(1942-2011) Martha Ferro, born in Buenos Aires, was the daughter of two anarchist partisans who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Influenced by the stories told to her by her parents and grandmother of Mujeres Libres, the anarcha-feminist organization of the CNT, she founded El Sotano (The Basement), Argentina’s first lesbian bar in 1976, during the US-backed fascist/military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla.

Inspired by the events of Stonewall, she wrote to the Gay Liberation Front in New York, with her poetry appearing in their newspaper Come Out. Modelling her bar after the spaces opened in the wake of the riot, it operated as an underground meeting space, club, and hideout for lesbians and feminists during a time homosexuality was punishable by life in prison. Drawing from from her lifelong study of anarchism and Trotskyism, this clandestine space served as both a place of escape from the repressive regime and a training ground for armed struggle against it. Located at the corner of San Lorenzo and Defensa streets in Buenos Aires, doors were kept barricaded, windows were covered and meetings were organized sporadically by word of mouth only to avert police and military raids. The space lasted from 1976 until the dictatorship began to crumble in 1983, and became a nexus for feminist, trans, and queer organizing in Argentina. 

“She used investigative journalism as a form of denunciation, not only about domestic violence but also about the persecution and death of transvestites, flood victims, and people who had been swindled. She had a very broad vision, especially of poor and marginalized sectors. Her feminism was openly classist.”
-Mabel Bellucci

Further Reading
-The Way to Newark and Other Poems by Martha Ferro