The Purple Lily Awards honor the intersections of Latino and LGBTQ identities

A sea of audience members cheered as Ridge and Toni Garcia belted out their rendition of “Vámonos,” a ranchera immortalized by the late Mexican-Costa Rican singer Chavela Vargas. They called the song — which details the pain of being in love despite harsh social judgment — the “lesbian anthem.” Facing a crowd of nearly 300 friends, activists and leaders of L.A.’s Latino LGBTQ community gathered Thursday at Studio-MLA, a landscape architecture firm, they turned their acoustic guitars toward one of the night’s honorees, Nancy Valverde. At the Purple Lily Awards, hosted by the Latino Equality Alliance to honor the local Latino LGBTQ community, Valverde, 90, was recognized for her commitment to preserving her own identity amid discrimination. It wasn’t easy to be out there alone.” And even though there has been significant social progress since the 1960s in advancing LGBTQ rights, Valverde said, there is still much work to be done. “It’s just really great to have a space to ourselves where we can feel celebrated,” said Sor Loose Clarita, a sister with the Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a nonbinary “Order of 21st Century Nuns” that, in the words of its website, was “founded to bring flamboyant hilarity to serious causes and to amplify voices needing a power lift.” The seventh annual event, which began in 2016, serves as one of the Latino Equality Alliance’s primary fundraisers of the year.