Hey! Still working on rewriting the history background for travel guides into what amounts to a damned book. Book is 156 pages. This section is probably one of the harder ones to write, which is why it is the last one in the Felipe González period to be posted here. (And probably a quarter of the information originally intended for this ended up shuffled to other sections, which haven’t been updated and should because it adds a lot.) Hopefully this section doesn’t read like a sentence salad.

Feminism, lesbianism feminism, feminist lesbianism and lesbian separatism

Both in Spain and around the world, lesbians found themselves displaced; they were ignored by both feminists and by an increasingly misogynistic and patriarchal gay and trans liberation movement in the 1980s. Neither group were willing to address the specific needs of female homosexuals. Consequently, lesbian feminism and lesbian separatist movements began to grow in places like the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France and Australia. This shift in nominal earlier inclusiveness would have repercussions throughout this period and to the present day.

During the 1980s and 1990s, lesbians tried to figure out how to organize themselves within militant feminism. At the time, there was the question about the need for lesbians to try to self-organize within feminist structures. By the mid-2000s, this question was no longer being asked as it was self-evident.

Lesbian separatism drew ideologically from difference feminism[1][2], but went further because the feminist movement did not provide lesbians with enough to meet their political demands and desires; they wanted something exclusively for lesbians and to not borrow from models by other groups. During this period, lesbian separatists considered a number of different theories about lesbianism. One such theory included that lesbians were a third gender.

Despite the various challenges they faced, lesbians were part of the Spanish feminist movement during the 1980s because the movement was attractive to them, not necessarily because they were militants to the cause but because they could be around other lesbians in groups where they were a majority and where they could be integrated in normally. During the 1980s, lesbian political goals often aligned with the feminist movement. Their mobilization as a group was often around feminist organizations and feminist goals. Lesbians did not organize independently as a lesbian political movement in this decade. Despite this, they were able to introduce concepts around sexuality into feminist discourse in this period, making the movement more inclusive and assisting in giving the feminist movement more prestige domestically. Members of lesbian collectives play an important role in continually bringing up sexual options in the Spanish feminist movement in this period. The lesbian-feminist movement was at its height in Spain in 1986 and 1987.

The broader feminist community was at times indifferent to the issues and exclusion of lesbians inside their own groups. Their stated goals included criticism of the heterosexual norm imposed by Spanish culture. This did not always manifest itself in the questioning of heterosexuality itself, which at times made Spanish feminism appear heterosexual normalizing. At times, this also made lesbianism appear in feminist circles to be a personal choice that should remain private.

Lesbian activists in this period were largely invisible, with years of hard work receiving hardly any credit. The lesbian response to desexualization and invisibilization by feminists more generally in this period was multifaceted. For some, this status vindicated the needs of their activism and the creation of their lesbian groups and associations. For other lesbians, they felt bored or angry, and these attitudes turned them away from the broader feminist group to focus on more lesbian related social, artistic and political activities. The actors in the LGBT movement and the feminist movement generally had two approaches to lesbians speaking out against being sexualized and erased; they either pretended not to know this was happening or they got really angry at these lesbians. Queer activists were angry at times because they saw lesbian desire for visibility and recognition as challenging what they saw were more important issues, like transrights, the AIDS epidemic and homophobia.

When outside the feminist movement, lesbians embraced different models of organization based on their individual identities and political goals. One group included separatist lesbians, who opposed and fought to abolish patriarchy. Others included radical lesbians, who believed the broader feminist movement was dominated by heterosexual women and marked the movement as heterofeminism. Radical lesbians were at the forefront of keeping sexual minorities visible during the early and middle period of González’s presidency.

Despite the various challenges they faced, lesbians were part of the Spanish feminist movement during the 1980s. During the 1980s, lesbian political goals often aligned with the feminist movement. Their mobilization as a group was often around feminist organizations and feminist goals. Lesbians did not organize independently as a lesbian political movement in this decade. Despite this, they were able to introduce concepts around sexuality into feminist discourse in this period, making the movement more inclusive and assisting in giving the feminist movement more prestige domestically. The abortion rights fight was one of the central unifying goals of the lesbian feminist movement in the 1980s, even if and when they disagreed on other issues. Members of lesbian collectives play an important role in continually bringing up sexual options in the Spanish feminist movement in this period. The lesbian-feminist movement was at its height in Spain in 1986 and 1987.

On the whole, the most politically active homosexuals in the first decade following Franco’s death were gay men, mainly in Madrid, who were often hostile to institutionalized decision-making bodies, and not engaged in institutionalized political discourse.

Lesbian feminism by the early 1980s in Spain began to speak of specific repression that they faced because their orientation made them sexual minorities; other women did not suffer such specific double repression. The Jornadas de Sexualidad in June 1983 in Madrid were one example of lesbian feminists speaking out on this issue. The Jornada was organized by the Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas. As part of the event, they counted the number of events carried out by feminists more generally in 1975 and 1976 and counted 32 that took on an explicitly heterosexual perspective.

The lesbian focus on sexual activism as a component of their militant feminism meant that they had laid the theoretical framework in Spain for the debate around sexuality in Spanish culture during the 1980s and going into the 1990s. Part of that framework involved kiss-in events as a form of protest about the necessity to make their sexuality invisible.

With lesbians having internalized the idea about the important of family as a result of deep-seated ideas of National Catholicism in Spanish culture, lesbian activism in this period, especially in the later part, lesbian activism would include the demand for adoption rights by the end of the 1980s. Feminism of the difference discussed the concept of motherhood in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s.  This line of Spanish feminist thinking was inspired by French and Italian feminist, and had two main proponents in Spain, Victoria Sendón de León and Milagros Rivera Garretas.

Spanish lesbians continued to create organizations and to re-organize inside existing organizations to support their own needs in this period. These included organizations on lesbian sexual and reproductive health, political organizations and social groups.

Grup de Lesbianes Feministes de Barcelona (GLFB) and Bizkaiko Lesbiana Feministen Kolektiboa (BLFK) defied the 1980s Spanish trend of identifying as feminist lesbians happening most elsewhere in Spain and instead identified as lesbian feminists. They did so with the intention of trying to make themselves visible as lesbians and to separate themselves from groups like CFLM who focused almost exclusively on feminist activities. Maite Irazabal was a member of Bizkaiko Lesbiana Feministen Kolektiboa during the 1980s.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Basque lesbian feminist groups wrote their publications in two languages, Spanish and Basque. Their publications covered a wide variety of topics like what it meant to be a lesbian, poetry, comics, jokes, feminist critiques, calls for demonstrations, book and record reviews, and critiques of government institutions. Sorginak was the most important magazine in the region in this period. Sorginak was the most important because it helped to disseminate the works of international authors like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Monique Witting into the regional lesbian consciousness. It also helped bring up other issues like racism, the situation for lesbian immigrants, lesbian feminist life in Latin America and the Caribbean and the realities of lesbian life in Berlin, Germany.

Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas de Madrid (CFLM) were another active organization in this period. They were greatly concerned with increasing the visibility of lesbians in western culture and Spanish culture in particular.  Cristina Garaizábal and Pilar Albarsanz were CFLM militants active in the 1980s.

Spanish lesbians looked at the situation in the United States, and law that the conflicts between heterosexual women and lesbians created a huge division within the feminist movement, especially around lesbianism. Spanish feminist wanted to avoid that, and tried to avoid conflicts in the 1980s and early 1990s. They worked on trying to build consensus, to try to find common ground on strategies to change the law, and ultimately subordinated their identities as lesbians to do that. That all began to change in the 1990s when the feminist movement began to atomize, with different groups like lesbians, transexuals and prostitutes beginning to want to be heard and have their rights advocated for as subgroups within the feminist movement.

During the 1980s, a unique form of Spanish identity politics independent of Anglo-Saxon queer identity politics would emerge. It would be largely ignored in this early period of the González government because there were too many existing issues about broader discrimination in society that created cohesion between the LGBT community and feminist communities and because the movement more broadly had been disestablished so broader sharing of these new LGBT political concepts were not as feasible.

Many lesbian groups, lesbian currents and individual lesbian feminist activist were found within the structures of Coordinadora de Organizaciones Feministas del Estado Español (COFEE) in the 1980s including Nanina Santos, Victoria Sendón de León, and Yolanda Alba.  By around this point, feminist lesbians were in two camps. One were in feminism of the difference, and the other were feminism of equality and double militancy. These positions were already beginning to be staked out during the feminist conference in Granada in 1979.

Dolors Majoral was involved with La Nostra Illa, the Amazonas Network and the Center for Women’s Studies in this period, where she continued her work of the earlier period to propagate ideas related to lesbian separatism and radical feminism. These three groups were important in both movements in Catalonia in the González period.

Red de Amazonas were one of the exceptions to how lesbian organizations operated in the 1980s. They were critical of the double militancy of lesbian feminists, and critical of the militant feminist movement’s exclusion of lesbians from feminist discourse. In this sense, they were a forerunner to Lesbianas Sin Duda.

Empar Pineda was one of the primary spokesperson for the invisible lesbian, the lesbian without a clear political agenda, during the 1980s.

Lesbian collectives became organized more autonomously separate from Asambleas de Mujeres in Bizkaia, doing so in 1982 as Grupo de Lesbianas Feministas de Bizkaia. This lesbian group would later create the highly influential magazine Sorginak. A lesbian collective at a Bizkaia assembly on 17 May 1986 explained this disconnect as, “We are a currently thinking globalist feminists contesting heteropatriarchy, insofar as we consider as an unquestionable premise the abolition of the heterosexual norm, and we can not be encompassed as a collective in the A.M.B. since it does not assume in its struggle for the transformation of patriarchy the heterosexual norm as a basic point in the oppression of women.” In Gipuzkoa, lesbian feminists believed that continued involvement with Asambleas de Mujeres should end in “order not to cut off their access to independent lesbian women and women of the ghetto”.

In Valencia in 1983, MAGPV was re-organized and a lesbian group was re-established inside the organization. This group worked on a number of issues including STD prevention, police harassment against transvestite sex works and on co-organizing homosexual cultural events. Both MAGPV and its lesbian group adopted their own model of identity politics focused around community but rejected Anglo-Saxon models of discourse around sexual identity.

Bizkaiko Lesbiana Feministen Kolektiboa was created in 1983. The importance of lesbian visibility in the group began to diminish over time as they began to work more on feminist goals.

The 1983 jornades de Sexualitat were an important moment in Barcelona for the relationship between straight women and lesbians inside the feminist movement inside the city. Straight women wanted to assert that women’s sexuality should be explored in a broader feminist context from within a heterosexual model.

The first edition of the Jornadas de Lesbianas de Euskadi / Lesbianen Euskadiko I. Jardunaldiak took place in Zamalbide in May 1983. Around 250 women participated, including ones from the four Basque provinces though mostly southern Basques along with a handful from Madrid. Women came who were members of both EHGAM and Colectivo de Lesbianas Feministas. Women from EHGAM and ESAM also got together at the conference. The major discussion was about lesbians should self-organize in the Basque Country. Lesbians from EHGAM and those from the Colectivos found themselves in conflict as EHGAM militants believed the Jornadas feminist organization method often made lesbian issues secondary to broader feminist goals like abortion, divorce, and gender violence.

The Jornadas de Sexualidad in June 1983 in Madrid were one example of lesbian feminists speaking out on the issue of lesbian sexuality being invisible within the feminist movement. The Jornada was organized by the Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas. As part of the event, they counted the number of events carried out by feminists more generally in 1975 and 1976 and counted 32 that took on an explicitly heterosexual perspective. The Basque based Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas participated in the jornada. Citing their document, they said that the feminist movement in Spain had taken a heterosexual trajectory, with earlier works from 1975 and 1976 assuming a heterosexual perspective.

In the mid-1980s, the lesbian separatist movement was still largely confined to Barcelona. There, lesbian separatists congregated in a neighborhood where they had a hairdresser, a Center for Women’s Studies, and carpentry shop. This model did not prove sustainable in the long run, but those involved were able to develop international contacts with other like-minded lesbians abroad including those in Germany, France, Australia, the Netherlands and the United States. They were also able to create a parallel organization to ILGA which was named the Red de Amazonas. Red de Amazonas drew largely from an existing network called La Mar, who had extensive contact with American lesbian activists. Between 1987 and 1999, the grew published a couple of journals including Ones de la mar, Labris and Laberint. The longest print run of these involved Laberint and was 37 issues with its first issue published in 1989.

During the mid-1980s, CFLM militants could forget their identities as lesbians and instead focus on their goals exclusively as women. Some issues, like abortion, CFLM led the feminist movement in the city in addressing the issue. In a lot of the available pictures from the beginning of the abortion rights movement in Madrid, there was not a single photo of activists that included a heterosexual woman.

Colectivo de Lesbianas de Granada appeared in Granada during the 1980s. They convened several demonstrations with Asamblea de Mujeres de Granada against sexist violence in the city.

Frente Feminista de Zaragoza had a Comisión de Lesbianas during the mid-1980s as they saw lesbianism as an emerging issue for feminists alongside the struggle for other political and social goals like free abortions and right-wing attacks against women. Their magazine, Mujer, had an article in their June 1986 issue titled “La existencia lésbica”.

Lesbianas Unidas los Viernes (LUVIS) met twice a week during the mid-1980s. Wednesday meetings were political meetings. Friday meetings were fun meetings.

Grupo de Lesbianas Feministas Akelarre was founded in Sevilla in 1984 by five lesbians who left Asamblea de Mujeres de Sevilla because they did not feel like the organization devoted enough attention to lesbian issues. Members included Carmen Flores and Pepa Álvarez. While abortion was a major issue, lesbians in the 1980s were more concerned with the bigger issue of invisibility and silence. They rejected the position of being double militants within the feminist movement. Instead, they wanted to be independent of the constraints of both the gay right’s movement and the feminist movement. Their primary goal was lesbian visibility. At the same time, aware of the debates around various types of feminism going on around them, they took the side of feminism of the difference, and aligned themselves more closely with autonomous and separatist lesbianism. The group rejected support from state institutions, with funding coming from individual members or via fundraising activities. Their first year was spent reading and discussing about lesbian-feminism and political practices. They developed a close relationship with lesbians in Barcelona and lesbian militants in FLHA. Members also attend conferences in the Basque Country, Barcelona and Valencia. The group were interviewed by Los reporteros de Canal Sur TV at some point. They also held events where they would go to bars, and kiss each other as a way of making lesbians visible. Bars they went to included El Chandelier, El Sopa de Gansos, El Caleco, El Olivo, and El Cactus. This often resulted in them being expelled from bars. Part of their intention in doing this was to try to make the gay ghetto disappear, and make lesbianism be able to be able to be right next to heterosexuality in social situations. The group would also graffitied the city with phrases like “No al silencio, lesbianismo al viento”, “Lesbiana, no te cures”, “Viva el lesbianismo vivo”. The group never considered getting involved with the fight against HIV / AIDS as it just did not appear relevant to their activism. They group also did not debate the issue of pornography or prostitution, but were generally abolitionist in their viewpoint. The group eventually dissolved in 1991 as members went their own various ways for personal reasons.

Gretel Ammann founded Centro de Estudios de la Mujer “El Centro” in 1984, which became a central point for feminists in the following years.

I Semana Cultural de la Mujer was organized by Asamblea de Mujeres de Granada in 1984 in Granada. Pilar Bellver gave a presentation on lesbianism.

Abortion was decriminalized in 1985. After the abortion law was approved, militant feminists in Spain, including lesbian feminists, turned their attention at the end of the 1980s to the issue of violence against women. This focus accelerated into the 1990s, with various groups turning attention to specific groups impacted by violence against women including prostitutes, immigrants, gypsies, young people and transsexuals.

Gretel Amman put forth the concept of “lesbian gender” as an identity around 1985. This was an idea around the political autonomy of lesbians within the feminist and homosexual rights movement. Some of this was an extension of Monique Wittig’s writings. It challenged the idea some feminist theorist had that lesbians were not women since woman is a political construct based on an economic system set up around heterosexual thinking.

In 1985, Lola Majoral and Gretel Amman also opened their home in creating the Centro de Estudios de la Mujer “El Centro”. She then went on to co-found the Primera Escola d’Estiu with Xesca Camps and Carmen Suárez. This led to the founding of La Nostra Illa in 1987, one of the three most important organizations in the González period in terms of radical feminism and lesbian separatism. La Nostra Illa then became an important reference point for lesbian feminists in Barcelona. They would go on to create cultural and artistic productions that would challenge heteronormative imaginaries in the city during the 1990s. The work of Lola Majoral and Gretel Amman was effective, and gained European wide attention.

Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas de Barcelona, Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas de Zaragoza, and Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas de La Rioja were all founded in 1985. Colectivo de Feministas Lesbianas was founded in Galicia in 1985. Colectivos de Lesbianas Feministas de Bizkaia y Gipuzkoa was created in 1985. The group held regular meetings where they held discussions and planned events and campaigns to support their goals.

II Semana Cultural de la Mujer took place in March 1985 in Granada with a talk by CFLM’s Montserrat Oliván.

Eix Violeta was founded in November 1985, by a group of young women from Santa Coloma de Gramenet. They had links with lesbians and feminists from Valencia and from the Basque country. They went on to organize their first meeting in Barcelona in 1986. The organization became involved with student protests. They were also involved with the 11-day occupation of a building on carrer Font Honrada with the goal of getting a feminist space in the city. They also published a magazine called Revista Mate Lila, which published its last and 6th edition in 1992.

The 1985 jornadas in Barcelona focused on a number of feminist issues, including the right to legal abortion and decrying the limits placed on women seeking abortions. Among the lesbians participating was Montse Oliván.

Grup de Lesbianes Feministes de Barcelona was founded in founded in 1986, with around 30 to 40 women regularly participating. Some of the women were members of extra-parliamentary political parties. They would go on to play a critical role in a number of lesbian political issues in the city.

The Sexto Encuentro de Feministas Independientes, also known as the Jornadas de Las Lagunas de Ruidera, took place in Ciudad Real in May 1986. One of the primary groups pushing for and organizing the meeting was the Red de Amazonas. The event was financial by the provincial government, the local townhall and independent feminist organizations. Among the activities was a workshop on education and another on art. A group of lesbians also gave a public presentation at the conference.

Red de Amazonas was a network of lesbians all over Spain but based in Barcelona. They were in constant communication with lesbian organizations from all other the world, trying to document work being produced abroad for a domestic audience of Spanish lesbians. The group was founded after and in response to the Sexto Encuentro de Feministas Independientes held earlier in the year.

In October 1986, several members of the lesbian community in the city traveled to Berlin in October for second edition of Lesbian Week, a concept pushed for in Germany by Susanne Bischof. The Spanish lesbians in attendance got the chance to interact with lesbians from a variety of countries including Germany, Croatia and Slovenia, along with lesbians representing different groups like Afro-Germans. Topics included racism, exclusion and demarcation of lesbian spaces.  They were also less radical but applicable to everyday lives of lesbians like love, relationships, work life, education and sports.

Grupo de Estudios Lesbianos was created in November 1986, emerging from the member Red de Amazonas. They demanded that feminism be re-examined, and re-examined from a point of view that was not explicitly heterosexual. The group, representing a small minority opinion within Spain’s feminist circles at the time, considered lesbians to be Spain’s true lesbians. There was a lot of pushback to the group.

Lesbian feminists began abandoning collectives by the late 1980s and early 1990s. These organizations saw their membership numbers stagnate in some cases, and a number of these organizations would disappear mid-way through the 1990s.

A lot of conversations around sex, and sex and relationships started to take place in the late 1980s. During the late 1980s, the Spanish feminist lesbian community that talked about sexuality began discussing topics like butch-femme relationships between lesbians, sadomasochism, and pornography for the first time. Spain went from a huge pro-sex movement where the majority was in support of pornography and prostitution to one that was much more divided on the issue by the 2010s. Efforts to actively change these attitudes started in the late 1980s. Those who were opposed to both were the minority in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Lesbian feminist collectives, particularly CFLM, tried to change those attitudes and start tough debates on the topic.

Colectivo de Lesbianas Feministas de Guipúzcoa had many discussions in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the complication of same-sex marriage and its relationship to lesbianism. They were happy that lesbians were finally being addressed by society, but at the same time they wanted their needs to be addressed as independent and autonomous women with their own sexual capacity. Marriage did not fit that definition.

The invisible lesbians of the late 1980s had their own issues. They often viewed the feminist movement as retrograde and lesbophobic, something that they had to manage to survive under. What they wanted was financial independence, and the ability to function in society as an autonomous lesbian. Much of the invisible lesbian experience would be mobilized around court cases.

Asociación Galega da Muller had integrated in a Comisión de Lesbianas by 1987, and it was the largest and most important lesbian group in Galicia in the late 1980s. The organization itself was founded by 50 women in 1976 following Franco’s death and joined the major national feminist organization. It was initially based in Santiago de la Compostela. The organization split two years later. Asociación Galega da Muller would see a number of organizations emerge from it, including Coordinadora Feminista de Vigo and Asociación Democrática da Muller Galega.

Lesbians were integrated into Coordinadora Feminista de Navarra by 1987. Colectivo Lesbianas de Araba was founded in 1987. The group held regular meetings where they held discussions and planned events and campaigns to support their goals.

Grup de Lesbianes Feministes de Barcelona (GFLB) was founded in 1987 and would play one of the largest roles in lesbian political activity during the 1990s. The group believed it was important for lesbians to build bridges with groups not institutionalized through state support to achieve common goals. This included developing relationships with feminist women not part of organized groups, transsexuals, non-feminist lesbians, queers, and gay men. At the same time, GFLB worked with similar organizations including Red de Amazonas, the state network for feminists in Catalonia. Front d’Alliberament Gai de Catalunya (FAGC), joined the group, launched the Insubmissió Marika campaign in 1997. The following year, Grup de Lesbianes Feministes de Barcelona (GFLB) launched their campaign Un carrer per a les lesbianes to criticize civil marriage in Spain, comparing the inability to for homosexuals to marry is akin to forbidding Spain’s monarchy from ruling the military to fight. They would have approved of the destruction of all three institutions.

Barcelona’s només per dones hosted a weeklong meeting of lesbians called 1ª Setmana de Lesbianes de Barcelona from 2 – 8 February 1987 to discuss strategies for lesbians from across the country to defend lesbian interests, including fully accepting lesbianism as a normal sexuality. Gretel Ammann was one of the main driver’s in organizing the event.  The group wanted to asset their double militancy of its members as both women and as homosexuals.  . They also talked about the violence involved in imposing heterosexual rule on lesbians and women.  There were some who came from militant feminist groups, some who were independent feminists, and some who were lesbian separatists like Gretel Amman. The gathering included around 300 lesbian activists from Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, San Sebastián, Vitoria, Pamplona, Santiago de Compostela, La Coruña, El Ferrol, Zaragoza and from other places across Europe.

Organizers sent a request to the Ayuntamiento de Barcelona to use Centre Cívic Cotxeres de Sants, for the 1ª Setmana de Lesbianes de Barcelona in January 1987. Their initial request was denied. Then a broader women’s organization applied to use the facility for the conference on their behalf, and they were granted permission to use the venue on the condition that they not advertise outside what they were discussing inside.

The Oriko Jardunaldiak took place from 1 – 3 May 1987. Around 100 lesbians participated, with the goal of creating autonomous lesbian groups or lesbian groups within women’s assemblies. Participants were seeking social reform, reform and progress on the rights for lesbian couples, more information on dealing with the complexities of lesbian relationships on topics like love, jealousy, desire and seduction, and the need to create archives and libraries of lesbian related materials.

Euskal Herriko Lesbianen III Jardunaldiak took place in December 1987. One of their sessions was titled, “Lesbian Movement and Organization”.

By 1988, CFLM acknowledged the possibility that they had abandoned the lesbian ghetto because their lesbian life lived in a sector involving centering women’s rights. There was a disconnect as they were rarely doing things explicitly for lesbian rights.

Lesbians organized a protest in Pamplona in 1988 to condemn violence against women. One of their arguments during the protest was that the need to remain closeted was a form of violence against women.

Durng the 1980s, Asamblea de Mujeres de Granada’s sexuality commission was renamed the lesbian commission and began publishing a magazine called Menos Lobos in 1988. The magazine focused on women’s sexuality in general, with a lot of lesbian specific content, including poetry, analysis and political commentary. Articles by both regional and national lesbians would also appear, including works by Gretel Ammann, Empar Pineda, Cristina Garaizabal or Fefa Vila.

Santiago de Compostela hosted a conference against violencia machista in 1988. This conference brought up some of the difference between feminist lesbians and feminists around the issues of sexuality, prostitution and pornography. It was symbolic of other rifts that were beginning to happen within the movement as some lesbians began again to move more towards gay men and what soon became queer feminism.

The lesbian magazine Labrys came out in January 1988. A month later, the lesbian magazine Tríbades also is published.

At the February 1988 Jornadas contra la Violencia a las mujeres in the Irun, Colectivo de Lesbianas Feministas de Bizkaia presented a paper that said, “Silence, as the cruelest response that can exist, stands as the most subtle and deceptive aggression that heteropatriarchy uses”. Outside this presentation, there were few other presentations about or by lesbians.

Jornadas Estatales de Lesbianas, organized by Coordinadora Estatal d’Organitzacions Feministes, took place in 5 June 1988 in Madrid. This supported feminism and lesbian feminism, and was held in coordination with Spanish feminist organizations. Lesbians from the Basque Country attended along with members of the feminist group Matarraskak. Around 2000 women attended. One presentation had the playful title of “Lesbian from the provinces looking for a girlfriend”. Another paper reflected on the goals and experiences of lesbian feminism in Madrid. The Catalan group L`eisx violeta did a presentation about power dynamics in relationships, violence in relationships and breakups. Bizkaiko Lesbiana Feministen Kolektiboak and the Sexualitate Batzordeak did a presentation where they discussed pornography. Nanina Santos Castroviejo, a member of Asociación Galega de la Mujer (Santiago de Compostela), did a presentation titled, “De la inopia del sueño y del excitante peligro de todo despertar”.[3] Jornadas feministas contra la violencia machista took place in December 1988 in Santiago de Compostela. It included members of CFLM, but not as representatives of the organization. They held a session called “El deseo de las demás es cutre, amigas, el mío no” that defended erotic fantasies between lesbians, along with sadomaschostic lesbian relationships. Gretel Amman criticized the presentation in Laberint.

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[1] Spanish: feminismo de la diferencia.

[2] While Gretal Amman had created a theoretical framework called feminismo de la diferencia, she was not talking about the theoretical framework now known as feminismo de la diferencia.

[3] Literal English: From the innocence of sleep and the exciting danger of awakening.