The history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people (LGBTQ) in Argentina is shaped by the historic characterisation of non-heterosexuality as a public enemy: when power was exercised by the Catholic Church, it was regarded as a sin; during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it was in the hands of positivist thought, it was viewed as a disease; and later, with the advent of civil society, it became a crime.
The indigenous peoples of the pre-Columbian era had practices and assessments on sexuality that differed from those of the Spanish conquistadors, who used their sinful "sodomy" to justify their barbarism and extermination.Bazán, 2010 , pp. 59–61
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first activist groups of the country appeared, most notably the leftist Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH), whose immediate forebear was Nuestro Mundo, the first gay rights organization in Latin America.Bazán, 2010 , pp. 340–342 The arrival of the last civic-military dictatorship in 1976—with its subsequent intensification of state terrorism—dissolved these activist efforts,Sebreli, 1997, p. 325 and the local movement often denounces that there were at least four hundred LGBT people among the desaparecidos. The end of military rule in 1983 was followed by a flourishing of lesbian and gay life in the country which, combined with the continued repression, resulted in a resurgence of activism, within which the role of Carlos Jáuregui and the Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA) stood out.
During the 1990s, the local LGBT activism continued to expand, and the first pride marches of the country took place. During the decade, the travesti and transgender rights movement emerged, spearheaded by figures such as Mariela Muñoz, Karina Urbina, Lohana Berkins, María Belén Correa and Claudia Pía Baudracco. Through the 1980s and until the mid-1990s, the nascent LGBT movement was primarily concerned with issues such as homophobia, police violence, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. One of its first great achievements was the repeal of police edicts (Spanish: "edictos policiales") in 1996, used by the Federal Police to arrest LGBT people. In 2000, a civil union bill was introduced in the Buenos Aires legislature, and two years later the city was first in the region to have a law granting legal recognition to same-sex couples.
In the early 2010s, Argentina established itself as a pioneering country in terms of LGBT rights, with the passing of the Equal Marriage Law (Spanish: Ley de Matrimonio Igualitario) in 2010—becoming the tenth country to do so—and the Gender Identity Law (Spanish: Ley de Identidad de Género) in 2012—which allows people to officially change their gender identities without facing barriers such as hormone therapy, surgery, psychiatric diagnosis or judge approval. Since 2019, the country has an official ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity. In 2021, the Cupo Laboral Trans law was passed—which established a 1% quota for trans workers in civil service jobs— and the country became the first in Latin America to recognise non-binary gender identities in its national identification cards and passports.
Indigenous peoples
Andean peoples
The Inca Empire (in Quechua: Tawantinsuyu) extended to part of the modern-day Argentine provinces of Jujuy, Salta, Catamarca, Tucumán, La Rioja, San Juan, and the northwest of Mendoza, incorporating them to the Qullasuyu administrative region.
According to journalist Edmundo Fayanas Escuer, homosexuality was frequently practiced in the Inca Empire—being closely linked with religious life—and lesbianism was permitted and even idealized within the noble classes. Among the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, skeletons of two young men were found surrounded by feminine ornaments and without any masculine attributes.Sebreli, 1997, p. 276
Nevertheless, Juan José Sebreli noted that: "This does not mean, however, that sexual permissiveness reigned in indigenous cultures, in the style of lost paradises that utopian anthropologists like Margaret Mead believe they find in primitive peoples. In the most advanced pre-Columbian civilizations, on the contrary, homosexuality was repressed more viciously than among Europeans; the Incas completely destroyed the sites where a case of sodomy was discovered."Sebreli, 1997, p. 277
Guaraní and Guaycurú peoples
In his 1946 study "Ethnography of the Chaco" (Spanish: "Etnografía del Chaco"), anthropologist Alfred Métraux reported that berdaches were very common among the Mbayá people, writing: "They dressed and spoke like women, pretended to menstruate, and engaged in feminine activities. They were regarded as the prostitutes of the village." According to Alberto Cardín, even though Métraux wrote on the Mbayá people, this was the name that the Guaraní gave in past times to the nomadic tribes of the Guaicuruan languages, who inhabited the other side of the Paraguay River.Bazán, 2010 , pp. 56–58 Pierre Clastres lived for a year among the Guaycurú people and reported two paradigmatic cases: that of Chachubutagachugi, a member of the Aché tribe who did not like men's jobs and worked alongside women; and that of Krembegin, an unapologetic homosexual who was frowned upon but never punished. Likewise, in the mid-19th century the Brazilian Historic and Geographic Institute reported on the homosexuality of the Guaycurú: "Among the Guaycurú and the Xamico, there are some men [...], whom they call cudinhos, who serve as women, mainly on long trips. These cudinhos or nefarious demons, dress and adorn themselves like women, talk like them, they do only the same jobs that they do, they urinate on their knees, they have a husband whom they are very jealous of and constantly hold in their arms, they appreciate that men fall in love with them and once a month they affect a ridiculous pretense that they are supposed to be menstruating, not eating, like women in those crises, neither fish nor meat, only fruits and palm hearts, going every day, as they practice, to the river with a basin to wash themselves."
Mapuche peoples
The Mapuche peoples—who inhabited part of the current territories of Chile and Argentina—had a notion of sexual identity and practice that differed from those of Spanish conquistadors, who reduced their complexity under the concept of "sodomy". According to Chilean writer Tomás Guevara, who studied the Mapuche people in the early 20th century:"[Mapuche] society did not stigmatize pederasty, which was not as widespread [among them] as in Inca communities. In Arauco, it was practiced freely by the machi, male healers. It seems that sodomy was an integral part of ancient and modern 'machism'. The chroniclers of the 17th century mention the existence of this deviation from genetic functions and describe the ways and the exterior of these pederasts. In the learning of 'machism' for men, the art of leaving their sex or of copying females in walking and dressing, in gestures, voice and looks was understood. They painted their faces and adorned themselves like women. They chose an invariably young man, who played the role of husband. They were these passive pederast machi and rarely experienced lewd feelings about women. The young men destined to satisfy the inverted sexual activity of these individuals were made the butt of ridicule by others, and nothing more. They never denied their status as active pederasts because they feared that by refusing, they could father defective children if they married. [The Mapudungun language] designates the homosexual with the word huelle and homosexuality with huelletun."
In the same way, anthropologist Alfred Métraux reported that: "The male shamans today are, as before, berdaches, to use an old French word formerly applied to people of their kind among the Indians of North America. Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, who knew them well in the 18th century, qualifies them as passive homosexuals (hueye). He describes them as dressed in loincloths tied at the waist in the manner of women and in a long tunic.' He adds: 'They did not dress like a man, but wore their hair long, while the others braided it. They were adorned with necklaces, rings and other feminine jewels. They were highly esteemed and respected by men and women; with the latter they behaved like men, and with the former like women.' Among the [Mapuche] of the Argentine pampas, a young man of delicate constitution who acted more like a girl than a future warrior, was not for that reason despised, he was not an object of ridicule. His tendencies were stimulated since they dressed him as a woman; an effeminate appearance was in a man the outer mark of his shamanic vocation."
However, more recent studies point out that, by translating the colonial codes of "sodomy" into the sexuality of machis—isolating them from their historical and socio-political contexts—European settlers were unable to truly understand Mapuche sexuality.Unlike what the Spaniards interpreted, the Mapuches considered that, while political power was masculine, spiritual power was linked to femininity. For them, in addition to men and women, there was at least one more gender identity and they accepted many different types of sexual acts. Until the late 17th century, shamans—then known as machi weye—were men with special powers due to their permanent dual gender identities and relationships with spirits, which allowed them to act as mediators between the human and spiritual world. The machi weye oscillated between the feminine and masculine poles, combining male and female behaviors, dress, and styles in various ways. This dual gender condition could be associated with active or passive sexual acts with men or women or with celibacy, the meanings of which varied depending on the context. A man who became "effeminate" did not lose any status, as womanhood and feminity were valued socially. According to Chilean anthropologist Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, the sexual acts of the machi weye in the Colonial era were not homosexual, heterosexual or bisexual; but rather linked to spirituality. Through colonization, the Mapuche people eventually incorporated the sexual ideology of the conquistadors, and many modern-day Mapuches claim that homosexuality never existed among them, but that they were practices introduced by the Spanish.
Pampa peoples The various indigenous groups that inhabited the Pampas region were grouped under the name of Pampas by colonizers, who sometimes made the distinction between these and the so-called Serranos, those who inhabited places farther away from the lowlands, such as San Luis, Córdoba and the Sierra de la Ventana mountains. The Pampas label was variously used to include the Mbeguá, Tehuelche, Ranquel and Querandí peoples, among others.
In the second half of the 19th century, with the indigenous tribes already in their decline, Lucio Victorio Mansilla reported in 1870 on the Ranquel people's orgiastic dances between men, writing: "They kissed, they bit each other, they threw obscene hands..."
16th–18th centuries: Colonial era