The lesbian and gay movement in Mexico

Scan page 13

WEAKE USED TO ME OUR VICT Fur and leather workers on strike in New York in 1912.

garment workers in the winter of 19091910. The strike began when workers at the Triangle Waist Company in New York were locked out after having joined the waistmakers union. It quickly spread throughout New York and Philadelphia and became known as the "Uprising of the 30,000." The NWTUL played prominent role in the strike, which was the first organized almost completely by women. The strike was generally a success: It won a 52-hour week and a 12 percent pay raise for the majority of the shops. The most important gain was the right to unionize. When the strike began, every shop in New York had been open; whèn it ended, 312 shops had a full union contract. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union emerged from the strike as the AFL's third largest union-and the majority of its members were women.

Other large strikes involving women in the early part of the century included the garment workers in Chicago in 1910, and the famous strike among the Lawrence, Mass. mill workers in 1912, in which the IWW played a prominent role.

The fruitfulness of working class inspiration for the women's movement was demonstrated by the Boston Equal Suffrage Association, founded in 1901, which learned that its greatest support was in the factory towns. Its experience with organizing working people led this group to pioneer the aggressive mass action and outreach activities later adopted by the Women's Party in the final push for women's suffrage.

In addition to the role of working women in inspiring new forms of action by the suffrage movement and gaining it support from working men, there was also a small but significant involvement of working women in the actual suffrage struggle. The Knights of Labor supported women's suffrage and Leonara Barry was a popular speaker at suffrage meetings. Barry also played a prominent role in the successful Colorado campaign for state suffrage in 1893. After 1903, the suffrage movement began in turn to reach out to working women.

In 1907 the Women's Political Union (WPU) was formed, uniting factory and professional women around the goal of involving working women in the suffrage struggle. In 1910 Agnes Nestor, the secretary-treasurer of the International Glove Workers joined the "suffrage special" train from Chicago to Springfield. She spoke at whistle stops to industrial workers on women's suffrage. Union women in the NWTUL spent much of their time on the suffrage campaign. Leonara O'Reilly, Maggie Hinchley and Rose Schneiderman were all popular speakers. The NWTUL organized a special suffrage division, the Wage Earners Suffrage League, to reach unionists on this issue. League speakers would travel to wherever a state suffrage bill was pending.

After 1914 women workers increasingly entered the same trade unions as men. Their collaboration increased the support of male workers for the rights of women, and in turn their support brought the suffrage movement out of its 20-year period of defeat known as "the doldrums." In Colorado, for example, the suffrage vote had lost in 1877, but in 1893, in a campaign where the only new factor was the support of labor, it won. In New York, it was the working class and immigrant vote that won the suffrage bill of 1917.

Allies in working class Through the huge upsurge of working class women's activities in the aftermath of the garment strikes, the suffrage movement gained new allies in the working class movement. In 1919 there was a large increase in women in unions and a tremendous upsurge in both the women's movement and the labor movement. By 1920 women were being organized in large numbers, and, of course, women had won the vote, using imass action strategies pioneered by the NWTUL, the WPU, and the Boston Equal Suffrage Association.

We have argued that the 19th and early 20th century women's movement (while middle class in leadership and even in composition) depended ultimately on collaboration with the working class struggle. Today's women's movement not only depends more than ever upon such collaboration, but must move toward the development of a working class leadership and program. Women make up about 45 percent of all workers, and more than one of every four union members is a woman.

The mutual dependence of the women's movement and the labor movement is especially clear in the current economic crisis. Labor is under attack, and the existence of sexism hurts its ability to resist. Low wages paid to women pull down the wages of all workers, and labor solidarity cannot exist if almost half the workforce is excluded from equal participation.

On the other side, the lip service to equality by politicians and business has begun to disappear now that profits are threatened, while the legal protection that many middle class women counted on has been practically wiped out by the Supreme Court ruling that it is not enough to prove the fact of discrimination to get redress; we must also prove intent.

It is clear that women cannot rely on business or on the politicians and judges that the capitalists control. Only by uniting with labor can women hope to further their struggle for equality, and only by involving women can labor present a united stance against corporate attacks. The two struggles must be connected by the participation and leadership of working women, who experience both sides of the contradictions women face, and can mobilize both these important forces in the struggle for our rights.

DURINDA COURSEY

The following article is based on information obtained during a visit to Mexico in August 1982. The authors are lesbian-feminists from San Francisco. Ann Menasche is a member of Socialist Action. Durinda Coursey is not a member of any political organization.

When we arrived in Mexico City on Aug. 15, we had not a clue on how to locate lesbians and gays, or the gay rights groups that we had heard existed in this city. All we had was the address of the PRT (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores—Revolutionary Workers Party, Mexican section of the Fourth International). From a gay PRT member, we obtained the address of Lambda, a mixed gay rights group that the PRT had helped organize in 1978, and presently the largest gay organization in Mexico. Lambda is housed in the former PRT headquarters, which Lambda shares with Oikabeta, an autonomous lesbian organization.

The following evening, we met Manuel Alvarez Reyes of Lambda, who granted us an interview and showed us copies of the Lambda newspaper, Nuevo Ambiente (New Environment).

Lambda has an active membership of 40 and a periphery of 100. Nearly half of its members and leadership are women. Most members of Lambda are socialists. They actively support workers' struggles in Mexico and other countries, and are in solidarity with the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Many are sympathizers of the PRT.

During the last election, Lambda fielded lesbian and gay candidates of their own choosing under the PRT ticket, and supported the PRT candidate for president, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra. Rosario, a feminist, is one of the most well-known women in Mexico and a leader of the National Front Against Repression.

Police violence

A key issue among lesbians and gay in Mexico is anti-gay and anti-women violence and extortion, often involving the police. Gay bars are periodically raided and must bribe police in order to be allowed to operate.

While we were in Mexico City, police arbitrarily detained large numbers of gay men in the streets, holding them until they paid a bribe. Lambda's response was to help organize a demonstration in coalition with other groups.

Anti-gay repression has been even more severe in Guadalajara, the country's second largest city. Two weeks earlier, 250 lesbians and gays were arrested at the point of machine guns while peacefully attending a gay social function. The prisoners were kept totally incommunicado for as long as three days, and were required to pay large fines to win their release.

Lesbians and gays in Guadalajara have been organized since 1981 in Grupo Orgullo Homosexual de Liberacion (Gay Pride Group for Liberation). At the time of our visit, Lambda and Oikabeta members were doing all they could to assist their sisters and brothers in Guadalajara.

There are presently no lesbian bars in Mexico City. Lesbians meet through the political and social activities sponsored by both organizations, or else sheer luck. There are a few gay men's bars, some having an exclusively upper-class and others an exclusively working-class clientele. Only one of these bars, a working-class bar, admits any women at all. This is a grim place, overwhelmingly male, mafia-run, with no dancing permitted (We were told that same-sex dancing is actually illegal in Mexico.) We noticed a surprisingly large number of soldiers in uniform at this bar.

The situation for lesbians and gays in Mexico City is better than in the rest of Mexico. Though repression is still severe, lesbians and gays are organized and fighting back. But in most of the rest of Mexico, with the exception of Guadalajara, there is no organized gay movement, and lesbians and gays are extremely isolated. Lesbians, of course, are the most invisible, often even lo themselves. Many of them, especially those who are poor and uneducated, or those living away from major cities, still have no alternative but marriage and children.

Yet lesbians and gays in Mexico are more organized and therefore better off than in most other countries in Latin America. The pioneer work of the lesbian and gay movement in Mexico will clearly begin to have an impact way beyond its borders.

The most striking difference between lesbians and gays in the United States and those in Mexico is the degree of radicalism and political activism of lesbians and gays in Mexico. On Gay Freedom Day, 4,000 marched in Mexico City to protest gay oppression. Their slogan was "Socialism without Sexism."

Since there is no illusion of freedom in Mexico, no illusion of being able to "make it" within the system, lesbians and gays in Mexico who are "out" or who identify with the gay liberation movement are, almost without exception, revolutionaries.

Though they have tried to create supportive social alternatives for themselves, there is no talk that we heard of building a counterculture as a retreat from political struggle. Their political consciousness, and complete independence from capitalist politics can teach a lot to gays and lesbians in the United States, particularly in "gay meccas" like San Francisco.

Letter to editor Dear editor, Your interview with Margarito Montes Parra of the Mexican PRT (Socialist Action, March 1984) contains an important mistake. In the middle of the interview it states, "All the left partiesincluding the PSUM (Communist Party)-participate in the Front Against Repression, which last October organized a national day of protest.... ??

It was not the Front Against Repression which organized the day of protest, but the National Workers, Peasant, and Popular Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Obrero Campesino Popular).

Fraternally, Francisco San Francisco Action

Scan page 14

Sharon Lockwood, Wilma Bonet, and Audrey Smith stickin' union in San Francisco Mime Troupe's new production, Steeltown. Michael Bry while she improves herself with night classes including one from a Marxist economics professor.

The Mirandas have it tougher, for Louie (Eduardo Robledo) has been laid off, and, he feels, sold-out by the union, and is resentful of having to stay home and keep house while his wife, Linda (Wilma Bonet), struggles to bring home the bacon and do all the housework Louie neglects.

It's a strong first act, though it did tend to go on a bit too long when the play opened at San Francisco's Victoria Theater March 12, and some elements, notably a confused bit about attempted plant sabotage, didn't seem too well worked into the text.

But it's laced with some fine songs by Bruce Barthol and Eduardo Robledo, sharply directed by Arthur Holden, and performed with captivating broad energy by all the principals and by Audrey Smith as an uptight ramrod of a company PR person and by Gus Johnson as the increasingly exhausted foreman trying to drive his workers toward greater Bill Farrell, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and a supporter of Socialist Action, died in Moraga, Calif., on April 1, 1984. He was 74 years old.

We wish to express our recognition of his life's work, which was devoted to the cause of socialism.

When Bill Farrell was 17 he shipped out as a merchant seaman. During World War Il he and other Trotskyists in the Merchant Marine helped to keep open the bonds of communication among revolutionaries around the world.

Bill Farrell became a member of the Socialist Party in the 1930s while a student at Columbia University. The Trotskyists at that time were working as part of a revolutionary current inside the Socialist Party. Farrell joined with the Trotskyists in 1936.

----- pull-quotes -----

MASTERS! WE WILL Starvations weapon FIGHT

STARVATION UNTILLNE WE WILL FIGHT WINT

Bill Farrell: 1910-1984