For Trans and Queer Divas in the Mission, HIV Prevention Was an Art

Editor’s note: This story is part of ‘Trans Bay: A History of San Francisco’s Gender-Diverse Community.’ From June 9–19, we’re publishing stories about transgender artists and activists who shaped culture from the 1890s to today.

When it opened its doors in 1979, Esta Noche became a gathering place for queer Latinos in the Mission. As the sun went down in the San Francisco neighborhood, the small dive bar exploded with fabric and sequin. DJs spun Juan Gabriel records alongside house beats, and reinas cackled and cotorreaban on the street outside.

“It was a tumultuous and fabulous time. There was lots of loss and chaos,” says Tina Valentín Aguirre, who first came to 16th Street as a Stanford student in 1987 to meet other young, queer Latinos. Since Aguirre hadn’t turned 21 yet, they ended up making friends with folks hanging outside the bar.

“I quickly met some people who were doing HIV outreach there, distributing condoms, lube and bleach,” says Aguirre, now an artist and the director of the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District. By then, HIV had already infected thousands of people in San Francisco, most of them gay men and trans women.

“Even though we’re talking about people with AIDS dying, there were some traditional Latino organizations that did not feel comfortable in talking about queer and trans issues,” says Aguirre. In 1994, they partnered with filmmaker Augie Robles on the documentary ¡Viva 16!, which captures the places and people that made up queer Latino nightlife in the Mission District of the ’80s and ’90s.

Meanwhile, in the Castro, “there were white-serving, mostly gay organizations that really didn’t have any idea how to work with queer and transgender people,” Aguirre adds.

So on the corner of 16th and Valencia Streets — the place geographically and culturally between the “straight,” Latino Mission and the gay, predominantly white Castro — is where Aguirre met some of the people that shaped the community’s unique response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. These artists and organizers came together to create programs and spaces that centered the needs of queer and trans Latinos, a new way of thinking that would shape public health efforts for decades to come.

One influential artist in the 16th Street scene was the dynamic and charismatic ranchera singer Teresita La Campesina. “Campesina” in Spanish can translate to “farmworker,” but as Teresita once told Aguirre in a videotaped interview years later: “There’s nothing about me that’s a farmworker. They call me ‘Campesina’ because I sing music from the ranch, from the country.”

With a voice powerful enough to command even the rowdiest party, Teresita sang ballads of heartbreak, longing and desire all over the bars of 16th Street. “Once I was able to go into the bars, she would try to take my drink — she would try to take my man,” Aguirre recalls.

The two would go on to form a profound connection: In Aguirre’s chosen family, Teresita became their mother. “Us younger queens helped her with makeup and getting dressed,” Aguirre says. In turn, “she helped us understand how to take care of ourselves and how to be safe with some of the men who just wanted to have a good time.”

After contracting HIV in the early ’90s, Teresita became more vocal about HIV/AIDS, talking about prevention and available treatment during her performances. “We needed her as one of our elders to show up and tell her story,” Aguirre says. “She was a sex worker on top of being a singer and later an AIDS activist. … Her story was a political story.”

Better understanding safe sex

Throughout the ’90s, the HIV/AIDS crisis intensified among San Francisco’s queer Latino community. The city already had one of the highest rates of people living with AIDS in the country, and among different demographic groups nationwide, Latinos had some of the highest rates of HIV infection.

It was during this moment that Rafael Díaz, a developmental psychologist and clinical social worker, began to interview gay and bisexual Latino men living in San Francisco to better understand how this group was thinking about HIV and safe sex. He found that while many of these men knew that safe sex practices — like using a condom — can help prevent an HIV infection, they were still knowingly putting themselves at risk.

“Our safer sex intentions are too often weakened by strong factors in our culture such as machismo, homophobia, poverty, racism and sexual silence, to name a few,” Díaz later wrote in his 1998 book, Latino Gay Men and HIV: Culture, Sexuality and Risk Behavior. In order to better prevent and educate about HIV, care providers would have to take into account these cultural factors, he argued.

One of the people that Díaz spoke to as part of his research was artist and community organizer Héctor León, who in 1989 moved from Mexico City to San Francisco. Before coming to the U.S., León was already involved in HIV/AIDS activism as a member of Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolucionaria, the collective that organized Mexico’s first-ever gay pride march in 1979. Once in San Francisco, León quickly got involved in volunteering efforts to care for those living with AIDS, and prevention work with Community United in Response to AIDS/SIDA (CURAS).

“[Díaz’s research] confirmed what some of us already knew. … One of the reasons that people were more vulnerable to contracting HIV is because they were alone and didn’t have a support network,” León says in Spanish. In the Mission District in the ’80s, León saw how transgender people and sex workers faced intense rejection from the rest of the community and had very limited access to healthcare services.

In response, León decided to put on a wig and a dress, and pick up a briefcase. They became “La Condonera,” a persona that walked the streets of the Mission District at night passing out condoms to the transgender sex workers and anyone else who might need them. “The girls didn’t like that a gay boy showed up to pass out condoms,” they explain. “But if I dressed up, it would be easier for me to approach them.”

La Condonera would also visit bars and clubs holding up their briefcase, a reinterpretation of a 1920s cigar girl. “At the time, you had to be discreet — even when talking about condoms,” they say. “So I would set up the condoms as if they were chocolates and would even ask people, ‘Would you like a chocolate?’”

“People would always welcome La Condonera,” León adds.

‘Different cuerpos, different deseos, different culturas’

In 1993, León joined forces with legendary lesbian activist and DJ Diane Félix, National Task Force on AIDS Prevention director Reggie Williams, organizer Jesse Johnson and other community leaders to start Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida (PCPV) — Project Against AIDS and For Life. From the beginning, PCPV sought to provide HIV services that responded to the cultural and linguistic diversity of the Mission District.

First located at the corner of 16th and Mission Streets, PCPV was a space where anyone could come in and pick up condoms, and a hub for extensive artistic, athletic and cultural expression. “Las Diablitas,” a soccer team for young queer women; a hiking and meditation group for HIV-positive gay Latino men called “¡Adelante Caminante!”; “CuidaTe-Ta,” a monthly support group “for hermanas of all ethnic backgrounds and orientations.”

As he continued his research on HIV/AIDS prevention through the 1990s, Rafael Díaz confirmed that discrimination and sexual silence were putting the Latino community at greater risk of infection. PCPV’s mission statement spoke directly to these factors: “Different nombres, different cuerpos, different deseos, different culturas coming together to form a community dedicated to living, to fighting the spread of HIV disease and the other unnatural disasters of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and poverty,” declared the group’s mission statement.

“Proyecto challenged the assumption that everybody wanted to live,” says Juana María Rodríguez, professor of ethnic studies and performance studies at UC Berkeley. While working on her dissertation in the mid-’90s, Rodríguez started going to PCPV events, which were completely different from any type of HIV work she had seen before. “Creativity and art are life-affirming. … This gave these young queers a reason to want to take care of themselves.”

PCPV was also different from other organizations because of who led the programming, Rodríguez points out. “Many of the most vulnerable members of the community were immigrant trans women,” she says. “Proyecto, in some ways, had trans women at the very center of its vision.”

An old friend of León’s, legendary drag performer Adela Vázquez, soon joined PCPV, where they both ran the group’s AtreDivas collective (a play on words that combines “daring” and “divas”), that offered sewing and classes for trans Latinas. Las AtreDivas performed all over the Bay Area — including at Esta Noche — educating their audiences about HIV and safe sex while lip syncing until the early hours of the morning.

“What worked well for Proyecto was that there was a clear vision,” says León. “Through art, we could bring people together to create things, who wanted to design a shirt or write a poem … and that way make sure that no one had to talk about AIDS by themselves.”

‘Hablar del VIH es hablar de la vida’

In 2005, PCPV transformed into El/La Para TransLatinas, a nonprofit that focuses on serving immigrant trans women. After living with HIV for over a decade, Teresita La Campesina died in 2002. And more recently, Adela Vázquez passed away from a heart attack at 66 years old last October. But the HIV work that came out from 16th Street during the height of the crisis is still felt both in the Mission District and among public health experts.

Only a few blocks away from where Esta Noche and PCPV used to be is Mission Neighborhood Health Center (MNHC), which serves thousands of families, most of them Spanish-speaking immigrants. In 1989, MNHC opened Clínica Esperanza, the first bilingual HIV clinic in the city, offering both medical services and support groups. Tina Aguirre helped design the clinic’s original programming, and Rafael Díaz’s research became the foundation for an intervention program for Spanish-speaking gay and bisexual men: Hermanos de Luna y Sol, which continues to operate after 30 years.

Many of the men at Hermanos de Luna y Sol are living in the U.S. by themselves after being rejected by their biological families back in their countries of origin, says César Monroy, HIV and Prevention Wellness Manager at MNHC, who also runs the Hermanos de Luna y Sol meetings.

“In our countries, we don’t really have the chance to talk about our personal things … which sometimes makes us believe that no one else has experienced what we’re going through,” he says.

“If you’re worried about paying rent or not having a job, we’ll talk about that … as these are factors that may push you to make risky decisions,” he adds. “Hablar del VIH es hablar de la vida.” — “Talking about HIV is talking about life.”

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts in San Francisco partnered with community members to create a prevention and treatment strategy for the city’s Latino population that took into account unique cultural factors. Researchers with UCSF’s Unidos en Salud initiative confirmed that their COVID-19 strategy was partly informed by the impact of HIV/AIDS among the Latino community.

“We don’t have to imagine that this is the first time the community has ever faced oppression or exclusion,” says Aguirre, thinking back to what they learned from Teresita La Campesina and the other queens that formed their chosen family during those nights at Esta Noche. “We were not the first, and not only that, we had a lot to learn from people who have already been there.”