“I know that younger generations may not know about us,” historian and author Lydia R. Otero says of Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU) in the 2023 PBS documentary about the group, Unidad, “but we made life better for queers of color and we made a difference because we made the world better.”

Founded in Los Angeles in 1981 by a group of gay and lesbian Latinx and Chicanx activists, GLLU was a trailblazing organization that took an intersectional approach to LGBTQ+ advocacy decades before that term and concept entered mainstream political organizing.

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As Laura M. Esquivel — often called “La madre of the Latino LGBT Movement”and GLLU’s first Lesbian president — explains in the doc, in the late 1970s, gay organizations “were mainly founded and run and controlled by white gay men,” and “were focused on what they considered gay issues.”

“Nobody wanted to talk about the issues that we were facing as Latinos. So, nobody wanted to talk about racism, nobody wanted to talk about, you know, farm workers. It’s like, Those are not the gay issues,” she explains. “And in the Latino organizations, gay issues were not considered Latino issues.”

GLLU co-founder David P. Gonzales envisioned the group as incorporating political, social, and cultural aspects of the gay Latino experience. Initially launched as “Gay Latinos Unidos,” the mostly male members made a point of encouraging women to join, ultimately switching to the more inclusive name. And co-founder Roland Palencia credits women like community organizer Geneva Fernandez who joined GLLU early on with broadening the group’s focus from the personal to the intersectionally political.

“Sometimes we as gay males tend to probably focus on sexual liberation, and the women really brought this much more expansive agenda about classism and sexism and patriarchy and all this context and this interpretation about systems,” Palencia says in Unidad.

In the early 1980s, the group held fundraising discos and social retreats that attracted and brought together diverse queer members of the Latin American diaspora. GLLU’s women’s retreats even spawned a separate lesbian organization, Lesbianas Unidas.

GLLU made its presence known not just at Pride parades, but in marches and demonstrations for United Farmworkers and with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) against U.S. intervention in Central America. They combatted anti-LGBTQ+ gang violence by reaching out to young people involved in street gangs and including them in neighborhood celebrations. 

The group’s newsletter, Unidad, provided vital resources to the Latinx LGBTQ+ community, as did their Spanish-language educational materials addressing LGBTQ+ issues. They hosted international conferences addressing issues facing LGBTQ+ people of color and produced a monthly radio show, Radio GLLU, amplifying Latinx LGBTQ+ voices.

When the HIV/AIDS crisis hit, the group mobilized to fill the gap in funding and resources that were largely going to white gay organizations. They distributed Spanish-language material on safer sex and awareness campaigns tailored to the Latinx community. They also partnered with community health organizations to provide testing and counseling services in both Spanish and English. And, as in so many other communities at the time, the women of GLLU stepped up to help care for gay men who were sick and dying.

“Like with most things, we looked around and said, ‘What does our community need, and how can we help?’” Esquivel recalls in Unidad.

In 1989, GLLU launched Bienestar: A Gay Latino AIDS Project, which lives on today as Bienestar Human Services, a Los Angeles-based drop-in clinic providing medical care, HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, sexual health services, mental health services, and substance use counseling.

GLLU’s work was entirely reliant on volunteers, and as Esquivel notes in Unidad, all of the organization’s leadership also held full-time jobs. By the late 1990s, many of its founding members were burnt out and left the organization for various reasons. 

According to a timeline on GLLUArchive.com, the group also faced “internal conflicts regarding leadership and strategic direction, leading to difficulties in sustaining the organization” in the mid-’90s. As other Latinx LGBTQ+ organizations began to form, GLLU formally disbanded in 1999.

Despite Otero’s concern that younger queer folk today might be unfamiliar with GLLU and its history, young people are learning about the group — at least in California. Slides developed by LGBTQ+ history organization One Institutedetailing the group’s history were included this year in California State 11th Grade Ethnic Studies lesson. And Radio GLLU lives on in the Radio QGLLU Podcast.

As Esquivel says in Unidad, “We were there, and we contributed, and we made a difference. And that story needs to be told.”