Historical trends leading to the Unlike other short-term perspectives focusing on the strategies of LGBT organizations and on sudden and recent shifts in politics, our study concentrates on the historical transformations of varying length that established the conditions under which the struggle for same-sex marriage could succeed. Among other trends, we will analyze the changes in family structure, the relation between same-sex marriage and Argentine national identity at the end of the 19th century, the decline of religion, and the transformation of male homosexual subculture over the four decades prior to when same sex marriage was passed.
We argue that this law resulted from deeply rooted historical trends rather than constituting a sudden turn. Some of these trends leading to same-sex marriage emerged in the last four decades, as in the case of the transition to democracy, the growing acceptance of homosexuality, the decline of religion, and the transform ation of heterosexual marriage.
Yet, the Eurocentric nature of Argentine national identity and the formation of a secular state have nineteenth-century origins.
These trends of varying historical length were a prerequisite for the LGBT rights revolution to emerge, even though they have been ignored by the scholarship in the field.
While we agree that these factors did in fact play a role, we argue that the conditions necessary for the LGBT rights revolution to happen were rooted in deeper sociocultural change in society at large. Relying on a combination of demographic, historical, and ethnographic analysis, this paper organizes bibliography seemingly unrelated to LGBT issues to reconstruct the history leading to same-sex marriage legislation, and to show that such history has contributed to the endurance of the LGBT rights revolution in Argentina despite the recent conservative trend in Latin American politics.
