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The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-689

1527-1900

Martin Nesvig,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

This essay is both a historiographical review of male homosexuality in Latin America and a historical synthesis of the intellectual and cultural traditions of attitudes, mores, and laws regarding homosexuality.1 The topic of male homosexuality is a powerful lens through which historians can address and problematize the dilemmas of reconstructing the social past.2 Taken originally as a corrective against overly diplomatic and political history, the new social history of the 1970s still bears crucially on the subject of homosexuality because the available scholarship still struggles with the basic issues of reconstruction.The history of homosexuality bears centrally on the nature of sexual relations, reproduction, marriage, and family, all central components of social values. Unfortunately, the scarcity of extant sources and the nascent quality of its historiography render the study of homosexuality in Latin America difficult. Scholars of this subject wrestle quite consciously over the dilemma of "realistic reconstruction" of action as opposed to the study of collective representations. The lack of narratives by gay men, the issues of "filtration" of sources through those who wrote about the "objects" of crime and sin, and the overall scarcity of material contribute to this dilemma. As a result, the use of espistemology as a framework retains strong allure for many scholars working on Latin American homosexuality. Precisely because there is scant documentation of the actual social behavior and cultural worlds of homosexuals in Latin America, scholars have understandably been drawn to theoretical models of gender and sexuality.Two concerns are woven together into a strand of social, cultural, and intellectual history; in other words, homosexuality conjures the dilemma between behavior and proscription. On the one hand, there exist intellectual and cultural traditions of attitudes, mores, and laws regarding homosexuality. Taken in their broadest terms, Michel Vovelle defines this territory as both ideology and mentality. In this model, ideology represents the more formalized discussions that bear on a particular subject. Consequently, law, theology, military sanction, governmental policy, and propaganda constitute ideology. Mentalities are less definable, more fluid, and, as the famous annaliste historian Marc Bloch understood them, derive from collective representations.3 For our purposes here, mentality concerning homosexuality includes popular attitudes, social customs, response to Church teachings, reaction to law, as well as the beliefs, customs, and concerns of homosexual and bisexual men.This essay is divided into several sections because the scholarship is fragmented along geographical and epochal boundaries: section 1 focuses on the Spanish colonial period, drawing on Mexican and Iberian theological and legal traditions to provide a fuller understanding of colonial attitudes toward homosexuality; section 2 offers a critical overview of the historiography of colonial Brazil; the third section is a speculative discussion of the period from roughly 1700 to 1870, a period marked by a near-complete absence of historiographic attention for the subject under review. Studies of the so-called period of modernization that followed showcase a growing body of scholarship on homo sexuality. For the most part, such work tends to show how attitudes toward homosexuality gained a positivist and psychiatric distinction. The essay concludes with a discussion of the works of anthropologists and sociologists, from 1940 to 2000.The long-cherished assumptions of patriarchy and male-dominated sexuality have guided the historiography of homosexuality in Latin America. Two theoretical models inform this classification. First, the honor-shame paradigm of Latin American and Mediterranean society suggests that sexuality is a key component of the system of honor and shame. A classic formulation of this paradigm is Julian Pitt-Rivers's discussion of the sexual honor in the Mediterranean. Pitt-Rivers argues that penetration is the overriding metaphor for such honor; thus before marriage, a woman needed to be a virgin in order to protect her honor and man should not have been sexually penetrated.4 Numerous Latin Americanists who specialize in gender studies have shown that this system is indeed endemic to domestic and marital culture,5 but the problem for the subject of homosexuality is that sexual metaphors and the honor-shame model do not always map neatly onto male-male sexual interaction. The result is that numerous scholars have taken the male-female honor-shame paradigm as a strict corollary for the active-"male"-penetrator and passive-"female"-penetrated axis of male-male sexual encounters.The second model on which numerous scholars rely for theoretical guidance is the infamous hijos de la chingada mythology proffered by Octavio Paz. Nearly half a century has passed since he penned the much-debated essays that comprise El laberinto de la soledad, suggesting mentalities and universal characteristics of mexicanismo. His propositions about the essential nature of Mexican sexual identity have cast a tremendous shadow over the historiography and ethnography of Mexican and Latin American sexuality.6 In "Los hijos de la Malinche," he argues that the immutable characteristic both of Mexican sexuality and genealogical identity is bastardhood. According to Paz, Malinche forsook "her people" to Cortés and the Spaniards, leaving the Mexican mestizos to fend for themselves. Thus Malinche became the "violated mother" (la chingada) who abandoned her offspring. According to this logic, to offer oneself passively (via intercourse) is akin to defeat and degradation; the sexually active partner is the victor.7 Extending the metaphor of sexual penetration for conquest and domination, Paz contends that homosexuality in Mexico operates according to a system in which the passive partners are denounced and the active partners are "tolerated" insofar as they satisfy their male nature through the penetration of a passive body.8 Anthropologists have described such a "system" of homosexual behavior as the "Latino Mediterranean" or "gender-stratification."9 The female is associated with passivity, disenfranchisement, reception, and helplessness; the male is associated with agency, power, penetration, and dominance. Furthermore, because this system operates in cultures that place a premium on masculine honor, to take the passive role and "become female" is to lose one's male honor.10These models assume that Latin American homosexuality is based on a rigid male-female, active-passive, dominant-submissive dichotomy. Thus many scholars assume that the ideology of masculine cultural and sexual control over women means that the functional definitions of homosexuality offer corollaries. The insertive, active partner is rendered "male," and the receptive, penetrated partner is considered to be subservient and plays the role of the "female." This essay will show that there is deeply imbedded in the sexual ideology of Latin America the theory that male means dominance and control and female means submission. By the same token, it will also demonstrate that this does not mean, as many scholars claim, that the "male" homosexual partner was somehow freed from legal condemnation and social stigmatization.11In 1543 the first bishop of Mexico, the Franciscan Juan de Zumárraga, penned and printed his Doctrina breve muy provechosa, intended as a primer on Catholic orthodoxy for literate Indians, priests, and lay colonists.12 In this doctrine, he wrote that "nothing fouls or destroys the heart of man as much as the desires and fantasy of carnality."13 So perfidious was lust that Zumárraga considered it to be one of the chief enemies of salvation and one of the most dangerous of the seven deadly sins. At that time, lujuria (lust) was a sin that violated the Sixth Commandment. Lujuria literally meant luxury, but was also used to refer to excessive desire, effeminacy, or lust. Zumárraga echoed the influential Cardinal Cajetan (known best in his role as the Papal nuncio sent to convince Luther to recant), who offered some of the most representative and critical discussions of lust, sexual morality, and sodomy for his audience of parish priests and confessors.14 To early modern Catholic theologians, the Sixth Commandment prohibited several "species" of lujuria in increasing severity: fornication, adultery, lust between married persons, stupro (deflowering a virgin or rape), incest, sacrilege (sex with a priest), and the pecado contra natura.15 Taking lujuria to be manifold in its forms, Zumárraga's Doctrina placed the pecado contra natura at the apex of this sin, identifying three types of sodomy: male-female, male-male, and female-female.16Recto vaso, recta positione—"in the proper vessel and in the proper position"—was the Latin theological phrase that expressed the prohibition: legitimate intercourse had to involve the man on top of the woman, penetrating the vagina. If Zumárraga condemned pecado contra natura in no uncertain terms, what did he mean by it? Sodomy (sodomia) was by this time synonymous with the sin against nature, both of which were understood as male homosexuality. His explanation of this act was quite graphic: "Sodomy is a very abominable placing of the virile member in the dirtiest and ugliest part of the body of the person who receives the man; that part is delegated for the expulsion of feces."17 It would appear from this definition that the act of a man having anal intercourse with his wife would be as damnable as that of two men engaging in intercourse, but Zumárraga concluded that the male-female form of sodomy was less sinful than sodomy between two males.18Zumárraga's discussion of sodomy had deep roots in medieval scholasticism. John Boswell addressed this subject and, indeed, he was one of the first historians of homosexuality for our modern period, tracing the changes in official proscriptions of homosexuality in the medieval period.19 In like fashion, Mark Jordan focuses on some of the more familiar medieval texts concerning homosexuality as well as contributes discussion of lesser-known works in a recent book, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology.20 As Boswell and Jordan demonstrate, definitions of sodomy as male homosexuality began to solidify in the middle medieval period, and it was understood to be the worst type of lust. In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas, the great synthesizer, defined sodomy as a violation of natural, canon, civil, and scriptural laws.21 Aquinas's definition was new because he included natural law arguments to buttress theological and canonical discussions of sodomy. Such underpinnings are not superfluous for our understanding of Latin American homosexuality. Indeed, all official teachings on homosexuality for Latin America, at least until the eighteenth century, relied on medieval schoolmen. Aristotelian metaphysics lay at the heart of the natural law condemnation of sodomy, concluding that semen had one purpose—the fulfillment of natural coitus, with the end being conception. Therefore, acts that could never produce conception automatically violated nature.22The great legal historian Francisco Tomás y Valiente traces the early modern Iberian conceptualization of sodomy to the "second Spanish scholasticism," with Aquinas ruling supreme.23 Man was understood as a collaborator with God in the creation of a new human being, in the sense that the man created a new being from nothing, just as God created Adam from mud. The understanding of sodomy, or homosexuality, was based on the violation of this collaboration, since it was not possible to procreate with two men sexually interacting.24 As late as 1665, Juan de Enríquez wrote a treatise on this subject entitled Cuestiones prácticas de casos morales in which the discussion of the hierarchy of lujuria was virtually unchanged from that of Zumárraga's and other early modern conceptions.25Theological and legal documents from the colonial period reveal how sodomy was perceived. A recent study by Federico Garza Carvajal provides English.26 Despite these discussions, there is some confusion as to whether sodomy fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition or the civil courts.27 Scholars of the Inquisition generally pay little attention to this subject unless they specifically center their research on it. Nonetheless, the consensus is that the Mexican and Spanish Inquisitions prosecuted people for sodomy.28 For example, Mexico's Inquisition prosecuted a sodomite as early as 1542, presumably by Zumárraga, but this case is only preserved with its cover sheet and we know nothing about it except that it involved some sailors.29 The question of civil law is uncertain, and a recent study of urban crime in Mexico City by Gabriel Haslip-Vieira sheds no light on sodomy vis-à-vis civil law.30 For Peru, we have some peripheral scholarship on extirpation that suggests that Spanish priests were horrified by sodomy committed by Indians, but such discussion never goes very far.31The problem with jurisdiction is that in many instances local municipal fueros demanded juridical autonomy for a variety of issues, including sodomy. In early modern Castile, derecho real generally dealt with sodomy.32 Even the Inquisition was not clear on its role in these crimes and was usually more concerned with heretical beliefs, such as the belief that fornication or sodomy was not a sin, than the act itself.33In theory, Iberian law codes provided guidance for colonial alcaldes, corregidores, and oidores. But it is likely that many of these magistrates, excepting perhaps the audiencia judges, had not read the codes, and further, they might not have possessed copies of the codes.34 Secondly, the existence of a law code did not mean that it was effective. We know that multiple forms of sexual deviance proliferated in the colonies, so we must be cautious in using codes. Some argue that the mere presence of a prohibition indicates the behavior. This seems intuitive, but we must also remember that the fear and horror of sodomy often may have been enough to proscribe it in law codes, regardless of whether or not it was common.Definitions of sodomy in Spanish law began in earnest in the thirteenth century. Title 21 of the seventh Partida condemned sodomy as a crime, relying on the biblical reference to Sodom and Gomorrah as a template for this understanding.35 Thus sodomy was legally understood to cause plagues, famines, and disasters. To remove the offense to the community and stave off or end the various ills that the sin of sodomy caused, the appropriate punishment for this crime was death.36 In addition to this Partida, the Fuero real promulgated by Alfonso X condemned sodomy in no uncertain terms. In fact, where the seventh Partida was silent on the method of execution of sodomites, the Fuero real detailed it rather gruesomely, recommending castration and execution.37 Both Boswell and Tomás y Valiente demonstrate that the concept of sodomy as a crime was rooted in an understanding of it as a sin in biblical and scholastic literature concerning the violation of religious and social order.38 Yet Garza argues that it was not until royal legislation of the late fifteenth century that sodomy began to be persecuted. He links this to a general persecution of heresy and crimes against the Crown that included the increasingly hostile and violent actions against the Jews.39The explanation of sodomy as crime against nature continued in jurisprudence. Jurist Gregorio López furnished the authoritative gloss to the 1555 Salamanca edition of the Siete Partidas.40 Predictably, López considered homosexual sodomy to be the most heinous variety of this crime, and thus ordered the execution of male sodomites.41 Another influential legal glossator to comment on sodomy was Antonio Gómez, who in penning the gloss on the Laws of Toro, defined sodomy as when "someone realizes carnal access that is not oriented to natural coitus and procreation."42 Similarly, Gómez understood homosexual sodomy as the worst variety of the sin against nature, recommending death and the confiscation of property for male sodomites.43 In a twist that many scholars overlook, Gómez reasoned that the penalty was as applicable to both the "agent" (active, insertive partner) and the "patient" (passive, receptive partner).44The distinction between "agent" and "patient" has plagued modern-day scholars on the subject of social stigma and identity of homosexuality. Richard Trexler gives the fullest expression to an ideology of sexual power in his aptly titled work Sex and Conquest. In this controversial study, he asserts that constructions of homosexuality in Latin America cannot be separated from conquest and violence. According to Trexler, the dual traditions of Iberia and Mesoamerica fused to create a homosexual order that places the active partner in a position of power and the passive person in one of degradation. He avers that in the Iberian tradition of sexual conquest and the Mesoamerican tradition of using berdaches ("men-women") as sexual outlets because penetration was synonymous with domination. Therefore, this logic attests that the "agent" was an hombre macho, a real victor, and to him went the spoils of his conquest, that is, sexual dominance of a passive object. Trexler argues further that because sexual intercourse cannot be disassociated from conquest, the sex (male or female) of the object of penetration is immaterial. Ultimately, he applies a thin veneer of evidence over a vast time period and geographical area, attempting to generalize about the entire colonial Latin American world, from Brazil and Bolivia to New Mexico.45 Unfortunately, Trexler elides the lengthy Spanish tradition and medieval theology that made no legal distinction between active and passive partners. Additionally problematic is that Trexler seems more bent on establishing the "inherent" connection between intercourse and rape than on examining the evidence.46A host of anthropologists and some historians insist that because Iberian cultures place such a premium on machismo, taking the passive role in homosexual intercourse is much more socially damning than to take the "male" role. Yet in Spanish legal commentaries, when there was any distinction between the roles, it was only to say that both partners were punishable. Furthermore, if the passive partner was significantly younger than the active partner, he might be considered a victim of rape and therefore less guilty of sodomy. In fact, the Setena Partida reasoned that a male under the age of 14 or who had been raped could not be guilty of sodomy as a matter of law.47We seem to know a lot about official law and theology on the question of sodomy for the colonial Spanish Americas; however, there is virtually no data to show how such laws were implemented. Garza demonstrates that persecution of sodomy increased in the sixteenth century and, like the persecution of other offenses, was often associated with foreignness.48 Tomás y Valiente suggests the same by illustrating that sailors were one of the most frequent targets of inquisitorial activity against sodomy.49 Thus the nexus between the invasion of "foreign vices" and fear of sodomy was conflated.The exigencies of archival preservation further complicate the problem of attempting to understand how law dealt with sodomy in this period. During the riot of 1692 in Mexico City, when hundreds of people reacted against grain shortages, the viceregal palace was burned to the ground.50 Along with the palace went the civil court archives and with them our possible key to understanding the nature, extent, and treatment of male homosexuality in Mexico before 1692.51 The civil authorities prosecuted sodomy in Mexico and presumably in other colonies such as Peru, but our knowledge is hamstrung by lack of documentation. For example, in 1658 a huge scandal broke out in Puebla and Mexico City in which over 120 alleged sodomites were arrested and interrogated. The only apparent record of this sensational event, in which 14 young men were roasted alive on 4 November 1658, are brief letters from the viceroy, the duke of Albuquerque, and Juan Manuel de Sotomayor, the alcalde del crimen (prosecutor).52 Both Serge Gruzinski and Garza draw on this correspondence to reconstruct the social world of these men and to address issues of sodomy in midcolonial Spanish America.53 Their essays are noteworthy for several reasons. First, they show that men were using adolescent boys as sexual outlets. Second, they lend weight to the hypothesis that homosexuality was largely an urban phenomenon in the early modern period. Puebla and Mexico City were important cities in the 1660s. Unfortunately, this hypothesis runs into many counterfactual problems, since there is very little data on rural sodomy for this period.One of the complications of Gruzinski's and Garza's essays is typical of scholarship for this period. Since we do not have the original trial transcripts, it is difficult to know exactly what transpired in this case. Nevertheless, these two essays show that civil authorities reviled sodomy for the same reasons as the theologians: homosexuality was a crime against nature, God, and the Crown. Furthermore, homosexuality was identified as effeminizing, regardless of the role one took in sexual intercourse. Interestingly, though, the case shows that active partners identified their passive partners as their "female" lovers. It seems that from the viceroy's account that active partners gave as nicknames the names of notorious whores and beauties to their passive partners. Furthermore, it appears that this case involved a fairly sophisticated and cohesive sodomitical subculture of a "secret" group with coded slang and behaviors.As for the social history of homosexuality in the colonial period, there is scant scholarly investigation, with a scattering of essays like those by Gruzinski and Garza. In an article concerning the Aztec construction of homosexuality, Geoffrey Kimball uncovers some documents that indicate that the passive role in homosexual intercourse was reserved for special opprobrium for the abnegation of masculinity. Kimball's sample, however, is very small and does not necessarily provide a complete portrait of Aztec sexual values. Still, he mentions briefly the development concerning sexual passivity as the equivalent of losing male honor. Kimball's essay is an important beginning for some discussion of the earliest forms of homosexuality in Spanish America.54In an essay on colonial Yucatecan Maya, Pete Sigal evinces considerable sophistication in his treatment of the "politicization of pederasty." He examines Mayan histories in this time period to show how homosexual intercourse took on political, social, and ritual significance. Thus Sigal is interested in understanding how homosexually charged dialogue in ritual persisted despite Spanish prohibitions to the contrary.55 Homosexual desire among the colonial Yucatecan Maya was politicized to the extent that older men employed intercourse with younger men as a way of demonstrating their status and prestige. This was seen as more or less acceptable, as long as it was understood that it held ritual and age-specific meaning. In due course, older men penetrated younger men, assuming a teacher's role and imparting a patron-client relationship between an older active-partner man and a younger passive-partner adolescent boy. This type of pederasty also rested on the assumption that it was unacceptable for an older man to be penetrated.56 Sigal uses indigenous-language sources to examine the question of pederasty in Mexico, opening an entirely new area of study that has been ignored by previous historians.57Two works from Spain offer potential cues for future research. First, Rafael Carrasco produced the only monograph dedicated entirely to the question of sodomy and the Inquisition for Spain or Spanish America. He shows that, despite jurisdictional disputes, the Holy Office of Valencia was remarkably vigorous in prosecuting sodomy, recording the cases of hundreds of men and boys prosecuted for this offense.58 Carrasco provides some important conclusions that may bear on Spanish America, although archival research can only confirm them. Like Gruzinski, Carrasco suggests that sodomy was largely an urban phenomenon. He reasons so because cities had better opportunities for clandestine meetings and offered greater anonymity in sexual partnering. Secondly, Carrasco argues for what anthropologist Stephen Murray has called the "age-stratified" system of homosexuality. This system is what we recognize from ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, or in the Mayan Yucatán.59 In such a system, an older man takes the active role with a younger man who always plays the passive role. In due course, the young men "initiated" into such a system or subculture would take the active/male role with younger men once they attained adulthood.60Pedro Herrera Puga's study Sociedad y delincuencia en el Siglo de Oro offers a broad survey of crime, deviance, and punitive measures in Seville in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He dedicates an entire chapter to the pecado contra natura, and, like Carrasco, strives to make sense of the social world of homosexuality, demonstrating that sodomy was not only private but also quite public. For example, certain streets and sections of town were notorious for homosexual encounters and liaisons that were consummated in public or private rooms. According to Herrera Puga, such a homosexual culture was more than a shadowy undercurrent; sodomy was an obvious, if deviant and socially unacceptable, component of Seville's urban landscape in the seventeenth century.61The question of sources rises again as Herrera Puga's analysis is based solely on the account of one religious chronicler. While this should not rule out its importance ipso facto, it raises some questions: Did the chronicler not see sodomy everywhere when it was, in fact, quite limited? Were his depictions of local spots to encounter other sodomites accurate? Does his relación depict the true visage of the culture of homosexuality in this period?62 Despite such queries, his important work suggests, like Carrasco's and Gruzinski's, that sodomy was rendered more accessible and acceptable by urban environments in which sodomites could seek out a specific, if marginalized, niche in the city's streets.Ultimately, the relative lack of understanding of the social world of homosexuality and the practice of homosexuality for the period from roughly 1500 to 1700 is severely limited and circumscribed by the scant data gleaned here from a small body of scholarship. Based on elite and official sources, it would be reasonable to conclude that sodomy was considered to be the most heinous offense to God, Crown, and society. Likewise, there was a distinction between the active and passive partners. This seems to have been largely a functional distinction; in fact, the active partner was perceived to be more guilty from the point of view of natural law and Aristotelian metaphysics. Consequently, there is nothing to suggest Trexler's sexual conquest model, nor is there any evidence so far to prove that passive partners were especially denigrated. Indeed, Trexler seems to conveniently ignore the theological understanding that lujuria was always considered effeminizing.63 This, however, implies a potential misfire between theology and social practice, but even from the point of view of practice Trexler marshals no convincing evidence on this issue of active-passive partner dynamics.Finally, abundant data on other subjects suggests that colonists and Indians were less than cooperative in obeying official dicta concerning sexual mores. Works by Solange Alberro, Richard Boyer, Ruth Behar, Asunción Lavrin, and numerous others demonstrate that illicit, unacceptable, and stig-matized sexual behavior was quite common.64 Cohabitation, sexual magic, adultery, bigamy, and fornication were vigorously attacked in what appear to have been ineffectual measures. For example, the Church made a tactical retreat and ended prosecuting fornication itself and instead prosecuted the belief that fornication was not a sin.65 Numerous accounts by religious men complained of the lax sexual mores of Indians, castas, and Spanish colonists. Sodomy was a common complaint, and it does not seem impossible to imagine that homosexuality occurred with regularity, if only under circumscribed parameters.Outlining some of the basic facets of the early modern Hispanic conceptions of sodomy may seem unnecessary, but many of these earliest conceptions persist well into the modern period. Aristotelian ideas of gender, theological conceptions of sodomy as community sin, and legal distinctions that conceived of sodomy as a violation of social order all made for powerful traditions that went virtually unchanged into the twentieth century in Latin America. For these reasons the colonial past formed a solid foundation on which future mores and ideologies would draw.While the scholarship and available sources uncovered so far on the Spanish Americas are disparate and possess no coherent critical mass, the work on Brazil is more focused and finely tuned. This may be the result of better documentation. The files of the Mexican Inquisition are incomplete and scarce on the subject of sodomy, but those of Pernambuco and Lisbon are extensive.66 In 1968 historian José da Costa Pôrto wrote Nos tempos do visitador, a study of Pernambuco during the first visit of the Holy Office of the Portuguese Inquisition at the end of the sixteenth century. Pôrto employed testimonies from the Inquisition along with travel reports, correspondence, and written accounts