Do a 3 page paper on the reading attached giving the main points the author wants to give the readers.
116 chaPter 6 From Fags to Gays Political Adaptations and Cultural Translations in the Mexican Gay Liberation Movement Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba In a text commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of Lesbian-Gay Culture Week (June 2001), Carlos Monsiváis offers a lexical distinction that seems use-ful for understanding the transformation that Mexican sexual culture has ex- perienced since the introduction of the concept of “gayness” (lo gay) along with gay politics and lifestyle: “Gay is not a synonym of ‘homosexual, maricón, puto, torti- llera, invertido, sodomita,’ but rather a word which names attitudes, organizations, and behaviors that were unknown until recently. In the same way, desclosetarse or coming out of the closet used to be an action tied to shamelessness and the cyni- cism of those who had nothing to lose, but is now an act which proclaims the le- gitimacy of difference” (9).1 Gayness marks a watershed in Mexican sexual culture. It is a concept that is not synonymous with tortillera, maricón, puto o invertido, although it refers to those very same concepts.2 The semantic precision proposed by Monsiváis focuses on the politics of slander, which contrasts the pre-gay termi- nology (produced in the context of traditional homophobia) with the vindicating concept of gayness: tied to happiness, pride, community, and the declaration of legitimacy and difference. From this angle, the introduction of the word “gay” to the Mexican lexicon underlines the creation of a space of liberation, the designa- tion of a legitimate social identity—in sum, the creation of a culture that would embrace subjects previously scorned because of their sexual preference. At the same time, the introduction of this word opens a new chapter in the ongoing debate over North American influence in Mexico, since some criticize the international gay rights movement as cultural colonization. In this chapter, I address the impli- cations of the introduction of gay politics and culture in Mexico, emphasizing the contradictions in the Mexican gay movement, the politics of coming out of the closet and its socioeconomic and cultural effects, and the resignification of pre-gay categories in the era of globalization. The Mexican gay liberation movement was founded in 1971 (two years after the Stonewall riots) on the liberating precepts produced in North American gay poli- Co py ri gh t @ 20 09 . Va nd er bi lt U ni ve rs it y Pr es s. Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or a pp li ca bl e co py ri gh t la w. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 7/22/2018 3:50 PM via UNIV OF TEXAS AT EL PASO AN: 305558 ; Long, Mary K., Egan, Linda.; Mexico Reading the United States Account: s4252121.main.ehost Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba 117 tics.3 Nevertheless, civil inclusion and self-identification had already manifested in Mexico before that milestone. The history of antihomophobic resistance in Mexico should be traced back to the group of artists and writers gathered around the magazine Los Contemporáneos in the 1920s and 1930s, specifically in certain poetry by Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia and artwork by Abraham Ángel, Roberto Montenegro, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, and Augustín Lazo. Attentive to the homophilic—that is to say, not homophobic—works produced in Europe dur- ing that era, these first attempts at dignifying the image of homosexuality and ac- companying lifestyle inform us of the process that the politics of gender will follow in Mexico from that time on. Since these homophilic ideas were imported from imperialist nations (for example, Novo and Villaurrutia translated French homo- sexual authors such as André Gide), they had to carry the weight of a colonialist political label that threatened national identity. In 1925 and 1932, the newspapers of Mexico City published several vehemently critical articles that harshly equated the effeminacy of men of letters with the corruption of nationality. These arguments provoked a strong defense of the universalist culture represented by the Los Con- temporáneos group in which criticism of nationalist virility suggests an anti homo- phobic politics. Nevertheless, this antihomophobic position was not completely free of pathological definitions of homosexuality. Robert M. Irwin notes there is a “freudianization” of the country in the beginning of the twentieth century (32). Psychoanalysis allows the homosexual subject to know himself as such, that is, to know himself through a pathological definition of self. If in the postrevolutionary period this affirmative homosexuality, although “unhealthy,” awakened issues re- lated to nationalism and cultural dependence, in the 1970s the specter of Stonewall as the founding saga of the international gay movement will inevitably also bear a colonialist hue that must be examined. The appearance of gayness on the Mexican cultural horizon is part of a larger history of influences and translations of North American processes and as such is marked by a mixture of acceptance and resistance, as is the case with many of the ideas and fashions emanating from the United States. Among these, perhaps the gay rights movement faces the greatest obstacles to being admitted into Mexican culture, mainly because homosexuality is considered a threat to national identity by the most emphatic spokespersons of the postrevolutionary period.4 Throughout Mexican history, homosexuality has been an other which through its exclusion defines national identity. Gay culture thus would be part of the Americanization that has threatened Mexicanness since the nineteenth century. This contradiction is essential to understanding the context of the terms Monsiváis contrasts: Gayness liberates us from Mexican homophobic culture, which has been especially scathing because of the need to define national profiles through exclusion. In this context, Mexican societal foundations were built upon slander, which now implies that the consolidation of gay culture will dismantle the bases of homophobia and force revision of nationalist discourses. Gender connotations are central to collective cul- Co py ri gh t @ 20 09 . Va nd er bi lt U ni ve rs it y Pr es s. Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us es p er mi tt ed u nd er U .S . or a pp li ca bl e co py ri gh t la w. EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 7/22/2018 3:50 PM via UNIV OF TEXAS AT EL PASO AN: 305558 ; Long, Mary K., Egan, Linda.; Mexico Reading the United States Account: s4252121.main.ehost 118 MEXICO READING THE UNITED STATES tural definitions in the majority of genres that represent nationalist concepts (the novel of the Mexican Revolution, ranchera films, corridos, etc.). In these, the virile figure is privileged as the model of Mexicanness. The confrontation of national homophobia with Americanizing liberation— that is, the beginning of the Mexican gay liberation movement—marks a profound shift in the political coordinates in which nationalist politics must give way to those of civil rights. Is it possible, then, to speak of a Mexican gay rights move- ment that differs from the North American movement? Is the gay liberation move- ment really more than a symptom of Americanization? Must it in fact necessarily be seen as an effect of globalizing politics, as various authors have suggested (Cruz- Malavé, Hawley, Altman)? Given the drastic cultural and historical differences be- tween Mexico and the United States, how can we speak of similar conditions in the rise and development of the gay liberation movements in both countries? These questions help us to consider the Mexican gay rights movement as more than an emulation of its North American counterpart. It is a complex of adaptations and new meanings that tie the Mexican phenomenon to the international gay rights movement (which arose in the United States and was propagated as a necessity and a way of life throughout the planet), while at the same time it is responsible for the politics of the battle for sexual liberation in the face of Mexico’s own unique problems. These adaptations and new meanings inscribe the Mexican gay libera- tion movement within the postcolonial processes of appropriation and redirection of metropolitan models. North American and Mexican Gay Activism: Recurring Asymmetries Since the struggles for independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century, lessons from North American history have been put to the test in Mexican political experiments. Beginning in that period, Mexican liberals closely followed the intel- lectual proposals of their northern neighbor, and they transplanted laws, proto- cols, and consignments that they judged necessary for the modernization of the country. Continuing this attentive reading of political proposals and movements in North America, the gay liberation movement arrives as part of an emancipat- ing boom along with sexual freedom, pacifism, rock and roll, and fascination with psychotropic drugs. Reading the North American gay movement is, then, a lesson of moderniza- tion involving politics and lifestyle. As we can find in different instances through- out this volume, a number of U.S. cultural elements incorporated into society teach Mexico about modernity. Antonio Marquet, a gay Mexican public intellec- tual and academic, when examining the lessons learned from the North American gay rights movement, underlines the act of coming out of the closet as a political phenomenon that has opened up spaces for gay society. Two questions Marquet Co py ri gh t @ 20 09 . Va nd er bi lt U ni ve rs it y Pr es s. Al l ri gh ts r es er ve d. M ay n ot b e re pr od uc ed i n an y fo rm w it ho ut p er mi ss io n fr om t he p ub li sh er , ex ce pt f ai r us