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On Saturday, June 14, 1997, Diego Crespo, chief of police in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador, ordered a raid on the Abanicos Bar. That night, the bar was hosting the Miss Austro or “gay queen” contest, an underground event for trans women, travestis, and gay men. Police officers violently entered the bar and arrested more than 60 people for “attempted crimes against public moralality.” Brigitte “Pachi” Sandoval, who just hours earlier had been crowned queen, was one of those arrested. She was jailed and sexually assaulted inside the Provisional Detention Center.
While forced to remain in a holding cell, wearing the dress she had worn for the contest, Pachi was subjected to humiliation and abuse. In an article dated June 26, 1997, the newspaper El Tiempo de Cuenca, reported:
In the cell, one of them [referring to Pachi, misgendered as male] was raped while his compañero convulsed in frequent epileptic seizures. The police officers on duty limited themselves to observing and selling condoms for 5,000 sucres each… ‘They took us to a cell where there were alleged criminals, one of them raped me,’ that is all Pachi remembers before losing consciousness… When he woke up, he found his friend in the middle of an epileptic seizure. He asked that [his friend] be taken out, but the police refused. ‘Let him die, one less maricón, much better,’ said one of the uniformed officers.
Upon her release, Pachi publicly denounced what had happened to her, unleashing a wave of protests and solidarity across the country. The events sparked by her story and others like it proved crucial for the struggle to decriminalize homosexuality in Ecuador.
Until 1997, Ecuador’s Penal Code criminalized homosexuality in the first clause of Article 516, which stated: “In cases of homosexuality, which do not constitute rape, the two couriers [persons] shall be punished with imprisonment of four to eight years.” A few months after the Bar Abanicos raid, several LGBT organizations including Amigos por la Vida de Guayaquil, the Ecuadorian Foundation for Action and Education for the Promotion of Health (FEDAEPS), Triángulo Andino de Quito, SOGA de Manabí, and Coccinelle, in conjunction with human rights organizations, gathered signatures to file a case arguing that the article was unconstitutional. Representing the plaintiffs, Ernesto López presented around 1,450 signatures, meeting the court’s requirement to accept the case.
Then, on November 27, 1997, the Constitutional Court accepted the plaintiffs’ argument and declared the law unconstitutional, decriminalizing homosexuality in Ecuador. The ruling was plagued with moralistic and lecturing rhetoric in a tone warning LGBTI+ people to behave themselves. Still, it was a landmark achievement. Coccinelle, a collective made up mostly of trans women that was at the forefront of the struggle, was the first gay organization to gain legal personhood after the decriminalization ruling. The repeal of Article 516 was achieved largely thanks to the courage of trans women who, in the face of repression and great personal risk, took to the streets in a context of forced disappearances, hate crimes, and other abuses committed by police, civilians, and the military.
Despite being a milestone in Ecuador’s LGBTI+ history, there are few records of the process that led to decriminalization. In response to this gap, the archival-activist space Las Maricas No Olvidamos (LMNO) works precisely in the systematization, restoration, protection, editing, production, dissemination, and vindication of sex-dissident archives in Ecuador. It is one of a growing number of projects that combats the lack of official records on sex-dissident memories and histories in Latin America.
I define dissident archives as accumulations of diverse materials—photographs, letters, belongings, personal objects, among others—whose composition escapes institutional/state logics and traditional archival classifications. In this way, they evidence micro-macro memories of individuals and collectives that have not been recognized or have been forgotten by official history. In other words, dissident archives are a material defiance against the dominant organization of grand narratives, which are written from canonical archives linked to state-building and a fixed, hegemonic memory. Dissident archives, meanwhile, come from the affective, from chance, and from the desire of a minority to collect and preserve them.
Sex-dissident archives bear several common characteristics. First, these archives belong to historically excluded and marginalized groups; a dissident archive cannot come from hegemonic memories, and in that sense, they embrace minority becomings. Moreover, they are composed of objects capable of affecting and being affected by relationships, tensions, and encounters with other materials. They are also pliable repositories whose greatest power is their perpetual porosity, the possibility of reinventing and reorganizing themselves without the rigidity of formality. They are not totalizing or definitive repositories, but rather, moldable spaces whose main concern is the (re)construction of invisible histories.
Las Maricas No Olvidamos
LMNO was born from an artistic project that began with the production and dissemination of a fanzine called Máquina Púrpura (Purple Machine), an independent publication that I conceptualized alongside Antonella Zamora and Nua Fuentes Aguirre. This editorial project addresses kink, abject aesthetics, transfeminist/anarchist thought, anti-speciesism, and sex-gender dissidence. In 2015, I began to notice that, in the self-publishing, fanzine, and photobook scene, there was very little space dedicated to issues of gender equality, sexual dissidence, and the visibility of corporalities that did not align with traditionalist canons.
The little material that could be accessed in this realm associated women exclusively with menstruation and natural gynecology; sexual dissidence was reduced only to gay men, and gender transition was portrayed as a tortuous process meant to deceive. These reasons led us to create a fanzine that could show the beauty of transgressive bodies and the varied dynamics of gender, sexuality, and performativity that did not simply respond to the gender binary and heteronormativity. Over the years, Máquina Púrpura became a fanzine publishing house that currently has a catalog of 20 publications. As a result of this editorial experience, we recognized the need to systematize the legal, social, and organizational process that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Ecuador.
One of LMNO’s first initiatives was to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Ecuador. We dedicated an edition of TrueQué Residencia Artística, an artistic residency that took place on the Ecuadorian coast, to analyzing this historic event. Nine artists from Ecuador, Colombia, and the United States participated in the project, creating artistic-activist interventions that highlighted the stories and contributions of those who were part of the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality. This edition was named “Registro Cuyr.”
Ultimately, LMNO has materialized as a space for the activation of sex-dissident archives thanks to the participation of LGBTI+ activists who were part of the decriminalization effort and other survivors of the impacts of Article 516. The archive currently contains a collection of more than 300 documents including photographs, videos, police reports, press clippings, and personal diaries dating from approximately 1996 to 2011. LMNO’s mission is to recover and bring together documentary archives on the life history of Ecuador’s LGBTI+ populations. Its vision is to become a space that hosts and disseminates different collections of sex-dissident archives.
During the archival research process, I collected a series of objects—some donated by survivors of the criminalization era, some inherited after the death of the leading figures of the campaign, some hidden among other objects given to the collection. In the beginning, my main interest was in photographic archives, legal documents, newspaper clippings, and the collection of oral testimonies for a photobook I was compiling on the decriminalization of homosexuality. However, several circumstances diversified LMNO’s main objective.
One major trigger shaping our decision to preserve this material legacy was the story of Jeannette. As Jeannette, a trans woman, experienced progressively deteriorating health, no family members appeared until she was in agony. Her relatives went to her apartment to take only the belongings they could sell. During the autopsy, her breast implants were removed, and she was dressed in a suit and tie for her wake. The few photos and letters she kept in a cardboard box were thrown in the trash, and her clothes and personal belongings were burned. I managed to salvage an old comb that I saw her use during the time I knew her. This deliberate erasure motivated the collection and preservation of object memories.
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Translated from Spanish by NACLA.
Andrea Alejandro Freire / Drejanx is a performer, butohka, cultural manager, and writer from Guayaquil, Ecuador. They are also an HIV-positive queer activist, independent curator, and director of the sex-dissident archive Las Maricas No Olvidamos.