UNIDAD: Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos

Photo: Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU) marching contingent in the Christopher Street West Gay Pride Parade, West Hollywood, 1982. 

Photo courtesy Louis Jacinto

The story of the Los Angeles organization, Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU). 

Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU) was founded in 1981, only a dozen years after the Stonewall rebellion and only a couple of years before the HIV/AIDS pandemic began to ravage LGBTQ communities. GLLU was the greater Los Angeles area’s first major Queer Latin@ organization, and the film chronicles events surrounding GLLU at a pivotal time in the history of LGBTQ equality, women’s rights, and civil rights movements that shaped the destinies of GLLU’s communities for decades to come. UNIDAD: Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos airs Monday, June 12 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV.

Post Stonewall, Los Angeles saw the rise of many LGBTQ+ people of color organizations such as Gay & Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU). GLLU’s members fully claimed their rich ethnic, gender, gender identity, multi-racial, and multi-geographic heritage, leaving none of it behind. GLLU filled the void left by its Queer Anglo-focused counterparts, who mostly rallied around sexual orientation identity, with little attention to the dynamic and mushrooming diversity within its ranks and the diverse concerns that later shaped both the equality, women’s, and civil rights movements. With a few exceptions, GLLU’s constituents at that time were also categorically marginalized by Latin@/Chican@ liberation movements and organizations, and frequently by their own birth families, having no place of their own to call home.