This August 20 is celebrated the Day of Activism for Sexual Diversity commemorating the death of Carlos Jáuregui, the main reference of the struggle for visibility and the rights of the community. Born in La Plata on September 22, 1957, the son of a lawyer and a primary school teacher, he attended the José Manuel Estrada Archbishop’s College and in 1975 entered the National University of La Plata to study history.
Today August 20 is LGBTIQ+ Activism Day.
24 years ago, activist Carlos Jáuregui died.
One of the founders of @CHAArgentina and Gays for Civil Rights (Gays DC), in the meantime he did.
✊ Pictured with transvestite activist Lohana Berkins. pic.twitter.com/k5QKzSi91V — Agency Present (@PresentesLGBT)
August 20, 2020
Already graduated, he attended a course in Paris and it was in that city that he participated in his first gay Pride march, which he would claim years later was “the engine that decided my subsequent militancy in the gay movement”. Back in Argentina, he founded the Argentine Homosexual Community (CHA), of which he was its first president from 1984 to 1987. He was the first man to appear in the media publicly assuming his sexuality, appearing on the cover of the magazine Siete Días hugged with also activist Raúl Soria and with the title “The Risks of being homosexual in Argentina”. In 1987 he published the book “Homosexuality in Argentina”, dedicated to his partner Pablo Azcona, his fellow activism partners and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Carlos Jáuregui was founder of Gays for Civil Rights, one of the founders of the #MarchadelOrgulloLGBTTIQ+, author of the book “Homosexuality in Argentina” and the main reference in the fight for the visibility and rights of our entire community. — CHA Argentina (@CHAArgentina)
August 19, 2020
That same year he left CHA in search of more radical activism and in 1991 founded the Gays Association for Civil Rights (Gays DC), from which he promoted the first civil union project for LGBT+ couples. In 1992, together with other organizations, he led the first Lesbian Gay Pride March in Buenos Aires.
Before his death on August 20, 1996, he promoted the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the new Buenos Aires Constitution. She died at the age of 38 from HIV and today, in addition to all her accomplishments, a subway station, a square and a painting of hers in the Women’s Hall, Genders and Diversity of the Casa Rosada remember him.
