Valen Iricibar 
Updated November 2
Argentina’s annual pride march happens on the first Saturday in November. This year’s event starts at 10 a.m. on November 4, with a fair and concert in Plaza de Mayo. The crowd, which numbered 1.3 million in 2022, will start making its way to Congress at 3 p.m. along with a colorful cavalcade of floats and pumping music.
Argentina bucks the trend in this regard: internationally, the LGBTQIA+ community usually celebrates pride in the month of June, culminating in pride marches around June 28. The date commemorates the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York, a series of clashes between queer civilians and police following a raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
“Our first pride march happened on July 2 [1992] in keeping with Stonewall, but remember that it’s the middle of winter here and it’s very cold,” said Juan Pablo Morino, sports secretary of the Argentine LGBT+ Federation, a non-profit which brings together queer organizations from across the country.
“At a time when HIV was battering us, exposing the LGBT community to the streets wasn’t logical. So we immediately started looking for an alternative date in warmer months and found that the first Argentine LGBT+ organization, Nuestro Mundo, was created prior to Stonewall in November 1967, so it was moved.”
Nuestro Mundo was a small advocacy group for gay rights formed by leftists in Buenos Aires and was perhaps the first of its kind in Latin America. It later joined ranks with similar organizations to form the Homosexual Liberation Front, which dissolved in 1976 when the country’s last military dictatorship came to power.
Argentina’s 1992 pride march was the first in South America and this year will be its 32nd — Morino highlighted that few countries in the region came close to that number. Now, Argentina is known internationally for its pro-LGBTQIA+ policies but there is often a significant gap between the law and reality.
“Argentina is very advanced in terms of LGBT legislation but not in the day-to-day. We still don’t have an anti-discrimination law: in most countries that’s the first law that passes and the rest comes after,” said Morino. “But here we first saw equal marriage, the Gender Identity Law, Assisted Fertility — many laws in our favor but that doesn’t mean that society is changing.”
According to the LGBT Ombudsman’s Office for Buenos Aires City, there were a total of 129 hate crimes targeting the LGBTQIA+ community in 2022 — 108 targeted trans women and travestis. Of the registered hate crimes, 89 led to the person’s death, either through murder or “structural violence” (systematic exclusion and state neglect that infringe on basic rights and put lives in danger).
The demands for November 4 include laws against discrimination and in favor of trans rights, an end to austerity, and calls to resist political proposals to take away LGBTQIA+ rights — a pointed remark about certain political sectors in a fraught electoral year. The politics of the pride march demands are quintessential to the Argentine parade: pride has never been divorced from protest.
“I’ve been to pride marches abroad and it’s so much more commercial. It’s strictly celebratory with no politics,” Morino told the Herald. “Brands have visibility whereas here, the initial and primordial visibility belongs to our associations on their float.”
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Argentina’s June 28
Although the pride march is in November, the community here does mark the June date. In recent years there have been more pride-related activities throughout the month and on June 28, there was a march spearheaded by the trans-travesti community. Unlike its direct English translation, travesti in Argentina is a gender identity with deep political roots that is worn with pride.
In Argentine style, the march was a political protest —the “Eighth Annual Plurinational Federal Anti-racist March against Travesticides, Transfemicides, and Transhomicides,” calling for justice for the murder of travestis, trans women, and trans men respectively.
“It’s important to rethink the power logic within our community because pride marches are monopolized by gay white men,” said Manu Mireles, co-founder and secretary of the trans-inclusive school Mocha Celis. “Without a doubt, June 28 has been a spark to work hard on this.”
Mireles emphasized that there is an outstanding, historical debt within the LGBTQIA+ community to support trans people and travestis. If anything this is in keeping with the history of pride. Two trans women of color, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, pioneered the gay liberation movement but routinely faced discrimination from established gay organizations. They were even banned from participating in the first pride parade marking Stonewall’s first anniversary, which Rivera called out in her famous “Y’all Better Quiet Down” speech demanding to be listened to.
“Centering our trans-travesti and non-binary community necessarily makes things more transversal, starting from there means a reconfiguration of power within the movement. We are the most vulnerable,” Mireles said. “Every year at the Mocha two of our students are killed.”
A 2022 joint study by the Mocha Celis and the Buenos Aires City Ombudsman’s Office revealed that 63% of trans women and travestis, 66% of trans men and 84% of non-binary people had suffered violence over the past 10 years. Many trans women and travestis experienced violence at police stations specifically.
“There’s this fantasy that everything’s been solved in Argentina but living in Palermo is completely different to the outskirts of Buenos Aires,” Mireles said. “It’s completely different to inhabit spaces as someone who is racialized, fat, thin, young, old, a migrant. The experience of a Black travesti is going to be incomparable to the experience of a white or Indigenous travesti. It’s very important to have intersectionality as a key to guaranteeing our rights.”
For Mireles, that expansive intersectionality and historically active political involvement are elements the world could learn from Argentina’s queer community.
“We don’t just think about the world from a sexual and gender diversity perspective,” Mireles said. “It’s not what bathroom or pronouns we use —we talk about that because we have no choice— but we actually want to be talking about other things.”
“There is no democracy without Indigenous people, without Black people, without disabled people, without trans people, without travestis, without non-binary people. It doesn’t exist.”
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