Salsa Soul Sisters

The Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc Collective was a group for lesbians who are also womanists and women of color, in New York City. The group is the oldest black lesbian organization in the United States. Arguments within the Salsa Soul Sisters resulted in the disbanding of the Salsa Soul Sisters into two groups, Las Buenas Amigas (Good Friends) made for Latinas, and African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change made for African-diaspora lesbians.^[3]

The Salsa Soul Sisters grew out of the Black Lesbian Caucus of the New York City Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which in turn split in 1971 from the original Gay Liberation Front. They originally called themselves the Third World Gay Women’s Association, with the informal moniker “Salsa-Soul Sisters”.^[4]

In 1974 the Black Lesbian Caucus reformulated itself as Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc, an autonomous group of black and Latina lesbians offering its members a social and political alternative to the lesbian and gay bars, which had “historically exploited and discriminated against lesbians of color”.^[5][6] The Sisters started by “searching out each other, because of the strong needs we have in common” but also to “grow to understand the ways in which we differ.”^[4]