choose peace, which would come only when the United States let up its war of aggression against the Sandinistas, expressed through the Contra War.

Postrevolutionary neoliberalism and the rise of civil society, 1990–2006

The 1990 election ushered in peace but it also brought a turn to neoliberalism, and the harsh structural adjustment measures that came along with it. For many Nicaraguans the changes that were introduced produced greater hardship and despair.⁹ With the Sandinistas out of government, civil society and NGOs began offering services that were no longer provided by the state. The women’s movement, formerly organised through AMNLAE, the ‘women’s branch’ of the FSLN, began to establish organisations that were autonomous from the state and the LGBTQ community found a space as well, with the two often overlapping. Lesbians had a public and well-received ‘coming out’ at the autonomous women’s movement’s ‘Festival of the 52 Percent’ in Managua in 1991. Although this was a difficult time of transition in the country, important political openings occurred for social movements that were no longer tied to the interests of the FSLN. Notably, the NGOs Nimehuatzín and Xochiquetzal were founded by lesbian feminists who were devoted to addressing HIV/AIDS and the gay and lesbian community, though these NGOs were careful to state publicly that they served a broad and diverse clientele of those seeking sex education and sexual rights, not just the LGBTQ community.

9 See Babb, After Revolution on discourses of development, neoliberalism and the body.

During my many return trips to Nicaragua in the 1990s, I was fortunate to observe and participate in the growing LGBTQ presence in Managua and a few other cities in the country.¹⁰ In the new neoliberal context, and with the rolling back of the progressive reforms of the Sandinista Revolution, a draconian sodomy law (Law 204) was instituted in 1992, with the result that Nicaragua was subject to the wholesale criminalisation of both gay men and lesbians. This repressive move by the government served to galvanise LGBTQ political activism and give it international exposure, even as activists needed to exercise caution lest they violate the new law. Beginning in 1991, Nicaragua began celebrating Gay Pride annually in late June, with a jornada (fortnight) of events, including talks and workshops, social events, and often a drag performance and ‘Miss Gay’ pageant. That same year, the feminist NGO Puntos de Encuentro began publishing La Boletina, which gave regular attention to gay pride and politics. Women continued to play a leadership role in the NGOs, in organising events and in attracting international funding. In 1993, the NGO Xochiquetzal launched the magazine Fuera del Closet, with articles on health, the body and LGBTQ lives, to coincide with Gay Pride events.

The distance that lesbians had come in gaining visibility was clear in 1996 during Gay Pride events. Psychologist and lesbian feminist Mary Bolt González’s book Sencillamente Diferentes… had a launch to discuss its theme of lesbian self-esteem in urban Nicaragua, which drew a large audience.¹¹ The panellists included the lesbian feminist co-director (with Bolt) of Xochiquetzal, Hazel Fonseca and the famed comandante Dora María Téllez, and the festive evening closed with music by leading singer-songwriter Norma Elena Gadea.

While women have been the protagonists in much LGBTQ organising in Nicaragua, they have nonetheless continued to experience exclusionary practices in a machista society. Whereas gay bars attract men and offer them public areas in which to socialise, women have few such spaces. In one successful effort to correct the absence of women and lesbians in much of popular culture, Puntos de Encuentro produced a highly regarded and much-watched television series, Sexto Sentido, with both gay and lesbian characters.¹² In 1999, a new (though short-lived) lesbian magazine, Humanas: Por la visibilidad de lesbianas y sus derechos humanos, was launched, with the objective of reaching out to Nicaraguan lesbians.

10 My own coming out during those years coincided with the developments in Nicaragua, and I followed them with keen interest.

11 M. Bolt González, Sencillamente diferentes… La autoestima de las mujeres lesbianas en los sectores urbanos de Nicaragua.

Lesbians in Nicaragua throughout the years of the Sandinista revolutionary government (and into the new millennium) have benefited from coordination with international feminist delegations to the country. As activist Rita Arauz expressed during the 1990s, ‘We would always tell our foreign sisters, “Ask about the lesbians. Ask for us by name – my name, the names of the others. Remind them that we exist, that we’re here and we’re not going away”’.¹³ Thus sexual orientation was identified as a feminist issue, making the Sandinista leadership and other Nicaraguans better aware of lesbians’ existence in the country. This was furthered by the formation of such lesbian organisations as Nosotras, Grupo Safo, Entre Amigas, Grupo Lesbiana por la Visibilidad and the Lesbian Feminist Collective.

Lesbian visibility increased in the 1990s, but by the end of the decade, there was backlash. In 1998, shock waves were felt throughout Nicaragua when former President Daniel Ortega was charged by his adoptive stepdaughter Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo with 20 years of sexual abuse, beginning when she was 11 years old. While Ortega remained silent and hid behind his parliamentary immunity, his wife (Zoilamérica’s mother) Rosario Murillo spoke often and publicly against her daughter’s allegation. Appealing to religion and the traditional nuclear family, she was quoted as alleging that Zoilamérica’s supporters were motivated by their ‘uncertain sexual identity’ into trying to influence her daughter, as well as projecting hatred for the opposite sex, rejecting marriage and motherhood, and, in general, the values and culture of heterosexuality. This effort to discredit the charges against Ortega by implying that lesbians were to blame for influencing Zoilamérica with distorted ideas became widespread.¹⁴

Post-2006 gains and losses with the return of the Sandinista government

Ortega’s animosity towards women who defied social convention and opposed him politically was later expressed in the form of a backlash against feminists during his electoral campaign in 2006, and into his new presidency. In order to appeal to conservative voters, he chose to ally with the conservative Catholic Church and to stand against abortion rights, even in the case of ‘therapeutic’ abortion following rape or when a woman’s life was in danger. This extreme stance was challenged by feminists, who saw Ortega as an anti-democratic opportunist masquerading as a champion of the people.

12 For an extensive discussion of this television series and of the protagonism of lesbians in the struggle for sexual rights in Nicaragua, see Howe, Intimate Activism.

13 Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 277.

14 This was not the only instance of politically motivated lesbian-baiting in Nicaragua, but that goes beyond the scope of this work. See Hobson, ‘Si Nicaragua Venció’ for an interesting discussion of international lesbian and gay solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution, which describes the female masculinity that emerged with the struggle. This image of lesbians in Nicaragua, while seductive for many lesbians from the north, may have fed heteronormative fears in the country.

Once elected, Ortega’s comeback was marked by his targeting of feminists and other progressives who stood in opposition to his caudillo (macho/ strongman) style of politics. Notably, while shunning feminists, he began favouring the LGBTQ community, particularly the trans community, with resources and recognition. This may have been an effort to drive a wedge between feminists and the LGBTQ community, groups that had long worked together on issues of gender and sexuality. Moreover, it seemed to be a way of deflecting unwanted national and international attention from his stance on women’s reproductive rights. And finally, as argued by González-Rivera and Kampwirth, supporting the LGBTQ community was a way to appear ‘modern’ in the current Latin American context and in the international arena of human rights.¹⁵ Even so, as these scholars have expressed, there was ‘more circus than bread’, that is, there was greater cultural support than extension of political rights, although the infamous Law 204 was repealed and some new anti-discrimination legislation introduced in the revised Penal Code in 2007.¹⁶

As Kampwirth notes, ‘the FSLN’s new sexual diversity politics is not merely a response to international trends, but is also shaped by domestic politics, in particular by the history of FSLN-feminist movement relations, and by the tradition of clientelism in Nicaraguan politics’.¹⁷ Some positive developments in recent years include the institutionalised presence of sexual diversity groups in every office of the Juventud Sandinista around the country. Furthermore, LGBTQ groups have benefited from resources made available by the Centro de Estudios Internacionales, headed by Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo (who is estranged from her mother, the Nicaraguan first lady). President Ortega named long-time activist Samira Montiel as the Procuradora de Diversidad Sexual (ombudswoman for sexual diversity) in the office of human rights in 2009. This may all be a form of ‘pink washing’, that is, using a friendly stance towards LGBTQ issues to conceal other more conservative stances, such as that on therapeutic abortion rights and the persecution of civil society actors, including well-known feminists. Moreover, some activists claim that despite the showcasing of LGBTQ concerns, there is little more beyond that as few new rights have been extended. Nonetheless, as a result of receiving a degree of state support, the LGBTQ community is expected to offer patronage and has lost some credibility as an autonomous social movement.

15 González-Rivera and Kampwirth, One Hundred Years of LGBT History.

16 See K. Kampwirth ‘Abortion, antifeminism, and the return of Daniel Ortega: in Nicaragua, leftist politics?’; and N. Jubb, ‘Love, family values and reconciliation for all, but what about rights, justice and citizenship for women?

17 Kampwirth, ‘Organizing the Hombre Nuevo gay’, 320.

When Ortega’s government established new policies on family rights and protections in recent years, a number of feminists and LGBTQ activists were disappointed that the right to marry was not extended to same-sex couples, a right that is now expanding in the Americas, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Canada and the United States. Others, however, were not surprised and felt that the time was not yet right. When a new Family Code was debated in 2012, it was criticised for its exclusion of single-parent households and of LGBTQ-headed families. That same year, the Miss Gay Nicaragua pageant and the demonstrations against the Family Code were followed by incidents of violence, which suggests that despite some recent political gains, there are very real limits to Nicaraguan society’s understanding and acceptance of gender and sexual difference.¹⁸

It is worth noting that in 2013 a collective of artists, academics and activists joined together in Nicaragua as ‘Operación Queer’ in order to give more visibility to gender and sexual difference. The collective’s impact has been both cultural and political as it takes up questions of the body and identity, and of forms of exclusion relating not only to gender and sexuality but to social class, ethnicity, age, ability and aesthetics. Those in the collective have addressed whether there is something like a community among ‘queer’ Nicaraguans, understood to be diverse and fluid in its formation. The intellectual sophistication and cultural emphasis of Operación Queer should not stand in the way of recognising its fundamental political potential as well. As one indication of its ability to push LGBTQ Nicaraguans further in their analysis, Operación Queer has addressed its own elitism and appears to take a highly self-critical approach; indeed the collective acknowledges that, for example, a trans sex worker in the Managua market may not be familiar with queer theory, yet nonetheless transgresses everyday norms of sexual performance.¹⁹

Comparative revolutions and LGBTQ political cultures: Nicaragua and Cuba

In discussions of Latin American revolutionary societies, Nicaragua has often been compared to Cuba. While their revolutions were two decades apart, triumphing in 1979 and 1959 respectively, both had aspirations for social transformation based on economic development that was oriented towards socialist principles, and both stood up to the United States in order to struggle for such an ambitious goal. The two revolutionary societies had hidden histories of same-sex sexuality, which at first were attributed to the decadent past of their dependent capitalist dictatorships.

18 Kampwirth, ‘Organizing the Hombre Nuevo Gay’.

19 For the discussion of Operación Queer I consulted various websites, including www.bienalcentroamericana.com/2016/08/08/operacion-queercochona/ (accessed 30 Apr. 2019). I also wish to acknowledge helpful conversations with Nicaraguan participants at a summer school on ‘The culture of Sandinismo in Nicaragua’, held in Wuppertal, Germany, July 2017.

Homosexuality was repressed even among the revolutions’ supporters, with Cuba going so far as to imprison gay Cubans for crimes of anti-social behaviour and to quarantine those with HIV/AIDS. In more recent decades, both Cuba and Nicaragua have introduced more progressive legislation to protect the rights of gay men and lesbians. Although Nicaragua has emulated Cuba in establishing a Family Code, it has not gone as far in recent years to assure the social inclusion of its LGBTQ citizens. Interestingly, in both nations the daughter (or stepdaughter) of the standing president – Mariela Castro Espín in Cuba and Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo in Nicaragua – has played a key part in championing the rights of sexual minorities. Cuba’s government, however, has gone further in addressing the needs of these new groups, including paying for transgender individuals to have sex reassignment surgery. The neoliberal, and patriarchal, tilt of the post-2006 FSLN government makes this level of support most unlikely in Nicaragua.

Cuba and Nicaragua have often been considered exceptional cases in Latin America, as both have had 20th-century revolutions that received wide popular support and altered the course of their histories. In the case of Cuba, its reputation for exceptionalism is more clearly deserved, as the nation steadfastly maintained its political commitment even in the face of frequent attempts by the United States to destabilise the government of Fidel Castro. In contrast to Cuba’s half-century of defiance, Nicaragua’s revolutionary government of the 1980s lasted only a decade before it was voted out of office. The destabilisation wrought by the Contra War was in large measure the work of the United States, which achieved its goal through the illegal supplying of arms to counterrevolutionaries. Nonetheless, Nicaragua’s achievements during that brief revolutionary period, as well as after it, were in a number of ways exceptional.

In the post-1979 decade, Nicaragua accomplished a great deal of progressive change on many fronts, whether because of FSLN mobilisation experience, or in spite of it. By the end of the 1980s, not only feminists but also LGBTQ activists were finding a voice and a political space. Following the Sandinista electoral defeat in 1990, autonomous organising of women, including lesbians, and of gay men took the path of further movement-building activity. By March 1991, Nicaragua played host to a historic gathering of Central American feminists at the Montelimar beach resort. Nicaragua was emerging from what many considered ‘backwater’ status as a small Central American nation to become a regional leader in LGBTQ activism and cultural development.

Even where political rights have not yet been extended, it is notable that Nicaraguan culture has become more accommodating of gay and lesbian lives. The Gay Pride events during the annual jornada and the campaign for Sexuality Free from Prejudice have had an impact, lessening the stigma associated with same-sex sexuality. The media and popular culture now reflect greater diversity in people’s private lives, in part the result of the hugely successful TV series Sexto Sentido. Viewing audiences came to know Angel and Vicki as fully drawn characters, as human beings who were struggling to come out publicly.²⁰ This opportunity to ‘know’ gay people and talk about their lives had a profound effect on viewers in Managua and beyond. During these years, the language itself shifted from using the local and disparaging terms ‘cochones’ and ‘cochonas’ to homosexuals or gays and lesbians. Recognising sexual identity as diverse and not as ‘unnatural’ has been a big step forward in granting greater dignity to sexual minorities in Nicaragua, as elsewhere.²¹

The Nicaraguan difference? Revolutionary legacies and limitations

How do we account for these changes and what can this tell us about the wider society? The Nicaraguan experience suggests that the period of social mobilisation wrought through the revolution gave lesbians, gay men and other sexual minorities who were involved a way of finding one another, and of recognising their own sexual difference. Their involvement in the revolutionary process also gave them the strategic tools necessary to develop a way of struggling for sexual rights. Some of the lessons of the revolution were carried over into activism. For example, NGOs supporting LGBTQ rights made use of broad-based popular education to promote sexual awareness and safer sex; activists looked to the grassroots to distribute condoms; and they seized public spaces to hold demonstrations and claim visibility, as when they held festive plantones (monthly gatherings) in the middle of Managua’s busiest traffic island at Metrocentro. Even as they may have employed mobilisation strategies developed in the revolutionary setting, however, LGBTQ activists needed to move beyond the Sandinista reductionism of inequality to social class differences, to assert their sexual, gender and cultural rights, and their demands for social justice.²²

To be sure, activists were also influenced by – and influenced – international currents in LGBTQ culture and politics. In earlier years, they sometimes had to deflect criticism that gay identity and activism were imported from the United States or elsewhere, that these were foreign (and contaminating) and not truly ‘Nica’. Now that same-sex and queer sexualities and histories are better understood in Nicaragua, as elsewhere, it is not deemed necessary to shun association with transnational currents of LGBTQ activism. It is well recognised that some of Nicaragua’s activists were deeply influenced by years of living abroad and brought back with them strategies for winning cultural and political rights, and that internationalists living in Nicaragua also contributed to building the movement. No longer was this seen as being at odds with the development of specifically Nicaraguan ways of ‘doing politics’ and enabling cultural identities to flourish.²³

20 See Howe, Intimate Activism.

21 When I gave a talk at the feminist NGO Puntos de Encuentro in 2003 on the occasion of the Gay Pride jornada, a member of the press approached me afterwards and asked if homosexuality was ‘natural’. Such uncertainty about sexual identities persists in Nicaragua, but today there is arguably greater awareness of the fluidity of sexuality and greater tolerance for sexual difference.

22 It is notable that in the discussion of gender and sexual rights in Nicaragua, the focus is on the country’s dominant mestizo (mixed race) population, without reference to minority indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples. For a broad treatment of the cultural history of sexuality by a prominent Nicaraguan feminist, see S. Montenegro, La cultura sexual en Nicaragua.

At the present juncture, given the ambivalent and contradictory politics of the FSLN, it is unclear whether the nation will continue along this path, but the state’s neoliberal recognition of individual rights, and its desire to become more ‘modern’, may pave the way towards further gains. Moreover, Nicaragua’s long-time association with social mobilisation at the popular level suggests that it may continue to serve as an example of what can be achieved with or without state support. The Nicaraguan Revolution was exceptional in Latin America for occurring after the emergence of feminist and gay social movements at the international level. This helped to shape the radical change that came about, from granting women rights as beneficiaries of land reform to granting more public space to lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and, most recently, trans Nicaraguans. Lesbians, as women whose sexuality has often been rendered nearly invisible in the past, have had an especially difficult challenge to gain recognition of both their gender and sexuality, yet they have frequently been the protagonists in sexual rights activism. As a result of their social struggle, many Nicaraguans in the LGBTQ community have undergone personal transformation and have won greater acceptance in daily life, and that in itself is no small accomplishment. Nonetheless, the LGBTQ community faces numerous challenges ahead as they strive to overcome the historical legacy of a still-heteronormative and sexist postrevolutionary society. As such, their recent experience shines a light on both the advances and the limitations of this ‘exceptional’ Central American nation.

Bibliography

Babb, F.E. (2001) After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua (Austin, TX).

— (2003) ‘Out in Nicaragua: local and transnational desires after the Revolution’, Cultural Anthropology, 18 (3): 304–28.

— (2011) The Tourism Encounter: Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories (Stanford, CA).

23 For transnational currents in LGBT organising in Nicaragua, see Babb, ‘Out in Nicaragua’, and Howe, Intimate Activism. See also the earlier work of R.N. Lancaster, Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua, which argued against using western-derived terms like ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ to describe Nicaraguans who engage in same-sex practices, and the recent discussion by P. Welsh ‘Homophobia and patriarchy in Nicaragua, pp. 39–45, which draws attention to both ‘modern’ gay men and lesbians as well as more ‘traditional’ same-sex relations in today’s Nicaragua. Welsh addresses Nicaraguan exceptionalism insofar as the country has fewer hate crimes than its neighbours, but notes the persistent homophobia as well.

Bienal Centroamericana (2016) ‘Operación Queer/Cochona’, www.bienalcentroamericana.com/2016/08/08/operacion-queercochona/ (accessed 16 Nov. 2019).

Bolt González, M. (1996) Sencillamente diferentes… La autoestima de las mujeres lesbianas en los sectores urbanos de Nicaragua (Managua).

D’Emilio, J. (2007) ‘Capitalism and gay identity’, in R. Parker and P. Aggleton (eds.), Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader (New York), pp. 250–8.

González-Rivera, V. (2011) Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 (University Park, PA).

— (2014) ‘The Alligator Woman’s Tale: remembering Nicaragua’s “first self-declared lesbian”’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 18 (1): 75–87.

González-Rivera, V. and K. Kampwirth (forthcoming) One Hundred Years of LGBT History in Nicaragua.

Heumann, S. (2014) ‘The challenge of inclusive identities and solidarities: discourses on gender and sexuality in the Nicaraguan women’s movement and the Legacy of Sandinismo’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 33 (3): 334–49.

Hobson, E.K. (2012) ‘“Si Nicaragua Venció”: lesbian and gay solidarity with the Revolution’, Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4 (2).

Howe, C. (2013) Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua (Durham, NC).

Jubb, N. (2014) ‘Love, family values and reconciliation for all, but what about rights, justice and citizenship for women? The FSLN, the women’s movement, and violence against women in Nicaragua’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 33 (3): 289–304.

Kampwirth, K. (2004) Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas (Athens, OH).

— (2008) ‘Abortion, antifeminism, and the return of Daniel Ortega: in Nicaragua, leftist politics?’ Latin American Perspectives, 35 (6): 122–36.

— (2014) ‘Organizing the Hombre Nuevo Gay: LGBT Politics and the second Sandinista Revolution’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 33 (3): 319–33.

Lancaster, R.N. (1992) Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley, CA).

Montenegro, S. (2000) La cultura sexual en Nicaragua (Managua).

Randall, M. (1994) Sandino’s Daughters Revisited: Feminism in Nicaragua (New Brunswick, NJ).

Thayer, M. (1997) ‘Identity, revolution, and democracy: lesbian movements in Central America’, Social Problems, 44 (3): 386–406.

Walsh, S.D. (2007) ‘Advances and limits of policing and human security for women: Nicaragua in comparative perspective’, in V. Sanford, K. Stefatos and C. Salvi (eds.), Gender Violence, Conflict, and the State (New Brunswick, NJ).

Welsh, P. (2014) ‘Homophobia and patriarchy in Nicaragua: a few ideas to start a debate’, IDS Bulletin, 45 (1): 39–45.