Trans women and travesti people were prominent actors in the first queer political organisations in Spain. These groups bloomed in the second half of the 1970s as the country transitioned from a decades-long National-Catholic dictatorship into a constitutional democratic regime. The role of trans people within them has sometimes been mythologised given their visibility in the widely circulated photographs of the first gay liberation march in the country, which took place in Barcelona in June 1977. But the truth is that we still know very little about their role and experiences in Spain’s gay liberation activism. Thanks to growing work in the field of trans history, we do know that trans people’s presence in the demonstrations of the period extended well beyond Barcelona into other regions across Spain. In this piece, I focus not on their participation in these groups, but on a more singular experience: the first trans political organisation in the country, founded in Barcelona in 1978 under the name of Colectivo de Travestis y Transexuales (‘Collective of Travestis and Transexuals’). After more than four decades of obscurity, I briefly reconstruct its history thanks to new archival material that includes press articles, oral history interviews and personal collections.
In 1976 the Catalan Gay Liberation Front (FAGC) was founded as the first stable, public-facing gay liberation group in Spain. It aimed to put an end to the draconian ‘Social Dangerousness’ legislation that the Franco regime had implemented to persecute homosexuals and other marginalized groups. The following year the group organised the first gay liberation march in the country, where trans people (who were persecuted as homosexuals, but also endured particularly intense forms of police repression and major social and economic exclusion) played a prominent role. In the Spring of 1978 the Front suffered two major splits. Lesbian women left the group to integrate themselves into the feminist movement, while young radical activists, who disagreed with the increasingly institutional direction of the group, founded the Coordinating Platform for Gay Liberation Collectives (CCAG). CCAG activists strongly opposed the arguments made by the Front’s leadership that the hypervisibility of loud, effeminate people could affect their strategic goals of achieving decriminalisation. As a result of these political tenets, travesti and trans people enjoyed a prominent place in the new group. This was reflected in the publication of a two-part debate about their realities in the first two issues of the organisation’s magazine, appropriately named La Pluma (‘effeminacy’, ‘flamboyancy’).
One of the women participating in the debate was Samantha (b. 1949). She was a Peru-born, Switzerland-raised performer and singer who would achieve a certain notoriety in the following months thanks to her media appearances and a disco single. Following what she described as a transformative encounter with gay activists, she agreed to coordinate a new independent collective within the CCAG focusing on trans people. For this project, I have interviewed Samantha, who had not spoken publicly about the experience since leaving Spain in 1980. She explained that her role in the Collective was not that of a conventional political leader, but to coordinate a space that promoted autonomy. Their goal was for the attending trans women and travestis to take control of their fates and decide what strategies to follow to change their lives, on their own terms. This message of empowerment was behind her 1978 poem: ‘Queens and princesses of the night/Dolls of pleasure/Come out into the daylight/and exert your power!/Sleeping beauties/Disenchanted Cinderellas/Clench your teeth!/The fairytale is over!’. She believed that it was time for trans people to come together to change their realities and no longer be forced to live on the margins of society. Samantha recalled around 20 members who regularly attended the group’s weekly meetings, which were lively, political and spanned a plurality of views.
Photograph by Oscar Laser, by courtesy of the author.
The second issue of La Pluma, published in July-August 1978, included a remarkable declaration of the group’s intentions: ‘The CCAG’s Collective of Travestis and Transexuals vindicates the liberation of the travesti [and] transexual from the repression, mystification, exploitation and marginalisation that it has been subjected to until now’. In the following paragraphs, they focused on the limited work opportunities available to trans people, their economic exploitation in cabaret clubs, and their fetishisation in erotic magazines. The article also pointed out that while travestis were often the subject of political debates, they were not given a platform to express their own views, which obscured their real needs and demands. Some of these demands, like ‘the lack of recognition of sex changes in the civil registry [even] for transexuals with surgeries’, had also been overlooked by gay activists. This lack of legal recognition deepened the difficulties trans people faced in accessing the labour market and regularly exposed them to discrimination and police arrests. This issue was in fact Samantha’s ‘main preoccupation’ when she first decided to help set up the group. Lastly, the text called for greater societal awareness of the reality of travesti and transexual people. The Collective argued that in order for them to enjoy ‘all the rights of men and women’ trans people should not have to ‘ask anyone for permission’ or ‘to be ‘tolerated’ or ‘integrated’ as ‘normal’ people.
In July 1978, following the June 25th gay liberation march, a journalist from the magazine Lib was invited to attend one of the group’s meetings. The resulting article provides a unique glimpse into the debates that energised the organisation at the time. In it members argue that their oppression came not only from anti-homosexual legislation, but also from ‘the sexist aggression that treats us like beasts’, echoing demands from feminist groups. Another member states that ‘we are not interested in integrating ourselves in this bourgeois society, which considers us freaks’, calling instead for a freer and less sexist society. A member named Luisa highlighted that ‘one of our stronger demands is the right to freely make use of our own bodies’, a realm in which travestis and trans women had ‘always’ been pioneers despite the reluctance of mainstream political actors to discuss the topic.
I have been able to identify one of the members of the Collective featured in the article as Miryam Amaya (Logroño, 1959), a Roma woman who grew up in the city of Zaragoza in the Northeast of Spain and relocated to Barcelona in 1977, at 17. Miryam took part in multiple demonstrations in Barcelona, and remembers it as a time that invigorated her work as an activist in the decades that followed (at 67, Miryam is still active in local activist groups in Zaragoza). In the Lib article, she denounced the FAGC’s treatment of trans people as an obstacle in their quest for decriminalisation, calling to ‘fight together for the abolition [of Francoist laws] and to be treated as people’.
Trini Falcés (A Coruña, 1942-2022), also known as ‘La Mami’, is another recurring figure in the images of the Collective’s demonstrations. Trini relocated countless times during her life, pushed by the scandal caused by her existence as a trans, intersex woman who was the daughter of a Francoist policeman. She was sentenced to internment in a ‘rehabilitation centre’ on the grounds of the ‘Social Dangerousness’ legislation, and her life was marked by profound economic exclusion. She was also joyous and had a strong sense of justice. For decades, she kept a suitcase in a precarious house in a small village in the province of Zaragoza, which contained a collection of objects she did not want to lose, despite her eventful life.
The materials inside this ‘old, battered’ suitcase (in the words of Victoria, her friend from the village who preserved its contents) included photographs and press clippings of Trini in different CCAG marches in 1978, sometimes wearing her work uniform as a hotel housekeeper. The suitcase also contained an intriguing image of a group of trans people holding a banner that read: ‘We are proud to be homosexual. The transexuals of Spain [illegible] we are going to manage to do it, being united with freedom’. Until now, it was not clear if the Collective had been active beyond October 1978. However, I have been able to date this image as June 25th, 1979, which shows that the organisation was still active a year after its foundation. On that date, members of the Collective marched alongside other groups to protest police raids and call for sexual freedom. This trans-led march was violently repressed by the police, as captured by the (previously uncontextualised) photographs below. Trini’s suitcase also included one magazine. It was a heavily used copy of the La Pluma issue that announced the formation of the Collective. Trini’s intimate memory of the Collective had been kept alive in this suitcase, 732km away from where she spent the last years of her life. This suggests that the experience had a significance for her that was not captured in the interviews that she gave during her lifetime.
belonging to Trini Falces, kept in her suitcase in the village of Fuentes de Jiloca (Zaragoza). Personal collection of Trini Falces, courtesy of Victoria Fuentes.
Like all the other members of the CCAG that I have had the chance to speak to, Samantha does not recall when the group ended. Many people simply stopped going to meetings or activities, leaving very little trace of the organisation. Experiences like the Colectivo de Travestis y Transexuales (and the CCAG as a whole) have been left out of institutional processes of memorialisation, adding another layer of difficulty to excavating their memory. My hope with this article is to show that it is worth reconstructing these precarious histories, which remain particularly relevant to our collective memory at a time when newer generations of trans people are faced with an increasingly difficult political reality.
