Colombia has elected a bisexual woman as its first openly LGBTI senator

Angélica Lozano. | Photo: Twitter/@AngelicaLozanoC

Colombia made history when it elected its first two openly LGBTI national politicians.

Angélica Lozano and Mauricio Andrés Toro Orjuela, both from the Green Alliance party won seats in the country’s Senate and House of Representatives respectively.

Colombians went to the polls in March to elect more than 200 new representatives in both houses of parliament.

Lozano is openly bisexual and is the partner of Senator Claudia López who will be running for the Vice-Presidency in May. López won a seat in the Senate in 2014 but came out after she took office.

Lozano won 105,299 votes in the election, the second-highest number in her party with the Green Alliance winning 10 seats in the Senate.

She celebrated her victory on social media with a simple post saying ‘we did it! thank you!’.

LGBTI rights

One of her policy platforms was to advocate for LGBTI and women’s equality.

She served as a city councillor in Colombia’s capital Bogota, where she was a vocal opponent of homophobic lawmakers.

In 2012, she condemned the comments of Colombia’s longest-serving senator, Roberto Gerlein who said gay sex was ‘dirty’. Lozano participated in a massive ‘kiss-in’ to protest his comments.

‘The idea is to congregate every citizen, not just homosexuals, to unite and participate in this kiss-in as a means of supporting the civil rights that make us free and equal,’ she said at the time.

‘It’s interesting that Gerlein isn’t disgusted by corruption, or violence, or abuse toward women’.

In 2016 Colombia legalized same-sex marriage and the year before that allowed same-sex couples to adopt children.

During the March elections 14 candidates openly identified as LGBTI.

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