The house had a continuous facade that blended into its block in a working-class neighborhood of Antofagasta, the mining capital of northern Chile. Inside, the atmosphere was celebratory. Guests had hung hand-lettered signs with playful slogans, including one referencing "SOLOCH" -- a term the Chilean tabloid press had coined in the 1950s, shorthand for "Sociedad Locas de Chile." Around fifty guests danced and laughed. Nine men wore women's clothing. Two reportedly danced without clothes at all. Neighbors, bothered by the noise, called the Carabineros. Lieutenant Sergio Canales Ponce led the raid. About half the partygoers escaped across rooftops and through adjoining patios in the darkness. Twenty-four were not so lucky.

What followed was not justice but theater. At 8:30 the next morning, the detainees were paraded to the First Criminal Court of Antofagasta. One woman, Rita Lopez Munoz, was released after explaining she had only come to deliver four wigs. The judge waited until 1:00 p.m. before allowing the nine detainees caught in women's clothing to change out of their outfits -- hours of deliberate humiliation in a public courthouse. By afternoon, two more were released for lack of evidence, and twelve the next morning. But the nine who had been dressed as women remained. Charged with "offenses against morality and good customs," they were declared criminals and held in the Antofagasta Public Prison for more than two weeks, until the Court of Appeals granted bail on July 2 at a cost of 450 escudos each. After their release, the detainees reported that they had suffered abuse and mistreatment throughout their imprisonment.

The Antofagasta press treated the raid as entertainment. La Estrella del Norte, an evening tabloid, blazed its June 16 front page with the headline "The greens muddied a crazy, crazy party" -- "los verdes" being slang for the green-uniformed Carabineros. El Mercurio de Antofagasta went further, calling it a "sinister orgy of depraved young people." Police had also found portraits of Che Guevara and a sketchbook referencing a "Latin American Colony," which the press seized upon to link homosexuality with leftist subversion. For the families of the detained, the newspapers brought a different kind of devastation: many relatives learned about their loved ones' sexual orientation for the first time through these lurid headlines. The scandal rippled outward. Councilor Luis Franco petitioned a judge to ban a scheduled drag performance by the Blue Ballet troupe at the Latorre Theater. The judge denied the request, though he did authorize the Carabineros to ensure no one under twenty-one attended.

Nine years later, in November 1978, police raided the same address again. Seven people dressed in women's clothing were arrested, all members of a club called "The Red Ring." The address at 352 Huanchaca Street had become, in the eyes of the authorities, a site to be surveilled and punished. But memory works differently than policing. In 2008, the Antofagasta journalist and playwright Pedro Arturo Zlatar premiered a stage play titled El escandalo de la calle Huanchaca, with support from Amnesty International and the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation. That same year, mathematician and novelist Eric Goles published El zapato perdido de la Marilyn, narrating the scandal in detail. What the state had tried to make shameful, artists reclaimed as history worth telling -- a story not of scandal but of people gathered in a house with defiant signs on the walls, celebrating who they were.