Sep 08, 2006  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

The historical Latino presence in the District has been a strong and conflicted one, and in a new exhibit presented at the Center, D.C.’s gay community center, the Latino GLBT History Project hopes to reveal the contributions made by gay Latinos to the city’s storied past.

The exhibit, which opens with a reception at 6 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 15 , consists of eight large panels full of documents, banners and photographs chronicling the history of D.C.’s gay Latino population. Available to the public for the first time, newsletters and documents of LLEGÓ, a national organization for gay Latinos that ceased operating in 2004, are much-anticipated highlights of the exhibit.

“This is one of the most important exhibits in the country,” says José Gutierrez, the founder of the Latino GLBT History Project and organizer of the event. “I have been receiving emails from everywhere — San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Texas — from people who are coming to see the exhibit.”

The Center, located at 1111 14th St., NW, became involved after Gutierrez approached the board about hosting the exhibit, which runs until October 15 as the focus of Hispanic GLBT Heritage Month.

“We see the role of the Center as a networking hub for the community,” says Joseph Palacio, presently the only Latino member of the Center’s board. “We have the elders’ outreach group, we’ve done youth things — this was natural for us to continue our role as bringing people together. José put this thing together, and we provided the networking hub.”

Gutierrez collected the gay Latino memorabilia starting in 1997 when he moved to the District from Atlanta.

“People know that I’m collecting the history,” says Gutierrez, 42. “People started giving me things from organizations and groups…pictures, brochures and posters that I was keeping in a trunk.”

GUTIERREZ DOESN’T JUST plan on revealing paper artifacts at the exhibit’s opening. The Latino GLBT History Project will honor various gay Latino leaders who helped to contribute to what he calls a “national platform” of gay Latino issues.

One of the honorees is Yolanda Santiago, a founder of D.C.’s first gay Latino organization, Enlace.

“[Enlace was] to become a bridge between our two identities,” says Santiago, 57. “We were very proud to be Latinos in the gay community and gays in the Latino community. We would not compromise those two powerful identities.”

Founded in 1987, Enlace worked with straight and gay political and social organizations to further awareness of D.C.’s gay Latinos and build bridges between the city’s ethnic groups and those who identified as gay.

“We established the first hotline for Latino gays in the whole U.S.,” Santiago says. “It was bilingual, in cooperation with Whitman-Walker [Clinic]. We received phone calls from Spain, Argentina, Mexico.”

One of the most popular events of Enlace was a series of social dances the group produced for the city’s gay Latinos. Letitia Gomez, one of the upcoming honorees at the Center and a past-president of Enlace, remembers the very beginning of the dances, which debuted in 1988.

“The reason we started those dances was because we went to a bar, and they didn’t want to play our music, although they advertised it as a Latino dance,” says Gomez, 52. “The D.J. didn’t want to play our music and said, ‘You have to consider who our clientele is.’”

Shortly thereafter, the group held its first event, La Fiesta Tropical, at a usually straight club called Cities. Many of the subsequent quarterly dances were opened to people of all ethnicities as a further way to build a larger community.

“People who dance together don’t kill each other,” Santiago says.

THE DISPLAY OF gay Latino political and social activism at the Center is meant to be both a nod to the past and a hopeful kick-start to the future.

“Now, it’s cool to be GLBT,” says Santiago. “It’s so cool [gay people] don’t want to protest or rock the boat or create consciousness to reach other people. People forget that there are a lot of issues in our community — domestic violence, drugs, alcohol, class issues, race issues, age issues, gender issues.”

In line with Santiago’s statement that modern gay people possess a shallow worldview, Palacio, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, says the larger gay culture pigeonholes Latinos as sexual commodities.

“I think people look at Latinos as hot Latinos,” Palacio says. “In general, there’s a romanticization and fetishization of Latinos. I would like to see this minimized through education. I think people will see a broader sense of who the Latino community is.”

The need for increased visibility is a recurring theme among these past and current Latino leaders, and Gomez says the exhibit headed by the Latino GLBT History Project will hopefully provide a historical context for D.C.’s gay Latinos.