The book Here We Are. Carlos Jáuregui, Sexuality and Politics in Argentina , includes unpublished texts, newspaper articles, photos and archives, but also snapshots of the intimacy, activism and legacy of the founder of the Argentine Homosexual Community (CHA). Compiled by Gustavo Pecoraro, writer and journalist, and published by the Buenos Aires City Legislature, this book features valuable contributions and perspectives from Martín de Grazia, Diana Maffia, Ernesto Meccia, Mario Pecheny, Mabel Bellucci, Cesar Cigliutti, Marcelo Ferreyra, Alejandra Sardá, Héctor Anabitarte, Osvaldo Bazán, Ilse Fuskova, and Alejandro Modarelli, as well as texts from Buenos Aires legislators—Andrea Conde (FpV), Roy Cortina (PS), Maximiliano Ferraro (CC-ARI), Pablo Ferreyra (FpV), and Patricio del Corro (PTS-FIT)—and the city's Deputy Mayor, Diego Santilli. Here is the chapter written by Modarelli, which recalls endearing and little-known moments in the activist's life.

The pariah, great sculptor, by Alejandro Modarelli

 

Don't ever say "you" again.

In the mid-eighties, I was a young man whose sole ambition was to become known as a writer, and if that dream proved too grand, as a journalist. It didn't matter which publishing house, newspaper, or magazine I tried my luck with, as long as that luck bore my name, because no other life project or path to recognition existed outside the public eye. In that cloistered room, I groped about, already driven mad by my clandestine sexuality, which, anomalous as it was, and naive as I was, became rumor or certainty through effeminate gestures and phrasing. A desire confessed with shame on the therapist's couch. And so I went, author of a small book where I masked myself within the protagonists of the stories, fearful that my family might discover me like a withered butterfly among other books in the library, though I had already been discovered, and as mothers and fathers generally do, I was immediately filed away again in the family basement. I lived turned away from my reflection in the uniformity of a desert, without even possessing the certain awareness of being an outcast among outcasts, and therefore incapable of thinking of rebelling and claiming, along with the others, the keys to the democratic city. My individual experience was playing the solitary game of heads or tails, the game of adventurer—the adventurer who has only chance and danger as his guide—and unleashing my libido in the city's underbelly. The periphery was much more reassuring to me than the centrality of reciprocal love or partnership: even to love and be loved freely required a certain political audacity against the moral empire of the family. I lived thus terrified of being caught by a policeman from the Morality Brigade on the train platform or of the possible lash of the homophobe. With the return of democracy, nothing had changed in the lewd street scene, between that teenager who spied on genital sociability in public restrooms during the dictatorship (a policeman had demanded money from me in exchange for not reporting my escapades to my parents; I was beaten on a train platform) and those early years of Raúl Alfonsín, when we gays were still prey to the orders and manic obsessions of his Minister of the Interior, Antonio Tróccoli. Who didn't talk back then about Leandro, his rejected son, a famous queer in that scene where I barely moved! I didn't move, and if I happened to come into contact with him, I feared or repudiated him like a character in Marcel Proust rejecting his own peers, his own mirror. Invited by my friend César Cigliutti, the only one with whom I shared secrets in the underground at that time, to a meeting of queers, I was speechless with horror because they addressed each other using feminine pronouns. Shortly after, I happily adopted that semantic loop as a result of the gay world's pedagogy, a habit of the game of identifications that entered into crisis for a time when queer people wanted to be admitted into the public and media arena, and which I continued to use nonetheless for the pleasure of destabilizing language. A performance of speech typical of the queer community, mimetic and automatic, against compulsory masculinity.

[READ MORE: Carlos Jáuregui, the unforgettable faggot]

By '85, César had fully embraced the Argentine Homosexual Community, distancing himself from my small, individual world. My childhood friend was becoming an activist, severing our Siamese twin bond to share his path with other wronged individuals who, like him, were daring to be reborn, while I remained in the background, persisting in my personal adventure. Nevertheless, with César in the CHA, I gradually came to accept the idea that my way of experiencing sexuality could be considered a right, and that The State not only had no power to enter bedrooms, but also not places of encounter....or to review the publications of the LGBTQ+ community. After all, if democracy protected freedom of expression, I was obligated to defend the expression of my sexuality. In those years, I definitively abandoned the conscious legacy of my Catholic upbringing and the classist aspirations of a privileged kid, because intuitively I was already associating my own sexual freedom, until then alienated and not yet lived with pride or happiness, with a much broader, more collective, and radical concept of liberation. I knew then that Carlos Jáuregui was already a figure whose responsibility transcended the individual, because he aspired to be the face of a pluralistic struggle. I saw him occasionally while he was president of the CHA, and sometimes at the home of a mutual friend of César's. Even then, he had been on the cover of Siete Días magazine, in a romantic embrace with another activist, and with that act, I assure you, all gay Argentinians were on the cover for the first time. Through the donation of his face and his name, and its public circulation, we won the first battle against the social stigma. I suppose that since the scandal of the Military Academy cadets in 1942, photographed naked at a prostitute party, homosexuality in Argentina hadn't so readily entered the realm of family conversation at the dinner table. Many felt that, having emerged from the shadows thanks to the media, homosexuality needed to be cloaked in masculine seriousness so that it could gain acceptance. The stage was still set for the performance of a repressive society; the powers that be still censored expressions of dissenting desires because they didn't have absolute control over everything visible and all voices circulating in the media and commerce, and it would take a few decades to transform sexual differences into a market niche and pleasure into an obligation. In that sense, The arrival of Carlos Jáuregui came as a turning point. between two ways of perceiving homosexuality as an identity in the public sphere. If it was still labeled an illness, if not sinful, the democratic state could no longer legally sustain such fantasies, and the market understood before anyone else that a new subject for differentiated consumption would soon emerge. Suddenly, two images assail me that summarize that time, between the late eighties and the mid-nineties, in which a state of affairs was being born without the one preceding it having fully died: Carlos debating on television programs with ecclesiastical dinosaurs, and Carlos in a photograph in the province of Córdoba, where he had been invited by a businessman seeking to build something like a country club “with absolute discretion” for vacations or a habitat for queer people. Between these two images in tension, time, it seems to me, decided on the latter. Carlos began to shape my political subjectivity long before I became such a close friend. One early morning in 1987, I left the Bunker disco with a man much older than me—a refuge for the carnal excesses of the weekend, when the body believes it has found a mechanism for self-justification. In his tiny apartment, he recounted that episode, which I once referred to in an interview as... “Carlos Jáuregui’s little stonewall.” (I return here to the subject of this Buenos Aires Stonewall because, despite several paragraphs dedicated to it, I don't think the younger generation has incorporated it into their collective memory): The brief lover in question (to my dismay, passive) had been at the Contramano nightclub the night Carlos rebelled against some officers from the local police station who, in a harassment operation, had turned on the lights to arrest customers and, as was common practice at the time, take them to the Central Police Department for "background checks." Carlos called for resistance, shouting and throwing himself to the floor to the strains of the National Anthem, just as popular demonstrators did to interrupt police assaults. His reaction, invoking the protection of the undeniable national symbol, immediately brings to mind... The alliance that Carlos maintained with human rights organizations, which had adopted that method, is still effective today when it is necessary to defend oneself against repression.The Bunker regular recounted the modest feat to me with indignation, for having been caught up “in the madness of that Jáuregui” who wouldn't stop haranguing from the federal police car. Only a few supported Carlos's New York rebellion in the South American suburb. Between that moment of submission and shame for the queers who preferred to be insulted in silence, like lambs, and that other (the last) police raid I witnessed not so long ago, prompted by a neighbor's complaint about a private party at a venue in Palermo, there lay a long period of understanding one's own dignity.

[READ MORE: Carlos Jáuregui, the first subway station to pay tribute to an LGBTI activist]

This last time the party girls resisted any humiliation; I even saw them sneaking between the officers, mocking them, shouting about their acquired rights, and without the officers—who knew they were abusing their authority—daring to arrest them. That revolt, misunderstood by many, led by Carlos Jáuregui in Contramano in the eighties, triumphed completely two decades later. It must be said that Carlos was at his most brilliant the more impassioned he was. Like the time one morning, hungover and caught off guard on the phone by a journalist's question about Cardinal Quarraccino's insults to the LGBTQ+ community, he claimed (a lie) that a lawsuit was already underway against the prelate for discrimination. None other than the Primate of Argentina, and back in the nineties! The truth is, thanks to this overacting, the old dinosaur ended up apologizing days later on his ridiculous television program, "Keys to a Better World." Fantasies of a better world for him, sexual dissidents concentrated on an inaccessible island. Carlos's movements were nervous, his booming voice was nervous, and so was the way he adjusted his glasses with his index finger in the middle of every conversation, like Tato Bores, as if time were never enough for him, even though he maintained he was going to die around the age of forty-five. Not because of the HIV virus, which he never spoke of and which ultimately made him ill in 1996, but—I believe—because of the intensity he was unwilling to relinquish in old age. And, who knows, perhaps because somewhere in his subconscious he was beginning to contribute material to the mythical construction of his own persona. We already know that the manner of death, like that of life, defines the effectiveness of the myth. So does the propensity to recreate one's own past. For Carlos, that part of his past that was no longer useful was either omitted or reinvented. From 1991 onward, my friendship with him became close, I suppose, because he was taking a break from activism and we collaborated on writing a script for a miniseries about a detective that never got off the ground. The outings, the arguments and fights, the computer games, the companionship we shared like children determined not to grow old. He had left the CHA (Argentine Homosexual Community) but Gays for Civil Rights hadn't yet been founded, where he forged a strong connection with César Cigliutti, Marcelo Ferreyra, Gustavo Pecoraro, and, alas, with me. (always like an obsessive satellite in the shadows, proposing but not acting) A political intervention project by the LGBTI community aimed at achieving legal equality, thus incorporating us as activists into the international egalitarian movement. In fact, I remember the constant stream of people from LGBTI organizations in other countries visiting the house on Paraná Street, where Gays DC was headquartered. It was also the place where we reflected on possible alliances with other Argentine social and political movements, with the goal of demanding legislation that would recognize us as subjects, and thus embrace Arendt's maxim that the worst form of discrimination is not social and cultural, but legal. The strategic originality of our group, in coordination with others, lay in communicating through performative urban protests, which attracted television cameras, as when Carlos, César, Marcelo Ferreyra and Ilse Fuskova characterized themselves as great military figures from historyOr in the early Pride marches, though some wore masks for protection. And as insistent voices and dissenting bodies on every television program we were invited to, no longer as a suggestion for family paranoia, but to burst onto the scene as citizens (or, if you will, as neighbors) in kitchens and dining rooms. I realize, as I write, that I keep saying “we.” I repeat that “we,” contrary to the grammatical conventions I unconsciously clung to in those days of friendship with Carlos, when he hadn't yet managed to get me to include my singularity within a collective subject. It was common for him to challenge me: “Don't say 'you' anymore” when ideas or reproaches occurred to me. Or when, one night of inspiration, I created the group's slogan, “At the origin of our struggle lies the desire for all freedoms,” for “you.” That's how absurd, how irrational, was my perception of the activist world, as if I were a satellite orbiting a planet of decisions, which I sometimes influenced but didn't entirely believe I was a part of. Even after years of visibility, the collective and the community were still a project, a political program in gestation, and I don't think anyone had given much thought to what that "we" meant and whether it included the most vulnerable. I believe that the emergence of the Gay Village on the dirtiest edges of the Río de la Plata, and its demolition by state bulldozers in the late nineties, as well as my own embrace of the transvestite struggle, led many of us—white, cisgender, and middle-class—to glimpse a much more dynamic, unsettling, and destabilizing concept of the terms "identities" and "collective." Another point that has been debated, and which I had to discuss with a guy on social media, is the comparison—which turned into an attempt at quality control—between the Two figures who, even in death, contributed even more pages to the annals of the Argentine LGBTI movement: Néstor Perlongher and Carlos JáureguiThey reflect two distinct periods, because between the existence of the Homosexual Liberation Front (FLH) in the early seventies, and the Argentine Homosexual Community (CHA) and Gays DC, from the eighties until 1996, the Civic-Military Dictatorship took place, bringing with it the temporary disappearance of activism and, in a way, a diaspora. This diaspora was spearheaded by Perlongher, of Trotskyist origin, and also by Héctor Anabitarte, the two leading figures of the FLH. Carlos disliked Perlongher, with whom he barely crossed paths, and I suspect that this dislike must have been mutual. They had forged their leadership in vastly different eras. The FLH embraced the paradigm of the revolutionary left, that program of universalist and radical transformation of social and cultural structures, but the union between revolution and homoeroticism was thwarted before it could be consummated, and the train that was meant to take us left us on the platform. The CHA and Gays DC later warned that a distinct agenda for visibility and the demand for democratic inclusion was needed, because otherwise, no one would take it upon themselves to write it for them. Perlongher had gradually abandoned sex-political activism and concentrated on his academic and literary career. Through his readings of the post-structuralists (from Deleuze and Guattari to Michel Foucault and Michel Maffesoli), he set out to challenge, in a provocative way, the concept of identity as an imposition, and therefore homosexual identity. Carlos was angered by an essay by Néstor that received considerable attention in activism, “The Disappearance of Homosexuality,” where he argued that this was an identity in retreat, especially after its overexposure due to AIDS, and that it would soon fade into the social fabric, no longer attracting anyone's attention. Carlos, on the other hand, believed more than ever that this identity—unstable, strategic, whatever you want to call it—had to be fully constructed in Argentina as a shared face, one that would account for its unsettling memory and its desire for vindication, so that it could then be maintained and developed, because otherwise what would disappear would not be the epistemological debates surrounding it, but rather the material possibility of registering its existence within the domain of Law and Justice. Only in this way, at last, could death, that desert where we were confined, no longer defeat us, those of us who were born, grew up, and left the world so many times as outcasts, like sand: Dear Carlos, Lohana Berkins died a few weeks ago. As melancholics say, the best always die first, and there's no one to take their place. I'm melancholic, like your mother, and that, like many other things about me, irritated you. I should warn you that some of your detachments bothered me too, for example, not wanting or being able to create your own means of survival, but above all, neglecting your body, which you mistreated so much. I see now, on the stage of memory, your body on its last day, on the sofa on Paraná Street, while we kept vigil before it resigned itself to leaving. It wasn't a scene offered up for pathos, but one of the most generous and genuine communal rituals I've ever participated in: your closest group of friends were saying goodbye, and I'm sure you could hear us. As always, joy is drawn from misfortune in the worst situations, and the eroticism of humor suddenly arrives to suspend the power of death. I'll never forget Alejandra Sardá's confusion, who thought she heard you ask for a cross—had that young man from the La Plata church returned to his old ways?—when in reality you were clamoring for a good glass of orange soda, a "crush." ​​I don't know why "crush," since for you a liquid that didn't contain alcohol was inconceivable (do you remember when you came home drunk from Contramano one early morning and gave the dog books so she could learn something?). We almost went looking for a crucifix that early morning of your veiled agony. It occurs to me now that that vigil around the armchair foretold a resurrection. What was being resurrected on Paraná Street was a family which for many of us had been dead as a concept long before. It re-entered the scene, this time dissenting in its functional way, and triumphed over the affective exile to which tradition had subjected us. We appropriated that funeral ceremony, which has such social prestige, we resignified it, and we turned a singular death into a shared death (in that undead dead man we watched depart, turned inward and beyond the noise of the world, resided all your truth, resided the great sculptor). Since those nineties, when activism was lived in its innocent state, that is, in the unity of what did not yet exist and for which we then fought, with the hope of those who had nothing to lose, a leader like you, in whom there was almost unanimous trust, has not emerged again. Your funeral was the most complete representation of that consensus. Over the coffin where your body was paraded around the Plaza del Congreso, an epiphany occurred. César appeared on television for the first time using his real name. I returned to the office later and received a surprising condolence from my boss, who wanted to acknowledge my sexuality, my openness, and the grief that left me speechless. My room has since risen up outside the closet, and everywhere else. Your death, for me, was that fatal and satanic instant that is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of before and after: one is still what one is going to stop being and one is already what one is going to be. The death of someone like you is, therefore, a gift of the future in the present itself.     I wrote, after Lohana's death, that positive leadership is that which illuminates, despite itself, individual dreams and incorporates them into a collective dream. That power then takes shape despite itself and sometimes without awareness of itself, like a beauty that, in the hall of the chosen, passes by the mirrors. And when necessary, it fades away. I think you would surely be surprised by the rare effects your beautiful leadership had, effects that survive death. You managed to plant thorns in the velvet of my complacency and make me understand that There is no sense of pride without action. Since then I am freer. Since then, my brother, whom I failed to care for as I should have in his final months, I have taken you in as I learn. Thank you for giving me, and for giving me, another life, both before and after the grieving process. Dear ghost that time keeps discovering and imagining, so intense, brilliant, now true in its own way, I carry you here like a trace on my bodyAnd goodbye forever. ]]>