BOGOTÁ — Marta Lida Arias, a community-oriented, gay woman living in Medellín, knows first-hand about the endemic threat of violence in this conservative part of Colombia. Her father was killed when she was 2 years old and living in the town of San Pedro de los Milagros, just north of Medellín.
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In 1964, her family moved to the Bello suburb of Medellín. Growing up in a household run by women, Arias learned two things: that caregiving is the best way to show love; and that she would never allow a man to set her limits.
Even as a child, she was strong and could stand up to any household dictator. She had to be, not only because she was the fifth of eight children, but also because she has a darker complexion and is gay. She adored soccer, and says she would always prefer “soccer shoes to heels, even if [I] got used to them.”
Soccer activism
Today, she is recognized in the city as a prominent activist who has worked for decades creating safe, supportive environments for gay women. She is also renowned for her tamales tolimenses, a tamale variety from the Tolima region, which is wrapped in plantain leaves.
Nicknamed Marta Tamales, she began making this ancestral delicacy at age 16, when she married and had a daughter. “My tamales are really well-known. They’ve reached Chocó [department, on the Pacific coast]. Without knowing anything, I began making them, as well as cakes and food for parties,” Arias said.
In the mid-1980s, Arias began playing soccer professionally. Her female team was one of the first to join the Antioquia Football League, and some of the players she trained even made it to the Colombian national team.
“Beyond the game, we’re all women.”
Soccer and activism went hand in hand for Arias. In addition to being team leader, she also organized fundraising initiatives for members of her team.
“We promoted soccer not as a clash of enemies, but as training. Beyond the game, we’re all women,” she said. Players’ relatives or neighbors often disapproved of such manly ways among women, which she blames on “the patriarchy that is so entrenched in Colombia.”
But her teammates learned to support each other both on the pitch and in the streets. That meant walking home together, and not alone.
The 69 Collective
A decisive phase of Arias’ life started in bars. For 12 years, she worked weekends in bars or bowling joints in different parts of the city, selling lottery tickets during the week. She enjoyed working in bars so much that she opened one of her own, Ruta 69, with a partner, Alexandra Gómez, an English teacher.
It became an iconic establishment in Medellín; it was also well-located in the city center, “so access was safe.” For many lesbians there, it also became a kind of safe house, where they could be themselves, out of the closet. Lesbians need safe places, Arias said, “because [as] statistics show…. even if we’re not lesbians, women face many risks in cities.”
Arias says customers would come in, take off their shoes and hang up their handbags, “then choose the music… while deciding what to eat.” For some customers, Ruta 69 was as comfortable as a home. Blankets were even on hand in case some had to spend the night. Twelve lesbian couples even tied the knot there.
“What you couldn’t do in your neighborhood, you could in the center.”
In her activities, Arias has always sought to create a welcoming environment and even provide help, in a city that can be pitiless. Her initiatives included raising money for other gay and transgender women through raffles, second-hand sales or fun events, or showing films on LGBTQ+ rights at Ruta 69.
Those initiatives led Arias to create Colectiva 69, a “catharsis” of all her previous activism and a way of bringing this closed community “face to face” with other women. “It identifies us because it’s more suggestive and has the same name as the bar,” she said. Soon she and the collective were marching in and even inaugurating gay pride events. Their presence in pride events has given a more sober, political tone to what is often a chiefly festive environment.
COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns led to the bar’s closure, which “was a personal disaster,” Arias said. Other plagues followed the pandemic, like the gentrification and touristification that have transformed emblematic streets, such as Barbacoas Street, and led to the closure of more gay bars, which Arias and another bar owner, like Natalia, described as places of “inclusion and respect and diversity” and part of the gay population’s “heritage.”
Changes in Central Medellín
The writer and historian of the city Ramón Pineda said that gentrification in central Medellín has reduced the number of places where all types of “gender-dissident” individuals can go out without feeling judged.
Jhon Restrepo, head of Casa Diversa, a local collective set to receive damages relating to Colombia’s past violence, confirmed this, saying central Medellín used to be a place where gays, lesbians, transgenders and prostitutes could act and dress as they pleased, with the freedom you could expect from a time when conservatism and carnal repression coexisted with furtive tolerance.
“What you couldn’t do in your neighborhood, you could in the center,” Restrepo said.
Today in Medellín, business logics and mass tourism are less permissive of idiosyncrasies. Even as new generations of the LGBTQ+ community continue to defend their rights, and Arias pursues her community initiatives, she remembers a lost time of far greater camaraderie, perfectly symbolized in Ruta 69. And if she’s learned one thing over these years, she said, it’s that Medellín needs another bar like that.
