LGBT in El Salvador

I frequently point readers to articles written by my friend Danielle Mackey on her blog Grit and Grace.    They are consistently well written and offer insights about El Salvador not found anywhere else from someone writing in English.     A good example of this is Danielle's recent three part series:  Historical Moments: The LGBT Community in El Salvador.   In this series we read about the struggles of the LGBT community in El Salvador where prejudice and violence run strongly through society.  From one of Danielle's interviews of a young lesbian activist:

My idea for the future is that we can live in peace, and I say that not just for the LGBT community, but for El Salvador as a whole. We have such a high level of violence that is not just expressed as homicides or as gang violence, even though it’s usually reduced to that, but there are all sorts of violence---gender, social, physical, sexual, economic violence. You’re not only targeted for your sexual orientation, but for whatever—whatever excuse they could possibly make—and it’s difficult to coexist and live peacefully in this country. Of course, it’s more difficult as a lesbian, but my dream for my own life is to live openly with my partner, my friends, my family at some point, without causing a problem by living openly as who I am, and to be able to feel like I’m living safely here, not because I have a soldier with a loaded gun behind me, which tends to be the image of peace that is propagated in El Salvador, but because I live a peaceful coexistence with the people in my society….

Read more here.