I first learned about Sara Harb Quiroz in 2021. I was living in El Paso, Texas, and researching America’s deportation of “undesirables.” For much of the twentieth century, immigration laws had been used against gays and lesbians. But in some cases, the banished fought back. I found Sara among them in a brief legal citation online. I wondered if she was still alive.
In El Paso, I looked for people who shared her last name and knocked on doors until I obtained her address — in Juárez. I found her at her home. She was 88 years old and battling cancer but had a sturdy build and a strong voice. “The doctor took off all my clothes!” she told me. She said that she wanted an apology from the U.S. government. Her memory seemed foggy.
A case file at the National Archives filled in her recollections. In the late 1950s, when Sara was 25 and a permanent resident of the United States, she lived with her sisters in El Paso and worked as a farm laborer, window washer, and homecare attendant. She had a young daughter, Guadalupe, who lived with Sara’s parents in Mexico, just over the international bridge.
One afternoon, Sara met a woman at a bus stop in El Paso and started a flirtation. They went to Juárez — the border was more porous then — and checked into a hotel. Sara would later tell the immigration authorities that this was the first person she’d had sex with since Guadalupe’s father. Though her relationship with the woman ended after a few weeks, she soon fell in love with someone else: Celia, a Mexican citizen working in Juárez.
Celia became a fixture at Sara’s house in El Paso. One of Sara’s sisters became suspicious and reported Celia as a lesbian to the authorities. As a result, Celia was taken to a federal holding facility, disrobed, and subjected to a gynecological exam. She was pressured to name names.
A few months later, Sara was returning to El Paso from seeing her daughter when an official stopped her on the international bridge. He confiscated her green card and brought her in for an interrogation that was as violent as Celia’s. “Are you afflicted with a desire which causes you to have sexual relations with other women, acting as the man of the couple?” an agent asked. Sara was genitally examined and ordered deported. “I spent a month in bed,” she told me. “I took pills the whole time.”
Sara challenged the decision in a Texas court. Her lawyers encouraged her to insist that she was heterosexual, and she even married a man to help her case. The ploy didn’t work. She then appealed her case to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. “I remember my father and I took a train,” she told me — over 1,000 miles from home, through the segregated South. Her lawyers gave up the heterosexuality argument and submitted expert evidence that homosexuality was not a disorder. That didn’t work, either. “Whatever the phrase ‘psychopathic personality’ may mean to the psychiatrist,” the court ruled, “to the Congress it was intended to include homosexuals and sex perverts.” Sara was deported in 1961.
Immigration law was amended in 1973 to replace the ban on homosexual “psychopathic personality” with an updated prohibition — against “sexual deviation,” a new catch-all that still rendered LGBTQ people deportable. Not until the Immigration Act of 1990 was that label removed. By then, Sara’s daughter was a U.S. citizen living in El Paso. She could have sponsored her mother for another green card, but Sara opted to stay in Mexico.
When I told a Texas-based rights group about Sara, they honored her as an “LGBTQ Border Hero” at El Paso’s Museum of History. Her extended family came, and some heard her story for the first time. Sara could not attend. She was almost 90 and too frail to cross the border.
Several years ago, I asked the artist Anya Ulinich to collaborate with me on Sara’s illustrated biography, which is excerpted here. Today, as the U.S. government escalates its attacks on sexual minorities, Sara’s story is more important than ever.
Debbie Nathan is a New York-based journalist. She has reported for decades on the politics of immigration and the politics of sex. She has written and co-authored several books, including Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt.
Anya Ulinich, a visual artist and novelist, is the author of Petropolis and Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel. She lives in New York.
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