Buenos Aires is a top competitor for the title of most gay-friendly city in Latin America; the city hosted the Gay Soccer World Cup last September and a five-star gay hotel opened there the following month. But though civil unions are legal and tourists can safely ask locals for directions to gay clubs, I always felt that queer folks were more tolerated than accepted.
“We’re not like you foreigners,” one security guard told me. “We don’t do that here; we have different standards.”
Irma Fischer, the founder of the Argentine chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbian and Gays, told me that even now she’s the only parent in the group who allows her photograph or real name to appear in the media.
It’s not necessarily out of shame, she said – a lot of the parents fear their children might lose their jobs if it got out at work that they were gay.
“My son’s in Germany, so it’s easier for me,” Fischer said.
Her son didn’t come out to her until he was 24, about fifteen years ago. She was visiting him abroad. According to her, she reacted “terribly.” But she read all of the literature her son gave her, listened to what he said, and, in the course of one very emotional night, she changed her perspective and decided to learn to accept him as he was.
When she went back to Argentina, she wanted to meet other parents in the same situation. Her son had given her a pamphlet from a PFLAG group in Germany, and through them she managed to find a mother in Argentina with a lesbian daughter. They started meeting.
They tried to recruit other people – for example, by leaving flyers at gay and lesbian hangouts. But since most people weren’t out to their parents, the flyers never went anywhere. It was just the two women meeting, for about a year.
Then the other woman left the country. “She left me all alone!” Fischer said.
Fischer tried to expand the group, but everyone she talked to told her the same thing – she would have to go public. She would have to use her real name and photograph to lend legitimacy to what she was doing and attract other people. They’d said the same thing a year earlier and she had refused, but now she was ready.
She appeared in an article and started getting responses, though the group was small for several years, with just four or five people.
Now there are 30-40 at any given meeting – not always the same people. A lot of their work is helping other parents learn to adjust when their children come out.
“People accept gays,” Fischer said, “but they don’t want it to be their own child.”