In the 1980s, as Americans suffered through an ever-worsening crime wave, an archetype of what some now say was a modern “witch hunt” was conjured up: tales of ritualistic, even satanic, child sex abuse emerged in courtrooms across the US.

More than two decades later, as several of those convictions are overturned, some of those accused link their convictions to homophobia.

“When we were being questioned by police, they made a point to put it out in there – that we were gay,” said Anna Vasquez, an openly gay Latina who lived in San Antonio, Texas at the time she was accused of child sex abuse in 1994, just after she left high school.

She and four other women previously convicted of ritualistic child abuse spoke on Wednesday to a crowd packed into the tiny feminist bookstore Bluestockings in New York. Vasquez and three other women from Texas, dubbed the San Antonio Four by contemporaneous press accounts, are the subject of a new documentary premiering at the Tribeca film festival on Friday called Southwest of Salem, which chronicles the “junk science” and hysteria they say led to their conviction. Another woman accused of “ritual” sex abuse, Kelly Michaels, also spoke at the event.

Vasquez and her co-defendants, Cassandra Rivera, Kristie Mayhugh and Elizabeth Ramirez, were accused of gang-raping Ramirez’s nieces, seven and nine years old at the time they accused the women. The girls’ accusations changed as they retold the stories to authorities, but revolved around the women threatening the girls and inserting objects into them.

Expert witnesses at the time testified that the ordeal appeared “satanic related”. The local prosecutor in Ramirez’s case, which was held separately from the three other women, alluded to one of the girls as a “sacrificial lamb” and an “angel”, and made frequent reference to Ramirez’s sexuality, according to a San Antonio Express-News investigation that shed new light on the case in 2010.

Vasquez said that during their trial, defense attorneys asked the women to wear dresses, put on makeup and style their hair to look more feminine.

Decades after the San Antonio Four were convicted, advocates and attorneys secured the release of three of the women – Vasquez had already been paroled – through Texas’s “junk science” statute, which allows for appeals on the basis of science that has since been debunked.

The state’s highest court, the Texas court of criminal appeals, is still considering whether to declare the women “innocent”, a legal distinction particular to the state that would entitle the women to claim compensation for wrongful imprisonment. But because the charges have not been officially vacated, the women remain in legal limbo, still facing the possibility of a new, though unlikely, trial.

Mike Ware, executive director of the Innocence Project of Texas, who represented the women accused in the San Antonio case, said he considered the charges “preposterous” even when he began working on the case.

“It sort of gave [law enforcement] what they needed – ‘they’re gay, the other, who knows what they’re up to’,” said Ware.

While the court considers the case three of the women remain out on bond. Even their trip to New York City for the premiere of Southwest of Salem had to be approved by courts.

The case of the San Antonio Four, however, was far from the only one that relied on conflicting testimony and rumors of homosexuality during a trial. Kelly Michaels was a 23-year-old woman in a sexual relationship with with her roommate, with whom she shared a bed, when she was accused of “ritual” sex abuse at a Maplewood, New Jersey, daycare center in 1985. She was convicted of 115 counts of sexual abuse of 20 children just three years later. She spent five years in prison before her release.

She was released upon appeal, after New Jersey courts found investigators asked leading questions of the children, who were as young as three. Prosecutors in Michaels’ case relied almost exclusively on the testimony of children to convict her.

“It’s inexplicable, impossible to describe,” Michaels said. “You don’t think it could happen to you.”

Debbie Nathan, a journalist who has worked extensively on cases involving allegations of satanic rituals, said the trials followed well-worn tropes. There were often “obsessive conversations about whether this person is gay”, said Nathan, who first questioned Michaels’ conviction in a front-page story for the New York City alt-weekly the Village Voice, in 1988.

In many cases, whispers would circulate towns during trials. “Gossip and rumor – how could they have done this? They must have been lesbians,” said Nathan. “There’s a lot of attention pay to sexual minorities when they’re victims … but if they’re accused” they are largely ignored, she said.