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ARGENTINA. Buenos Aires. Questions, adventures, and a list of songs that will get you dancing in the coming year.

Lesbophobia: A Documentary and Ten Responses

This holiday season, we suggest taking a look at the Catalan documentary Lesfobobia. A documentary and ten answers .

Awarded Best Short Documentary 2019 at Protesta, International Festival of Social Criticism Cinema , the film uses ten testimonies to reflect on the violence currently experienced by lesbians and, above all, on the collective responses and strategies that bring us closer to putting into practice as a society and reducing discrimination.

Directed by Inés Tarradellas, the documentary features the participation of the musical band Akelarre (Júlia Serrasolsas Moreno and Maio Serrasolsas Moreno), who open the cycle of interviews by recounting that, towards the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, they uploaded a song about lesbian desire to social networks and that this led to a series of acts of violence centered on the discourse of corrective rape.

The short film also features the voices of Anne-Cath, Berta Frigola Solé, Brigitte Vasallo, Clara Peya Rigolfas, Claudia Fuentes Brito, Dolores Pulido León, Heidi Ramírez, Laura Freijo Justo, and Marta Rodríguez Ayuso.

With an intersectional perspective, all participants share their experiences to narrate the invisibility to which lesbians are relegated in contemporary societies, and how violence increases if lesbians become visible—themselves, their desires, their affections—in public spaces. 

The short film invites us to end the year with a series of proposals that act as a starting point to think together about some strategies to end lesbophobia.

Some of the measures they mention include: new, more comprehensive and far-reaching public policies for the entire community; increasing the number of lesbians in positions of public, media, political, and power representation; working in schools to dismantle heteronormativity and gender binarism; and transforming medicine and healthcare so that they can meet the full range of needs of the population. The documentary can be viewed in Catalan and Spanish at this link .

Reading: A new curiosity by Santiago Nader

If we're talking about first reads of the year, A New Curiosity by Santiago Nader is an ideal book.

Published by De Parado, his first collection of short stories brings together a total of twelve stories – perhaps one for each month of the year – where each one is more delirious than the last.

We start with sparks flying from the penises of two men on one of their first dates, we pass by the edge of a beach where the elementary school bully manifests himself in a trikini that suddenly comes to life, and we land in an Indian restaurant where a foreigner talking about gauchos bleeds blue from his ears in a similar panic attack combined with epilepsy.

Nader takes us on a journey through a unique and hilarious universe, always permeated by a magical realism that he masters and executes to perfection. 

Reading story after story in A New Curiosity is like stepping onto a magic carpet where the journey, thanks to a fresh and always playful but never banal prose, never ceases to surprise us. Its narrators are always queer, and that perspective, combined with the sharp sense of humor with which they describe the world, makes this collection even more original and essential.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Nader's writing is precisely that it is novel but representative of universes that we know well in equal parts.

His characters, whether they are foreigners, gay men on somewhat incestuous romantic crusades, bizarre and dysfunctional families, or as he himself says in one of his stories, "rugby players and cyborg girls, made of country music", are original and familiar at the same time.

“I would describe this book as a youthful indiscretion,” Nader told Agencia Presentes. “As if the book documents a first, naive, and playful way of seeing the world that I may never have again.”

Reading it, then, allows us to inhabit that perspective again, to laugh at what we've already experienced, and to venture into what we've always wanted to experience. What better way to start the year than with such a curious thought?

Twelve LGBT Regional Rhythms

The New Year's holidays may have passed, but the celebrations don't have to end.

Pop bands with an eighties vibe, lesbian rockers, and cumbia bands about being "the faggots, dykes, queers; the trans, transvestites, fatties": what better way to set the musical tone for the start of this new year?

Here are twelve upbeat songs from LGBT artists in the region to welcome in 2022.