The World in Question: A Cosmopolitical Approach to Gay/Homosexual Liberation Movements in/and the "Third World" (from Argentina to the United States)

Abstract

Abstract:This essay focuses on two radical gay/homosexual organizations of the early 1970s: Third World Gay Revolution (TWGR)—a small group of radical Black and Latinx activists that spun off from the Gay Liberation Front in 1970—and the Argentine organization Homosexual Liberation Front (FLH), which was active between 1971 and 1976. By analyzing periodicals, bulletins, and other ephemera produced by them, Garrido demonstrates how both groups not only articulated demands related to queer sexualities in relation to those of other oppressed communities but also inscribed their gay struggles in a movement for the liberation of all peoples on a planetary scale within the framework provided by third world anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles being waged in African, Asian, and Latin American countries at the time. TWGR and the FLH engaged in "dissident forms of cosmopolitanism" (Chela Sandoval) that drew, in part, from the imaginary of a world in dispute—a world in which colonial and (neo)colonial/imperialist powers were being challenged and third worldism as a global emancipatory project led by "the darker nations" (Vijay Prashad) was gaining ground. At the dawn of neoliberal globalization, both organizations advanced a radical political agenda based on values of social justice with a spirit of transnational solidarity that, Garrido argues, may inspire the multidimensional nature of a queer cosmopolitics to come.