The life of Mexican-American lesbian activist Nancy Valverde was eventful and filled with admirable perseverance. Valverde was born in 1931 in New Mexico but moved to Lincoln Heights, California, with her father at the age of nine, where she would go on to make waves in the LGBTQ+ community.

Looking back at the younger years of her life during an interview with ABC7, Valverde said that she didn’t know much about what being lesbian was. When boys came up to her and asked to hold her hand, she would be confused and feel that she didn’t fit in anywhere.

At times during her lifes, she said she even felt that the queer community was embarrassed of her for being too loud about her lesbian identity.

Nancy Valverde, a longtime resident of the Center’s Triangle Square complex for LGBTQ+ elders, has been a fixture in L.A.’s queer community since the 1950s, when she was routinely harassed by police and arrested dozens of times for wearing men’s clothing in public. pic.twitter.com/Xx1w6m8H2x

— Los Angeles LGBT Center (@LALGBTCenter) August 2, 2023

Like many other lesbian activists of her time, Valverde’s life story led to her becoming an icon for the queer community. At 17, her queer identity became well known as she was frequently arrested for violating Los Angeles’s ‘masquerading’ laws.

The goal of these laws was to criminalize being transgender, butch, and doing drag in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It was a way to suppress the LGBTQ+ community from embracing their identity and instead force them to fit into a heteronormative society.

Valverde was put in the lesbian and transgender section of Lincoln Heights Jail over two dozen times in her life for wearing pants with a zipper in the front instead of the back or side like women had to wear at the time. 

Being sick of such injustice, the activist decided to take action. She reached out to a clerk at the LA County Law Library to research previous cases that proved women wearing ‘man’s clothing’ was not a crime or worthy of arrest. 

Once she had evidence supporting her claim, her lawyer was able to argue that it was not a crime, and she eventually stopped getting arrested for ‘masquerading’. Valverde did all of this at a very young age and was later credited with paving the way for these ‘masquerading’ laws to be disposed of for butch lesbians in Los Angeles.

After this great accomplishment, she went on to create safe spaces for the queer community. She trained to become a barber and eventually opened her own barber shop that allowed LGBTQ+ people to feel accepted and freely share their identity.

She told ABC7, “I didn’t feel comfortable where I was tolerated. But when you’re accepted, you can feel the difference right away.” Her goal for the barber shop was to have a place where the queer community felt supported and cared for. There wasn’t a more welcoming place than ‘Nancy’s Barbershop’.

Valverde’s business became a safe haven for the LGBTQ+ community – especially the lesbian community – and a legacy of what she stood for in her life.

Years later, she was honoured by the City of Los Angeles with an intersection named after her. The Latino Equality Alliance described Valverde’s life perfectly, stating that “she made queer history as a Chicana in Los Angeles who relentlessly stayed true to her identity and self-expression in the face of countless challenges”.