I would like to thank Stephen Engel for his fair and generous review of my book, and to the editors of Perspectives on Politics for allowing Engel and me the opportunity to engage in a much-needed discussion of the development of gay rights in the United States and Latin America. Now that the nations of Latin America have come closer than ever in matching (and in some cases exceeding) the United States in the development of LGBT rights, contrasting the evolution of these rights in both regions becomes a very timely and attractive proposition.

In this response I want to highlight a point raised by Engel’s review of my book that I think merits a reply, if only because it underscores my critique of his work about the need for comparative analysis to understand the rise of “gay rights landscapes” among liberal democracies. In the conclusion to Out in the Periphery I pointedly warn about how far we can expect the dramatic success of LGBT rights in Argentina to be emulated by other Latin American societies, given that this success is intimately linked to the ability of gay activists to tap into Argentina’s history of military dictatorship. Engel wonders if I am being too cautious since this history is not unique to the Argentines.

As Engel himself points out, the epic excesses of the Dirty War in Argentina is part of the answer. The violence of military dictatorship in Argentina far exceeded that of neighboring Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil, and included the infamy of the desaparecidos (those who disappeared while under state custody), many of them suspected to have been homosexual. But my point about “Argentine exceptionalism” is far broader than the excesses of the Dirty War. It includes how the legacy of that war has been handled over the years. Argentina is the only Latin American country to put the military as an institution on trial for human rights abuses. It is also the only country in the region to have enshrined the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its Constitution to ensure that history does not repeat itself. These happenings provided almost unique political opportunity structures for Argentine gay activists to tie ending anti-gay discrimination to Argentina’s democratic aspirations.

But looking beyond Latin America, we find the case of post-Franco Spain, whose experience Engel also raises in his review of my book. Spain’s repression of homosexuals runs from the infamous Inquisition during the sixteenth century, which burned homosexuals at the stake, through the Franco regime’s “Law of Social Menaces,” which declared homosexuality a national threat. After Franco’s passing in 1975, Spanish gay activists effectively used this dark history to end anti-gay discrimination and to expand notions of citizenship. The results speak for themselves. In 2005, Spain became the first Catholic-majority nation to legalize same-sex marriage, and the first one in the entire world whose marriage law put gay and straight couples on the same legal footing.

In both Argentina and Spain we are faced with an interesting gay-rights paradox that bears unpacking: some of the most expansive gay-rights landscapes are emerging in countries with some of the darkest histories of homosexual repression.