“Let’s Go For More” was this year’s theme at Argentina’s 19th annual gay pride march on Saturday in Buenos Aires. The LGBT community called for allowing people to change the gender on their birth certificates and for the issuance of national identity cards that can help to prevent the legal difficulties that many transgender Argentines encounter when official documents do not match their professed gender.
Argentina, which in July was the first country in Latin America to recognize same-sex marriage, has witnessed a surge in LGBT tourism in the wake of the passage of gay marriage legislation. “It’s the same kind of [tourism] increase that happened in South Africa, Canada, and Madrid after they legalized gay marriage,” says Pablo De Luca, founder of the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires. He added, people “want to travel to a country where we don’t feel like we have to hide our sexuality.”
Since the law was passed 500 couples have walked down the aisle and Mr. De Luca estimates that 100,000 LGBT couples have visited Argentina.
Read more on why Argentina legalized gay marriage. http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1753
