Colombia's first and only openly gay
congressman will seek a second term in 2022.
Congressman Mauricio Toro, 38, was
first elected in 2018.
“I think that I will be re-elected to
the House of Representatives,” Toro told the Washington Blade
during a Zoom interview from Bogotá.
Senator Angélica
Lozano, who is bisexual, is the only other openly LGBT person in the
Congress. Toro and Lozano are members of the Green Alliance party.
While gay and lesbian couples can
legally marry in Colombia and transgender individuals can change
their gender on government-issued documents, Toro suggested LGBT
rights in Colombia were weak because they were won in the courts.
“They have been give to us on paper,”
he
said. “What's the problem? It is the implementation of them
because these rights have not been won through the Congress.”
“A law is much more explicit because
a law has defined chapters and articles and defines the mechanisms of
how a right should be applied and the same government is assigned the
duty of regulating each of these applications,” he said.
Toro added that as the only openly gay
congressman in Colombia he's “very alone.”
“We are around 300 [in the
Congress],” he said. “I am fighting for our community’s flag,
but with the support and encouragement of members of other parties
that understand that this is a fight for equality, even though they
are heterosexual.”