All across the U.S., México, and around the world, June is celebrated as LGBT Pride Month. Though Dallas’s LGBT community mostly celebrates Pride with a parade in September there are still smaller celebrations around the city in June, keeping in-sync with a world unity of LGBT June Pride.
As part of June Pride Month TeCo Theatrical Productions, Inc., has invited me to speak as part of their speaker series about LGBT Latina/o North Texas History in the 80s & 90s.
Why LGBT Latino history? Because LGBT Latino history is often marginalized in the overall LGBT history, not only locally but also nationally – Latina/o’s are invisible in the overall mainstream of LGBT history – no more!
Lots of people don’t know that in Dallas the Gay & Lesbian Hispanic Coalition de Dallas was founded in 1983. That a gay Latino brought to life Dallas’ first annual Virgen de Guadalupe art exhibition in December 1988 and that Dallas also had U.S.’s first LGBT Latino bilingual radio show, Sin Fronteras, that begin broadcasting on the 4th of July 1993 on KNON 89.3 FM. Then in 1994 the Latina group Lesbians Latinas de Dallas formed. All worthwhile Latina/o organizations that helped fight discrimination and advance the LGBT Latina/o movement in North Texas – all before Facebook, Twitter: social media.
Though the Gay & Lesbian Hispanic Coalition de Dallas, Lesbians Latinas de Dallas and the Sin Fronteras radio show are no longer around: the preservation of Latina/o history does with a book titled, Queer Brown Voices that will be out in August 2015. Queer Brown Voices is a book of essays chronicling the experiences of fourteen Latina/o LGBT activists that present a new perspective on the hitherto-marginalized history of our work in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, LGBT Latinas/o’s faced several forms of discrimination. The greater Latino community did not often accept sexual minorities, and the mainstream LGBT movement expected everyone, regardless of their ethnic and racial background, to adhere to a specific set of priorities so as to accommodate a “unified” agenda.
To disrupt the cycle of sexism, racism, and homophobia that they experienced, LGBT Latinas/o’s organized themselves on local, state, and national levels, forming communities in which they could fight for equal rights while simultaneously staying true to both their ethnic and sexual identities.
Yet histories of LGBT activism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s often reduce the role that Latinas/o’s played: resulting in misinformation or ignoring their work entirely – often erasing them from history.
Erasing our Latina/o LGBT history no more: included in the LGBT Latina/o North Texas History will be a reading from the book, my chapter, titled "From the Closet to LGBT Radio Host in Dallas.” And there will also be a drawing to win two books, Queer Brown Voices.
The LGBT Latino Pride event is Saturday, June 20, 2015, 7:30 PM at TeCo Theatrical Productions, Inc., located at the Bishop Arts Theatre Center, 215 South Tyler Street, Dallas, 75208. Advanced ticket price $20 each, at the door $25: general admission seating. More information: 214-948-0716. Ticket information via the Internet at https://buy.ticketstothecity.com/purchase.php?event_id=3348
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