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How many Ilse Fuskovas can you fit into 95 years? Born in Buenos Aires in 1929 to a German father and a Czechoslovakian mother, Ilse was a photojournalist, poet, photographer, and flight attendant. She was also married to a man and had three children. It's hard to imagine when the image of Ilse, with short hair and a yellow sweater, making love to Mirtha Legrand . At the time, that was the highest- rated midday program on Argentine television, and there, in front of the cameras and a national audience, she proudly came out as a lesbian. And she broke the matrix.

“I think it's a great pain not being able to say it openly because it's like having a divided life: one outside and one inside, which is the intimate part. I think it's very damaging to have to live in those conditions ,” she explained that day. From that day on, many lesbians came out en masse. Among them was Claudina Marek, a teacher from Entre Ríos who decided to send her a letter. Thus began a love story that would last 22 years, until Marek's death.

“Ilse understood, before Monique Wittig, that there was something in lesbian language that conjugated and conjured our poetic, political, and sexual existences,” says Gabi Borrelli, lesbian activist, poet, and cultural manager. Poetry is a love they both shared. “It permeated much of the democratic intensity of our country, and she gave that intensity an almost poetic rhythm with her tone of voice and her way of speaking.” Calling herself an openly lesbian at a time when clandestinity was the norm brought important decisions into her life and the reaffirmation of an unwavering commitment to the lesbian-feminist movement.

“Passionately lesbian”

Several things had to happen before Ilse could sit at the table on that television show that hosted thousands of celebrities, but very few lesbians. First, she had to separate from her husband and become active in the feminist movement, eventually becoming part of the lesbian-feminist movement. 

Ilse was over 50 when she realized it was possible to want everything in life. Perhaps for this very reason, and until her later years, she maintained an active and curious attitude. This is how María Luisa Peralta remembers her on social media, where she shares that she was surprised when, at 65, Ilse began studying fine arts. 

The pivotal event would come around mid-1985. That year, two stars collided. Ilse met Adriana Carrasco, who was then active in ATEM (Women's Work and Study Association), and together she would embark on a path of politics and poetry for lesbian visibility in Argentine society. In 1987, with democracy restored in our country, they co-published Cuadernos de Existencia Lesbiana, which included six life stories of lesbian comrades .

A year later, on March 8, 1988, at the International Women's Day rally in Plaza Congreso, Ilse and Adriana, among eight other lesbians, stood with a pink cloth banner bearing the Cuadernos name, a flower on their shirts, and a ribbon in their hair that read "Passionately Lesbian." By then, the magazine was already in its fourth issue. "It was nice when we did things no one else dared to do," Carrasco wrote on her social media, as a farewell, alongside a youthful photograph of the two of them embracing. 

“I’m with the person I love and I don’t want to hide my feelings.”

In the 1990s, Ilse joined the organization Gays for Civil Rights, led by Carlos Jáuregui, the first president of the Argentine Sexual Community (CHA). Carlos would become a defining figure in her life. Together, they organized the first Gay-Lesbian Pride March in 1992. Around 300 people marched that winter wearing cardboard masks for fear of being recognized and losing their jobs.

The ideas Ilse developed during those years of lesbian activism would later be captured in the book "Amor de mujeres. El lesbianismo en Argentina hoy" (Women's Love. Lesbianism in Argentina Today), co-written with Claudia Marek and published in 1994. In those pages, she explains that kissing another woman in a public space is a profound sense of self-affirmation, of coming out of hiding.

“I'm with the person I love, and I don't want to hide my feelings. They're beautiful feelings, and no one is going to pretend they're not worthy of being expressed in public,” she writes. It wasn't common, back then, for heterosexual women to wonder why heterosexuality has been established as mandatory when, in fact, attraction between women has existed throughout history and on every continent. Or, in her words, “how the patriarchy benefits from our blind obedience.” I don't think it's common today either, although some paths have been cleared since then.

She will close that book by saying: “Lesbians exist and we are everywhere. To anyone who thinks this brought me problems, I assure you it didn't. On the contrary. Not having to hide or pretend anything is a tribute to freedom.” 

Farewell, Ilse Fuskova

Anticipating what might happen on a cold June day, in 2021, the documentary Ilse Fuskova premiered, directed by Liliana Furió and Lucas Santa Ana. The film portrays the life of the lesbian activist and one of the pioneers in championing LGBTI+ rights in Argentina. They wanted her legacy to reach everyone. “Meeting Ilse, for me, was an absolute revelation and a journey of total learning. Shortly after coming out, after being married for many years, I had the privilege and good fortune to meet her in person,” says Lili Furió. 

This friendship deepened in 2015, when the proposal to make a film about her life arose. “Sharing these last few years with her was another wonderful learning experience. The book Claudina and I wrote and everything they gave us as a tool for struggle is a learning experience, and I was very lucky to be close to her in these last few years,” says the documentary's director.  

In the film, you can see a completely white-haired Ilse reacting to her childhood photographs, from her years as a flight attendant, alongside her children. All the Ilse she sought, found, and dared to be in her 95 years. “Today we are in mourning because yesterday Ilse passed away, to whom we lesbians, lesbians, les lesbianes, and all the mostris owe so much. Ilse knew how to make lesbianism a notebook of resistance, visibility a tool for survival, photography a manifesto, and literature a field for sowing other possibilities,” wrote writer and researcher Vir Cano, as a farewell, on her Instagram account. 

His legacy

I wonder how many lesbian lives have taken Ilse's courage as a springboard for themselves. And of this I'm sure, we are not solitary lesbians. Many are those who, following her television appearance, were able to come out of the closet, out of their own catacombs. To shake the hand of the person they loved in a public place. To dare to live an existence without fear of reprisals. Even I, a lesbian daughter of my generation, a teenager who grew up in a province in northwestern Argentina, owe something to this story. It happened during a nap. I remember it well. I was able to trace Ilse's footprints on a slow internet cafe computer, see her sitting and taking the floor by storm in that interview from the 1990s, and feel less alone. I was able to think: "There are others like me." And then, I was able to dare to live.