BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Verónica Capriglioni remembers packing her bag: a white T-shirt, blue pants and a wool jacket for the cold nights. She looked toward the door twice as if she were waiting for something but then returned to adding items to her bag: socks, papers, travel documents.
She recalls closing her bag and looking around the room. Her eyes filled with tears. She then hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, zipped her jacketand left.
It was 15 years ago, at age 19, that Capriglioni left her family’s home in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, because of their rejection of her sexuality.
Capriglioni is a lesbian. When she fell in love with a woman, it unleashed a crisis within her family, she says. Her mother was suspicious even before she learned the truth.
“The girl whom I was with used to sleep over at the house,” she says. “One night, my mom gets up and starts to say to me: ‘What does this girl have to do here every day? I am tired of her.’ So I realize, my mom already suspected it.”
Capriglioni had to tell her mother the truth.
“I said to her, ‘This girl comes every day because she is my girlfriend,’” she says. “It caused a scandal. The girl left, my mom started to cry, and I started cry. After that, the air could be cut with a knife. Mom did not talk to me.”
After living that way for three months, Capriglioni decided to abandon her home in order to escape what she felt was a lack of understanding and mistreatment from her family. She traveled to Brazil with her partner and her partner’s family, who accepted the relationship.
She returned to Argentina two years later and began a new romantic relationship. Today, Capriglioni is married.
She is also the president of La Fulana, a nonprofit organization of and for gay and bisexual women. One of its objectives is to support those forced to leave their homes and hometowns because of their sexuality, as she once was. The organization calls this phenomenon “lesbian exile.”
In Argentina, many lesbians feel forced to leave their homes or hometowns to escape discrimination and mistreatment on the basis of their sexual orientation. This discrimination persists despite recent advances in the recognition of gay rights in the country’s legislation. One Buenos Aires group, La Fulana, is working to support women who have to leave their homes and to cultivate acceptance of homosexuality nationwide.
In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage.
The country’s 2010 census counted 24,228 households headed by same-sex partners – unions that comprised both legal and common-law marriages. These partnerships made up less than 1 percent of the approximately 7.3 million couples surveyed.
Two women headed more than 58 percent of these same-sex households, according to the census. More than 56 percent of all same-sex couples surveyed lived in Buenos Aires city or province.
Many lesbians feel forced to leave their homes because of their families’ lack of acceptance of their sexual orientation, Capriglioni says.
Natalia Cáceres’ family threw her out of their Buenos Aires home four years ago after they found out she was a lesbian, she says. Now 24, she lives in a shelter for indigent people run by the city government.
Before, Cáceres lived with her mother and older brother, who was the household’s primary breadwinner, she says. Cáceres never spoke with them about her sexual orientation. While working as a babysitter in the building where she lived, she became intimate with the woman who employed her. At first, they were just friends.
“But with time, the situation changed,” she says. “We were more than friends. One afternoon, she did not go to work, and one thing led to another.”
The women began an intimate relationship that ended on the day that Cáceres’ lover’s husband found the pair in bed together. The man began to yell at his wife while he hit Cáceres repeatedly. Dragging Cáceres by her hair, he brought her to her house. Her mother opened the door and broke down. That night, her brother arrived home from work, furious.
“It seems someone had told my brother what had happened,” she says. “Yelling, he told me, ‘In this house, there is no place for dykes.’”
Cáceres had to leave her home and sleep in the street. She never managed to find a permanent place to live. These days, when she finds work, she rents a room in a boarding house. Otherwise, she stays in the city-run shelters.
On one occasion, she tried to speak with her mother.
“My mom did not want to listen to me,” she says. “She just cried and told me that if my brother found out that I had gone to see her, he could get angry and was not going to help her with money.”
Claudia Cándido, a 45-year-old activist with La Fulana in Buenos Aires, came out to her family more than 20 years ago. Although she did not leave her home, her family’s struggle to accept her sexuality had lasting repercussions.
Her father, Rubén René Cándido, 67, still remembers how complex it was for the family to accept that his daughter was a lesbian when she came out at age 19.
“It was not easy,” he says. “My wife took it very badly. She could not get over it. My son also.”
Claudia Cándido says that although she did not end up leaving her family home, her family’s rejection caused her to be ashamed about her sexual identity for a long time.
“I did not know what was happening to me,” she says. “I lived with a family – as society dictates – within an established family, going to a religious school where they inculcate you even with virginity, and homosexuality is not spoken about because that word did not exist. I covered it up, I erased it, I removed it from my mind.”
Initially, Claudia Cándido lived in fear and shame of her sexuality, she says. But with time, she began to get accustomed to the situation and eventually decided to fight for the rights of women in similar positions.
Today, her mother is dead, but her relationship with the rest of the family has improved gradually. She now sees them sporadically.
Through her work with La Fulana, she travels to other Argentine provinces to raise awareness about the organization’s work through film screenings, debates and fliers. During these public activities, she often meets women who have fled discrimination from their families.
“We have evidence that this situation is repeated in many homes,” she says. “For example, when we go to the provinces to do a visibility event, women approach us who tell us they have to leave their native city or their family because they exile them, discriminate against them or mistreat them.”
The situation may be more difficult for lesbians in the interior of the country, where the public tends to be more conservative, Capriglioni says, based on the many stories she has heard from gay women across the country through her work with La Fulana.
Many of La Fulana’s members fled their hometowns seeking refuge in large cities such as Córdoba, Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz and Buenos Aires, Capriglioni says.
“In some places, if you walk down the street holding hands with your girlfriend, you can receive beatings or insults,” Capriglioni says. “It is very difficult to be able to live a life like that. So, what do you do? You come to the capital.”
But as Capriglioni’s own story shows, living in the city does not guarantee a life free of discrimination.
This discrimination persists despite laws recognizing gay rights that Argentina has passed in recent years.
The discrimination that lesbians face at home stands in stark contrast to the growing recognition of their legal rights in Argentina, says Flavia Massenzio, secretary of legal affairs for Federación Argentina de Lesbianas, Gays, Bisexuales y Trans, a national federation of groups, including La Fulana, that promote the rights of gay, bisexual and transgender residents.
After legalizing same-sex marriage in 2010, Argentina approved a gender identity law in 2012 that allows transgender people to change their names and sexes on official documents to match their gender identities without approval from a judge or physician. In 2013, the country passed a law mandating that artificial fertility treatment be available to all people, regardless of marital status or sexual orientation.
But although the nation’s laws have progressed, it is important to keep fighting against the discrimination that persists in some sectors of society, Massenzio says.
Groups within the federation, such as La Fulana, are working to erode this discrimination.
La Fulana was founded in Buenos Aires in 1996 to fight discrimination and to help lesbians who have suffered it. The word “fulana” in Spanish is similar to the term “what’s-her-name” in English. People often use it when they do not know the name of a person or do not want to say it.
One of the group’s tasks is to help women who feel obligated to leave their families or hometowns because of their sexual orientation, Capriglioni says. La Fulana used to have a house where women who had left home could stay, but it has given up the space for economic reasons. Now, the group’s members take women who need shelter into their own homes.
Cáceres, however, was not able to take advantage of this help. She did not realize there were groups such as La Fulana that could offer assistance.
“Maybe if I had known they existed, they would have helped me when I stayed in the street,” she says.
La Fulana also works more broadly to promote diversity, to fight discrimination and to prevent violence against lesbians and bisexual women. The group circulates information related to these themes, connects with similar groups in other countries, and aims to create a space of exchange and mutual aid, according to its website.
Capriglioni recognizes advances in gay rights in Argentina that support her organization’s work but still sees a disconnect between the law and the social acceptance of homosexuality, she says. It took her mother more time to accept her marriage than to accept the law legalizing same-sex marriage.
“I married my partner a year ago,” she says. “But it is only recently that my mom introduces us as a couple. She says, ‘my daughter and my daughter-in-law.’”
Capriglioni feels proud that her mother now sees her partner as a real partner, she says. When she left her home years ago, she thought that would never happen.
“It is a great achievement,” she says. “But there is still more to achieve. It is a daily struggle. We are going to go as far as we can – not only to celebrate the legal victories and a social acceptance, but also the construction of a more equal country.”
GPJ translated this article from Spanish.
