A Safe Space for Latina Lesbians in 1980s NYC
1995 Pride March in NYC with the new banner that Mariana Romo-Carmona’s mother made. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
“For many women, they didn't have any family, and it was so important because they felt like they were alone in the world,” says Mariana Romo-Carmona, adjunct professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies at The City College of New York and one of the cofounders of Las Buenas Amigas (LBA). “[With Las Buenas Amigas], we wanted to create that sense of strength and support and continuity that we knew was important to us culturally.”
“We wanted to create that sense of strength and support and continuity that we knew was important to us culturally.”
Formed in 1986, LBA was a group of Latina lesbians in New York City who started meeting at each other’s homes as resistance and a shield to the deep discrimination and invisibility they experienced daily. The 1980s saw a rapid increase in AIDS cases, a religious conservative revival, and rising violence of gang attacks and homicides against the LGBTQ community. While gay white men have historically successfully claimed spaces (albeit exclusive ones) lesbians, particularly lesbians of color, did not have the same chances because of sexism and racism. When they attempted to carve out these places, they faced legal and social punishment, especially if they had children.
1987. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
1987. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
During this time, the wider women’s movement marginalized lesbians. Latina lesbians’ families ostracized them as homophobia activated the already religious conservatism in Latinx culture. “This group in New York formed as a way to raise our own awareness, our own autoconciencia, to do consciousness-raising with ourselves in a group, to question ourselves and figure out like, who are we? What about our history?” Romo-Carmona says.
Consciousness-raising groups became popular in the 1960s and 1970s during second-wave feminism, not just among white women, but as a tool all women across races and ethnicities used to analyze their role in society. While there were other groups for women of color, like Salsa Soul Sisters, which launched in 1974, LBA was the first-known group to raise awareness around the particular issues of Latina lesbians and provided a space where they could embody their Latinidad. “That's how the group started and then after it formally became a group, the next stage was to really expand it in New York City and attend to the issues and the needs of Latina lesbians in the city because there wasn't another Latina lesbian group at that time,” Romo-Carmona says.
United by a feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, and anti-imperialist worldview, LBA was the brainchild of eight NYC-based Latinas: Aida Santiago, Dalitza Ramirez, Elizabeth Crespo, Juanita Diaz-Ramos, Lili Benson, Lourdes Cintrón, Luz María Germain, and Romo-Carmona. LBA came to organize Latina lesbians through educational, cultural, political, and social organization. It provided a place to deconstruct and take action against the oppression while cultivating a space of sisterhood where they could laugh, bochinchear, and actualize their existence.
LBA party at the LGBT Center. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
Romo-Carmona—an organizer, writer, and teacher now in her 70s—was 31 in 1984 when she moved to New York City to find steady work and be with her partner, June Chan, the cofounder of Asian Lesbians of the East Coast. But a decade before moving, she was married and raising a young son in Connecticut. When she came out as a lesbian in 1975, her world changed. “When I got a divorce [in 1976], my son's father sued for sole custody, and it was granted to him because this was in Connecticut. There was no law to protect me, to protect my parental rights,” she says, adding That she fought for visitation rights for the next 17 years. “It was because my ability to be a mother was questioned because of my being a lesbian.”
She moved to Boston in the hopes of seeking a better support system and a well-paying job that would allow her to hire a lawyer and pay legal fees. In the end, she couldn’t find the kind of job that could financially support her. “When I had come out as a lesbian, I was very aware of how civil rights for lesbians, as well as people of color generally, were being curtailed in everyday life,” Romo-Carmona says.
This deeply hurtful personal experience galvanized her to become an organizer in Boston, where she cofounded another Latina lesbian group and worked with a coalition that helped write legislation to protect women victims of violence. In 1981, Romo-Carmona also helped Juanita Diaz-Ramos edit Compañeras: Latina lesbians, a 1987 anthology of a collection of literary works by Latina lesbians.
NYC Pride march. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
While she found a community in Boston, she struggled to find work so Romo-Carmona moved to New York City and found a job at the New York Office of Equal Employment Contract Compliance that allowed her to pay for the lawyer she needed every time she returned to Connecticut to visit her son. In New York, she entered an expansive world with a lot of movement and high energy that felt exciting. “People were involved in all kinds of innovative and progressive projects,” she says. “[For example,] I was part of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.”
But being a part of prestigious, interesting, or creative projects didn’t save them from everyday discrimination. “It was kind of like there was activism, creativity, society, but then there was this personal life that is so integral to a person's development that did not have support. There were no legal protections. In fact, there were legal threats,” she explains. “The infrastructure that we see now where you can get support and you can see yourself and other people, that didn't exist. It tended to alienate people so that's why the so-called bar culture was so important.”
Lesbian bars have declined and risen over the past few decades. Meanwhile, bars, like Cubbyhole in the West Village and Ariel’s in Flatiron, in the 1980s were one of the centers of social life for lesbians in New York City. “Like the Duchess, those meeting places were really important because they function as those sources of support that otherwise did not exist,” Romo-Carmona says.
Early 1988, after an LBA meeting at the LGBT Center. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
1988, after an LBA meeting. Photo courtesy of Mariana Roma-Carmona.
Other integral spaces for NYC-area lesbians were dances at clubs like Park Villa II in the borough of Staten Island where Audre Lorde lived, art shows at small galleries, book readings at bookstores like Djuna Books in the West Village and Womanbooks in the Upper West Side, musical events, and community centers like Women’s Liberation Center and the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in Chelsea. “[It was] not as formal as now and definitely not as expensive, but people just knew a filmmaker or a painter or an artist, that's where the community would just kind of be drawn to,” she says.
While these cultural spaces provided joy, many lesbians also united in activism. “I think that the place where everybody connected was coalitions of societal change,” Romo-Carmona says. “There were coalitions for reproductive freedom, all manner of coalitions where people were working on particular social issues and fundraisers that were organized for funding marches and demonstrations and whatever initiative.”
As the founders formed LBA, they initially met at each other’s homes. When the group became public, the group moved the meetings to the Lesbian Gay and Community Services Center and met every Sunday at 2 p.m. “You didn't have to send out invitations. You didn't have to call people. You just knew it was there,” Romo-Carmona adds “You could bring snacks, you could go for coffee afterwards and eventually, the next thing that we did was we made a banner and we started marching as a group in the Pride marches.”
Ten to 20 women joined Sunday meetings to discuss the socio-political and cultural challenges and obstacles of lesbians, work on legislation, or form coalitions around issues like immigration. When LBA hosted larger gatherings and parties, at least 50 women came to celebrate. But what was important within LBA was that the women felt like they were a family because their own had disowned them. “One time my mother even came to the meeting just so that she could hang out with us,” Romo-Carmona says “It was amazing because a bunch of us started crying; we knew it was really important to have that kind of support.”
“Once we began to form these coalitions, it was so powerful; it really made a big difference.”
Ultimately, visibility of Latinx lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people was one of the great accomplishments of LBA. “I think that visibility alone can't accomplish everything, but I think that the work that was done in coalition with other groups, especially in terms of how it started to change representation of queer people legally; I think that that was a really important connection to create social change. Once we began to form these coalitions, it was so powerful; it really made a big difference,” Romo-Carmona says.
Romo-Carmona started to see these changes when there wasn’t just a token Latina involved in these projects. “When I was a member of Kitchen Table Press, and when we published Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, the three editors—Cherríe Moraga, Alma Gómez, and myself—we were so excited because when we were doing that work, we said this is the first time that there is three of us in a room,” she says. “It was good because before that, it was like everybody else had one Latina.”
“We changed not just in mainstream society, how we were seen there, but also in political work. Political work and literary work, you know, in the arts,” she concludes. “And then we kept going on to anthologies and museum exhibits and gallery openings and artists and musicians. It just really blossomed.”