“Embracing Our Sisters in Solidarity”: Revolutionary Nicaragua, Reagan-Era San Francisco, and Transnational Lesbian Possibility

This paper examines lesbian participation in, and discussions of lesbian identity within, the movement in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979-1990). I center my study around solidarity organizations based in San Francisco and led by lesbian women, especially lesbians of color; these groups included Somos Hermanas, Gays for the Nicaraguan Revolution, and the Victoria Mercado Brigade. Activists within these groups saw sexual freedom, anti-interventionism, and socialist change as interconnected goals. Further, they looked to the Sandinista Revolution as facilitating women's leadership within a broader radical struggle. By organizing lesbian solidarity with Nicaragua, they sought to challenge the domestic alongside the foreign effects of Reaganism, and to advance a vision of left struggle that might move away from masculinist rhetoric to place women's autonomy at its center. Lesbian solidarity activists also saw their organizing as a means to confront divisions – both perceived and actual – between San Francisco's lesbian and gay, people of color, and immigrant communities. Lesbians of color, importantly including Latin American immigrant women, became key leaders within solidarity groups, and used their positions to confront perceptions of homosexuality as primarily white, middle-class, and U.S.-bound. But activists, both white and women of color, faced a far great struggle in expressing their attraction to Nicaragua in ways that avoided objectification while still opening space for lesbian desire. Ultimately, U.S. activists' desire to become named as agents of revolution through their solidarity work forestalled open dialogue with lesbian and gay organizing occurring inside Nicaragua. Thus, this paper considers both the contributions and the constraints of work to “embrace our sisters in solidarity.”