On 11 September 1973 hundreds of thousands went out on to the streets of Argentina in protest at the military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. In Buenos Aires, a large group of Peronist supporters gathered around one of the Party's committees. The scene was striking. One faction walked under a banner with the inscription ‘Putos con Perón [Faggots with Perón]’, right ahead of a much larger group chanting the warrior's anthem of the Peronist guerrilla, ‘No somos putos, no somos faloperos, somos soldados de FAR y Montoneros [We're not faggots, we're not junkies, we're soldiers from FAR and Montoneros]’ (‘FAR’ stands for Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, ‘Revolutionary Armed Forces’).

From stories like these emerged the perennial question of how gay movements in Argentina established a productive relation with the Left, dominated in the 1970s by Catholic nationalism, Marxist moralistic teachings and an overall homophobic national culture. It didn't bode well, as the slogans announced. Patricio Simonetto's insightful book traces the origins and evolution of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front, FLH), answering that question and opening other debates about the relation between gay activism and radical political thought, and the somewhat hidden genesis of today's LGTTBIQ movement (as the movement is known in Argentina). There is a limited bibliography about this relationship, and the book is a welcome addition for those interested in the history of the Left in Latin America, gender politics in Argentina and political theory.

Simonetto's book draws on fascinating oral interviews and primary sources, sociology and gender studies, as well as on psychoanalysis and political philosophy, in order to reveal the significance of the FLH. The study is built on deep theoretical ground. The conceptual study doesn't always intermesh fluidly with the rest of the narrative. It makes the reading more arid than necessary, but the extra effort is more than compensated for by the depiction of the origins of the movement and its potential for revolutionary politics. For the author, the FLH defined its features in an active exchange with the Peronist and Trotskyist Left, feminism, homosexual culture and the state. If previously gay movements in Europe sought recognition and acceptance, the FLH embodied a radical interpretation of homosexuality as a catalyst for a deeper challenge: anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-imperialist. The improbable combination of four elements (engagement with the Left, working-class origins of many of its members, its transnational origins and the spiral of state violence surrounding them) contributed to shape this disrupting identity.

Néstor Latrónico was a copy typist who left Argentina in the late 1960s under the dictatorship of General Juan Carlos Onganía, which he described as ‘a military barracks and a convent combined’. He settled in Brooklyn. From there, he lived through the Stonewall riots in 1969, then returned to Argentina to join the FLH in 1973. In Buenos Aires he met people like Héctor Anabitarte, a Communist delegate from the postal workers’ union who in 1967 had sent a letter to the Central Committee suggesting an open conversation about homosexuality, only to be sent to a Party psychiatrist first and expelled later. Gay movements in Europe were an offspring of the romantic flames of Paris 1968; the FLH, instead, formally created in 1973, galvanised its defiant character during the violence of Stonewall and the cordobazo, the worker and student revolts in Argentina of 1969. The figure of Néstor Perlongher, radical poet and committed activist, emerged as the best expression of this powerful blend.

Added to the mix of the FLH identity was the populist matrix of denouncing inequality and defending those who were objects of oppression. On the ground, though, the relation with Peronism in its different varieties was fraught and dysfunctional, from the clashes with the homophobic leftist Peronist guerrillas to the more threatening call by the right-wing paramilitary death squads of the Peronist government to ‘get rid of all homosexuals’. The book tells how the FLH moved then to strengthen its ties with the Trotskyist Left, who offered some logistical help for their actions and a common ground with feminist groups. During those years, the violent spring between 1973 and 1976, the FLH elaborated its worldview in its magazine Somos, analysed in Chapter 3 of the book. The four areas prominent over the eight issues of Somos are telling of the period's atmosphere: State repression, personal stories, denouncement of medical discourse and theoretical reflections on homosexuality.

But once patriarchy is a target, gay movements became an expression of political radicalism. The book shows how the FLH lambasted the virile iconography of the guerrillas, a criticism symbolised in Kiss of the Spider Woman, the 1976 novel by Manuel Puig (a FLH member) about the relationship between a guerrillero and a homosexual in prison. Crucially, the FLH confronted the Cuban Revolution, sacred cow of the Latin American Left, for its repression against homosexuals. Scholars have worked on the gendered dynamics of Cuban revolutionary icons. Recently, Michelle Chase has shown in Revolution within the Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) how the male images of Castro and his bearded comrades prevented more radical, queer leaderships emerging from the underground of the early revolutionary years in the island. The FLH confronted all those who condoned the Cubans’ homophobic export of social control, from the Black Panthers in the US to the armed Left in Latin America: not because the Black Panthers consented to subordinate homosexual rights to socialist goals, but because in doing so they preserved the same foundations of capitalist exploitation that they aimed to destroy.

For Simonetto, time proved this essentialist approach misleading: ‘Homosexuality can live alongside systems of capitalist production.’ The proliferation of gayness as a niche market, the bland discourses dissociating sexuality from power relations at large seem to give credit to his idea. But as the author also said, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, ‘the role of revolutionary utopia is to illuminate the areas of that which needs to be destroyed’. And in that, the FLH proved persistently effective. By 2010, gay rights organisations were again united with Peronist supporters in the plazas of downtown Buenos Aires, celebrating the approval of the Marriage Equality and Gender Identity laws. The laws still are some of the most progressive in the region, promoted and/or tolerated by some of the same Peronist powerbrokers who had dismissed sexual diversity in the streets less than four decades earlier. Victory had never tasted sweeter.