On this day, 22 April 1973, the first LGBT+ rights protest took place in Chile when 40 young people wearing striped sweaters demonstrated in the Plaza de Armas in the capital, Santiago, demanding an end to police harassment.
The organiser of the protest was a 26-year-old sex worker and fortune teller known as La Gitana, who was described by the press as a “transvestite” but used female pronouns and was likely a trans woman. Another participant, Luis Troncoso Lobos, who self-identified as a transvestite known as La Raquel, described police treatment of gay and gender nonconforming sex workers, in a 2011 interview with the Clinic newspaper:
“The police were chasing us a lot. They saw us and took us at once, detained for offenses to morals and good customs. The First Police Station in Santo Domingo was like a hotel for us. There they beat us and shaved us to zero. And that was what hurt the most. Later, one was embarrassed to look in the mirror and the clients did not even give you the time.”
Women bystanders the protest covered the eyes of their children, while men hurled homophobic abuse, calling the demonstrators “disgusting sodomites”. The media described the participants as “deviants”, “weirdos”, and falsely claimed that the protesters were demanding the right to have same-sex marriage.
In the wake of the protest, La Gitana began to experience increased police repression and harassment, until eventually one day she disappeared and was never seen again. Media attacks on gay, gender nonconforming and transgender people escalated, and later that year the right-wing coup of general Augusto Pinochet occurred. The LGBT+ rights movement was driven back underground, to re-emerge in 1984 with the foundation of the lesbian and feminist Ayuquelén Collective.
More information, sources and map: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/11256/chile’s-first-lgbt+-protest https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=613339907505895&set=a.602588028581083&type=3