Age of Youth in Argentina

by Valeria Manzano

  Founded in 1971, the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH, Homosexual Liberation Front) served as an umbrella for joining various gay and lesbian groups. Activists and historians alike single out the groups Nuestro Mundo (Our World) and Eros as the ones propelling the creation of the FLH. Héctor Anabitarte, a former Communist militant and post office worker, created Nuestro Mundo in 1968, and the group attracted working- and lower-middle-class men concerned with the rising repression to which homosexuals were subjected during the Onganía regime. Unlike Nuestro Mundo, Eros represented the most radicalized segment of the gay rights groups: its members advocated for “unleashing the libido,” which they viewed as intrinsically revolutionary and liberationist. Led by Néstor Perlongher, a would-be major anthropologist and poet, Eros was instrumental in organizing university youth and in trying to bridge gaps between the FLH and revolutionary Peronist groups.48 As it happened with the feminists, the relationships of the FLH and the revolutionary Left, mainly that of Peronist background, were tense. In 1973, when Cámpora was sworn in and the promises of national and social liberation seemed close at hand, the FLH participated in Peronist rallies and sent letters to representatives in Congress to state that in “the struggle for liberation” they participated by “dismantling bourgeois morality based on machismo and the ensuing domination of women and rejection of homosexuals.” They never received positive responses: in 1974, in a pamphlet titled Sexo y revolución, the FLH recognized that their attempts at linking the sexual to the “social revolution” had been unsuccessful, largely because, they argued, “the revolutionary militants are part of a reactionary sexual culture.”49

  Drawing on ideas circulating transnationally, the FLH strove to describe the country’s sexual culture, which they regarded as blending a Catholic (or traditional) morality with a “morality of replacement.” In the “traditional moral” paradigm, they wrote, the patriarchal family was the basic cell of society: it was the site for the building of men’s economic, political, and sexual prerogatives as well as for enacting women’s subjugation. The patriarchal family was also the primary agency for confining the libido through the negation of infant sexuality, crucial to the disassociation of pleasure and sex. Such a repressive structure, the FLH believed, had met a “morality of replacement” disseminated through the “proyanqui” media, which enhanced and controlled sexual gratifications. That moral entailed “commodified eroticism,” whereas women continued being “neurotic objects of display” to gratify men, who were turned into passive agents of their own gratification. Sharing premises with lesbian and gay activists worldwide, the FLH argued that the “morality of replacement” had created further allure to the “traditional” patriarchal sexual culture. It had likewise created its own “totems,” such as the idealization of the companionate heterosexual couple. Gays and lesbians were excluded from the “new accepted parameters,” which further questioned the alleged novelties of the “new” sexual culture.50 Unless sexual drives were liberated, the FLH argued, there would not be a revolution of any kind.

  In the early 1970s, left-wing militants and intellectuals, for the most part, conceived of the sexual as a “false” revolution. Moral y proletarización, an oft-quoted document crafted by a PRT-ERP leader in 1972, is one of the few preserved pieces of prescriptive and programmatic thoughts and rules for shaping an ideal militant. It aimed at constructing a moral code according to what it deemed the proletariat morals, that is, an anti-individualistic, antibourgeois, new consciousness that would produce a new subject on the way to Socialism. Significantly, Moral y proletarización produced a reflection on sex, and on couple and family relations, based on Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. Following Engels, it advocated for the superiority of the monogamous family. That admittedly bourgeois form, the document pointed out, was nevertheless to be kept at times when “bourgeois morality seems to revolutionize itself through what some labeled the ‘sexual revolution.’” In a statement that gay and feminists could have shared, Moral y proletarización cautioned its readers that this was a “false” revolution since it maintained—and reinforced—the “objectification of human relations and the subjection of women to men.” That revolution, it went on, reduced love to the “animal instincts of sex,” and made women into “images to be sold in the marketplace.” Along with this statement, yet, Moral y proletarización asked its readers to displace sex from the center of couple’s relation: sex was not the marker of “harmony” but rather the communion of ideals and the mutual consecration of a project geared toward the building of a Socialist project.51 As I will discuss next, this moralistic understanding of sex permeated the shaping of the militants’ bodies within the PRT-ERP, who often labeled as petit-bourgeois individualism both consumption and sexual behaviors that deviated from the ideal of the monogamous heterosexual couple.

  The PRT-ERP’s members were hardly alone, however, when it came to downplaying sex as a possible domain for “revolution” and “liberation” and for condemning the ongoing eroticization of public life. In 1967, Francisco Urondo, a leading poet and would-be member of the FAR, when referring to the uses of female nudity in 1960s movies, asserted that eroticism in late capitalism resembled “mere pornography.” Moreover, he argued that sex represented a “false alleviation” of cultural and political crises, a means for “escaping from reality.”52 Liliana Hecker, one of the most renowned leftist writers at the time, reached similar conclusions when she participated in a roundtable addressing literary eroticism. She asserted that “perhaps before”—in an undetermined past time—sex might have had a “political side” because talking about sex meant breaking established rules, but “now, in 1971 Argentina,” it meant “diverting energies” from political ways of opposing the social order. Since the “real danger” was elsewhere, Hecker concluded, “society” imbued sex with “pretended oppositional tinges” but delivered only “pornography.”53 For his part, when writing for one pan-leftist journal, psychoanalyst Augusto Klappenbach further theorized the connections between politics and the “erotic tide.” By appropriating Herbert Marcuse’s ideas, he claimed that the rising publicity of eroticism undermined the critical potential of Eros through its confinement to the “safe realm of sexuality.” That was the key to understanding the “counterrevolutionary revolutions” which, he posited, were merely ways of “praising more or less subtle forms of prostitution.” However, in contrast to other leftist intellectuals (and, at this point, closer to the FLH’s proposals), Klappen-bach predicted that in a noncapitalist future, Eros would be unleashed to pervade human experience but, for this utopian moment to come into being, the “true revolutionaries” could not entertain themselves with the eroticism that consumer capitalism sought to “impose” on them.54

  Far from the strident claims and slogans of revolution, many young women and men in Argentina were protagonists in lasting transformations of sexual attitudes and practices. As I discussed in Chapter 4, by the mid-1960s it was plain that a new attitude toward sex had spread, mainly among middle-class youth: this attitude tied sex to love and responsibility and eventually to the horizon of marriage, thus presenting itself as both “modern” and prudent. This dynamic had brought about a practical questioning of female virginity as the marker of young women’s “honesty” and prowess. As historian Isabella Cosse has put it, the erosion of the “taboo of female virginity” was at the core of the “discreet sexual revolution” that Argentines would have lived through in the 1960s.55 In 1972, in fact, a journalist wrote in the humor magazine Satiricón that recalling what virginity had meant for girls entailed doing “archeological work.”56 While exaggerated, this vignette contributes insight into the normalization of heterosexual youth intercourse. The novelty of the early 1970s, in any case, meant that youth helped disengage sex from the possibility of marriage, thus challenging the respectable idea of premarital sex.

  Some surveys indicated that both middle- and working-class youths were becoming sexually active earlie
r, which suggested the spread of a new attitude vis-à-vis sex and marriage (or its promise). A large survey conducted in 1973 of 1,200 women, for example, showed that 46 percent of those from twenty to twenty-four years old responded that they first had sex when they were adolescents. Among single university students the same age, moreover, the survey found that 80 percent had had “sex at least once.”57 Also in 1973, a survey among 252 secondary school students showed that 70 percent of the boys had their first sexual relations at the age of sixteen, and 80 percent of them had done so with “girls of the same age.” Interpreting this finding, Dr. Octavio Fernández Mouján, an adolescent psychoanalyst, suggested that boys and girls in the working-class neighborhoods where he worked had not only had sexual intercourse at that age but also “lived sexuality in an unprejudiced way.”58 Although imprecise, these interpretations and studies point to the normalization of the practice of sexual intercourse among youth as well as to the extension of these practices and attitudes beyond the intellectualized middle classes.

  In this respect, one recurrent topic in 1970s popular culture and in memories as well was the recrafting of the piba de barrio (neighborhood girl). A sociologically lax category that usually evoked working- and lower-middle-class girls in their late teens, the piba de barrio had long captivated the imagination of poets and essayists, who made it the epitome of sexual repression and middle-brow superficiality. In a superb poem published in 1924, “Exvoto: To the Girls from Flores,” Oliverio Girondo wrote about the girls from that neighborhood who “walk together arm in arm, broadcasting their trepidation, and if anyone looks them in the eye, they press their legs together, for fear their sex would fall out on the sidewalk.” Sexually desiring and desired, the “girls from Flores” strove anxiously to get rid of desire. In 1964, for his part, essayist Juan José Sebreli blamed the “hypocritical petit-bourgeois man” for making his daughter (the piba de barrio) a “half virgin who masturbates her boyfriend in the movie theaters.”59 Ten years later, however, one journalist wrote for Satiricón that the piba de barrio was one of the “species in extinction.” Dressed in tight blue jeans and wearing “lots of makeup,” the neighborhood girls, she asserted—and some of the interviewees concurred—did not have major problems with their parents with regard to flirts and boyfriends. Most vitally, these girls thought of sex as “something natural” and conceived of virginity as a “burden.”60 The portrayal may have been exaggerated, but memories of “neighborhood youth” in the early 1970s point to the profound, yet embattled, transfiguration of sex mores among girls and, subsequently, boys. That is the case in an autobiographical novel about the coming of age of a boy in Lanús, who narrates his sexual experiences with his “neighborhood girlfriend.” The story revolves around Jorge and Mariana’s “first time” and chiefly around how both overcome the fact that they do not want to marry: they fear the “stigma” over her, yet as the narrative goes by, they not only leave the neighborhood but also learn that “at least as it comes to sex, we are equal.”61

  “Sexual equality” was, nevertheless, an incomplete project. While both the vanishing of the figure of the piba de barrio and the studies on the age of the first sexual intercourse suggest an incipient disengagement of sex from marriage, a double standard persisted nonetheless. That was one of the subject matters of two roundtables organized by the youth magazine La Bella Gente with working and student young men. They all concurred that having sexual intercourse with their girlfriends was “normal” and insisted that they did not make distinctions between “girls for sex” and “girls for dating” anymore. A university student, however, brought to the forefront the fact that “we are asked to have as many sexual relations as possible: this means machismo.” Young men discussed machismo and expressed anxieties regarding a new (self)-requirement: “quantity” as a marker of sexual prowess.62 Meanwhile, some young women and girls, while recognizing that the “taboo” of virginity had somewhat disappeared, insisted that young men “at the bottom of their consciousness, still want a girl to be a virgin,” as Norma, a shop worker, age twenty-two, stated in another roundtable. Norma and the other young women agreed, pointing out the persistent “veiled forms of machismo” that related not only to how youth sexuality was negotiated at an “intimate” level but also to the ways in which “this erotic tide shows only female bodies.”63 In practical terms, these young women captured the gendered dynamics and inequality that pervaded Argentina’s changing sexual culture in the early 1970s. In that context, young bodies were also the main carriers of projects that ideally would erase all forms of inequality. For these projects, other young bodies were required.

  Consciousness in the Body

  While exiled in Mexico, the Argentine intellectual Héctor Schmucler produced one of the first reflections about the relationship between political subjectivity and the body, as he thought it unfolded among revolutionary groups in the early 1970s. He claimed that the revolutionary Left came to conceive of politics as a technique performed on the margins of other, manifold human experiences. The revolutionaries, hence, would have replicated the capitalist-based fragmentation of experience, in their case through splintering the “desiring man” and the “political man.” In doing so, they postulated the hero as the ideal political subject and assumed the revolution as an ideal as well, which then turned into a “monster to be served.” The ideal political subject, the heroic figure, obliterated the corporeal “everyday, concrete man.”64 Ironically, Schmucler’s piece was informed by the persistence of presumed gender-neutral categories, like the universalizing “man.”65 As in other Latin American countries where revolutionary projects were tied to armed struggle, the ideal political figure in Argentina was built upon masculine standards centered on courage and resistance, sometimes depicted as a process of overcoming obstacles related to class origins and ideological or physical weaknesses—Che Guevara being the main example. The combatant was praised as the most courageous and conscious, as the “best among ourselves.”66

  Rather than focusing on the combatant and the attendant discussions of the “death cult” and martyrdom that have thus far attracted well-deserved scholarly attention, I scrutinize the larger militant culture to which that figure belonged, a culture characterized by the confidence on the body as a carrier of consciousness.67 First, while the glorification of the heroic guerrilla spread among most militants and helped them assess their prowess vis-à-vis the ideal, only a few gained the status of combatants: revolutionary militancy, for most, meant the restless activism through which their aptitudes and commitment were evaluated. A type of resilient body, culturally linked to youth and masculinity, appeared as the most suitable for engaging with that style of militancy that focused on “action” per se and that, unlike previous leftist traditions, denigrated ideological and political debate, dubbing it as “feminine.” Second, the creation of that resilient body brought different meanings for women and men. Women found it hard to comply with the requirements of the activist style of militancy. Along with the undeniable machismo “impregnating” the Left (and Argentina’s culture), the presumed nonideological link of militancy to activism was gender-based and in turn reinforced gendered hierarchies. A young, usually male, heterosexual body that was, in addition, able to domesticate its own sexual and other desires was the (self-)requirement.

  The praise of an activist style of militancy expressed the fervor to hasten the political times for a revolution that many regarded as impending. That style presupposed and required a resilient body, capable of enduring the seemingly endless activities to which militants were assigned and according to whose performances their commitment would be evaluated. Although with different modalities and intensities, the enforcement of that style swept across the most important revolutionary groups. In late 1971, an obituary for the recently killed PRT-ERP leader Luis Pujals, for example, evaluated his political consciousness by invoking his ceaseless activity: “days and nights, he took hours from resting, from eating, from sleeping.” In 1973, another portra
yal detailed what Pujals’s activities entailed: when he was initiating his political militancy (that is, before becoming guerrilla) he “would, at 6:00 A.M., be at the entrance of a factory plant, at noon in another, at the evening in a meeting; without sleeping, he would then write and print pamphlets that he would himself distribute at the factories in the day that followed.”68 The steps that Pujals followed in order to climb the party’s ladder, which in his case included military command, had nonetheless been punctuated by restless political activism.

  The PRT-ERP drew upon and amplified previous leftist traditions, particularly Trotskyism, to forge a distinctive militant style that centered on the vindication of patience, humility, tenacity, and self-sacrifice. All of these were part of a “proletariat moral” that would assure that the militants gave themselves in “soul and body to the revolution.”69 For the middle-class youth attracted to the party, this entailed crossing sociocultural boundaries and creating new routines. Written by his brother, an obituary portrayal for Eduardo Capello, a twenty-four-year-old young man murdered in the 1972 “Massacre of Trelew,” pointed to the changes involved in the making of a revolutionary militant “out of a petit-bourgeois kid.” Eduardo attended a commercial secondary school and wanted to become an accountant. By the mid 1960s, moreover, Eduardo “didn’t miss Saturday night dances and soccer matches on Sundays, and he was a sexual conqueror on a daily basis.” It was only in 1968, upon joining the Party, when his life changed dramatically. Although his parents had been affiliated with the Socialist Party in the 1950s, they had been “café militants”—the term that 1970s revolutionary militants used to denigrate their predecessors for their alleged inaction. In any case, his parents were astonished by Eduardo’s restless activities since he “barely ate or slept, all his time went to his militancy.”70 Perhaps trying to “compensate” in a short amount of time for a previous life of relative affluence, Eduardo overloaded himself with multiple activities, which the Party’s leadership deemed crucial to develop a new morality.