María Helena NG

María Helena NG (born 1947[?]) was one of only two known women to be charged with violating the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes, the 1933 law that defined homosexuality as criminal act in Spain. Arrested on 30 March 1968 at Barcelona's La Gran Cava, she was eventually convicted and sentenced to between 127 days and one year in prison, followed by a two–year mandatory ban from going to Barcelona and two years of government supervision. María Helena's case indicates that, although past and current conservative narratives challenge the existence of lesbians and gender-nonconforming women in Spain, the state was aware of them.

Biography According to prison records, as a young child, María Helena never wanted to play with dolls, nor liked playing in the kitchen. She would have her first sexual experience with another woman at the age of 12 in Montevideo. She did not like wearing women's underwear.

21-year-old María Helena was charged in Catalonia with violating the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes on 30 March 1968, with a file number of 296. Her case was brought before Judge Antonio Sabater, one of the principle authors of the first draft of the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes de 1933.

Historical importance María Helena's behavior was so transgressive that the state felt a need to interfere with it and punish it. Despite this, the state does not make clear if the problematic nature of her behavior is that it was homosexual and transvestite in manner. Was she a butch lesbian or a trans man? Government texts discussing her incarceration do not make this clear. This is important as religious groups and political parties like Partido Popular have continued to argue that the Francoist period was one in which lesbians did not exist, and that sexually deviant and sexually immoral behavior only existed in Spain as a consequence of the liberalization following the Spanish transition to democracy. María Helena's story is important because her exception case destabilizes narratives by repressive regimes by challenging false dichotomies. These laws would later be used to imprison women and to commit them to mental institutions. One of the women prosecuted under the law was prosecuted in the period between 1971 and 1978. At the time of María Helena's arrest, women did not go out alone to bars, and they did not transgress on masculine spaces.