The Maricon
Patrick Oster
"The Mexicans. A personal portrait of a people"
2002
ISBN 0060011300

From what little he remembers of it, Juan Jacobo Hernández's childhood was quite normal. Until the age of six, he lived in Leon in the state of Guanajuato. His memories are mostly gauzy images of playing with his brothers, sisters, and friends-except for one bizarre incident. At age four, he was sitting one day in a playpen with a number of his friends. As young boys will do, they began to examine and play with each other's genitals. Some adults discovered them and became very upset. The adults told the boys that such things were not nice and certainly nothing to be done in public. At the time, Juan Jacobo didn't understand what he had done wrong. Eleven years later, he would discover why the adults had been so upset.

In 1948, Juan Jacobo's family moved to Mexico City. He began school and studied a lot, encouraged by his mother and father, who had above-average educations. He made friends easily and quickly became one of the gang. When he turned fifteen, however, his world changed completely. He doesn't remember what triggered the realization. But in that sixteenth year of life it dawned on him that all of his friends were boys. He had no girlfriends, and no desire to have any. He realized he was a homosexual.

Juan Jacobo's parents probably suspected something. But, like most Mexican parents, they said nothing. Juan Jacobo didn't say much either. Mexico is the land of machismo. Being gay not only rejects the most important cultural value pounded into little boys, it can also be downright dangerous.

In 1964, at age twenty-two, Juan Jacobo finally did tell his parents and his seven brothers and sisters that he was gay. His father, now a retired electronics technician, said nothing. He still refuses to talk with Juan Jacobo about anything. His mother, a retired secretary, talks with him but has never really understood, as she might put it, what went wrong. His brothers and sisters are split. Some ask him about gay life, though only sparingly. The others, mortified at what their friends think about Juan Jacobo, can barely keep up the small talk when he enters the room.

Since his admission to his family, Juan Jacobo has come to grips with his sexual preference. He gives every sign of enjoying life immensely, despite the hostility one can find toward gays in Mexico. In the mid-1960s, he went bisexual for a while. He
had a torrid affair with a woman who seemed intent on saving him from himself. But Juan Jacobo has no inner doubts about what he is now. He is gay, pure and simple. He regards his past liaisons with women as fanciful flings, departures from real life.

Juan Jacobo might have remained a closet gay whose secret life was known only to his immediate families and his lovers. But Mexico, like many nations, went through radical times beginning in 1968, the year Mexico City hosted the Summer Olympics. Student protests and deaths in the streets started a lot of people thinking about their rights. Mexican gays were no exception. Many of them, bitter with the taste of government repression, fled Mexico for a while. Others bolted in 1971, when more were killed in Mexico City's streets during antigovernment protests. In the United States and Europe, young men such as Juan Jacobo picked up ideas of gay liberation. They picked up audacity, too.

Imbued with this new courage, Juan Jacobo came out of the closet in 1972. He surprised quite a few of his friends, not to mention his superiors at the Catholic boys' school where he was teaching. There had never been any real trouble at school because of Juan Jacobo's sexual preference. Nonetheless, after he went public with his gayness, he moved on. He speaks French and English in addition to Spanish. He used his language skills to earn money as a translator for a while. But the theater was his real passion. He acted in a lot of experimental plays. Eventually, he wound up teaching theater analysis and English at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a bastion of left-wing thought where he had received a bachelor's degree in French letters some years earlier.

When I met Juan Jacobo in June of 1987, he was on sabbatical from UNAM to work as an editor of Macho Tips, Mexico's only regularly published gay magazine. The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) scare had reached Mexico. Gays and left-wing parties were marching in the streets to demand that the government do something about the plague of the twentieth century. Juan Jacobo, whose magazine was publishing graphic, how-to articles on safe sex, was among the march leaders. I sought him out.

At the time, the United States had 40,000 confirmed cases of AIDS. Mexico had only 500. There was some finger-pointing in Mexico, as there had been in the United States. But the target was not the Mexican gay community. Not burdened by puritanical tradition, no Mexicans declared that God was punishing Mexican gays for their perversions. The farthest some government officials would go was to argue that Mexican cases of AIDS were mostly the fault of gay Americans or Europeans who had transmitted the disease to unsuspecting Mexicans. More than wrath, there was fear. Health treatment and basic hygiene are substandard in Mexico. Government officials were scared they might have an AIDS epidemic on their hands. They were so frightened that they began dealing with the gay community as they would with any other important sector of Mexican society-with respect. They seemed to realize that more gays had AIDS than any other population group. More were going to die of it. Therefore the cooperation of gays was vital to blunting the spread of the disease. What was fascinating about this was that under normal conditions, the government, like most of the Mexican people, would never have admitted that homosexuality even existed in Mexico. Gays had always been non-persons. But AIDS had forced the government not only to let homosexuals march in the streets. The controlled Mexican press was told it was all right to write about it. Mexicans were not being allowed anymore to pretend that gays did not exist.

The policy was a two-edged sword. Gays did pitch in to help the Mexican Health Ministry get its anti-AIDS campaign under way. There was no sniggering or displays of discomfort as health officials met with leaders of the gay community to plot strategy. An AIDS information center was opened in the summer of 1987. The government ran ads in most newspapers to let people know that AIDS could not be transmitted casually. In no-nonsense terms, the ads explained what AIDS was and was not, and how to avoid it. The government provided free testing for AIDS under conditions of strict confidentiality. The unexpected kicker in all this was that many Mexican gays found they liked the new openness about their existence. In what seemed a pivotal social event, they began talking about gay rights with a fervor not seen in more than a decade.

Socially, the new gay overtness was only a toe in the water. One did not see thousands of gays coming out of the closet that year. But the long-felt fear about being exposed as gay began to wither ever so slightly. Gay leaders began to talk, however hesitantly, about a new era of homosexuality in Mexico. They had no illusions that Mexico City would soon become the San Francisco of Mexico, with its own Castro district, political candidates, and gay-pride parades. Mexicans' attitudes against gays were too ingrained for that, they knew. But-ironically, thanks to AlDS- it might be just a little easier to be gay in Mexico. People might be a little more tolerant, some gays began to say. I found that an intriguing prospect for a society that worshiped at the altar of machismo.

One night I announced to my wife that I would be home late because I was going to cruise the gay bars of Mexico City's Zona Rosa. My wife looked a little nonplussed at first. But I quickly told her that I wasn't proclaiming any new sexual preference. I had just arranged with Juan Jacobo to show me around the night-spots that he and his friends frequented. If I was going to understand this profound transformation of Mexican society, I needed to spend some time with Mexican gays.

My classroom was El Taller, a basement-level gay disco on Florencia Street in the Zona Rosa, the capital's center of good restaurants and fine shopping. My teachers were Juan Jacobo and several of his friends, including an American visitor, Dr. Clark Taylor. From the street, it's easy to walk past El Taller. Its nondescript entrance makes no attempt to invite clients in. People come to E1 Taller because they've been told about it. Juan Jacobo described E1 Taller's decor as "a little butch." Its walls and ceilings were a montage of gears and cogs, industrial pipes, and electrical coils. Most everything was painted red or black. We arrived around seven. The crowd was pretty thin, about fifty young and middle-aged men, casually dressed. It was a weekday. But even if it had been Saturday night, it would have been early for Mexico City, which parties very late. Juan Jacobo had picked this night because Mario Rivas was performing. Mario was Juan Jacobo's lover and had been since 1980.

Mario wasn't going to be on for a while, so Juan Jacobo, Dr. Taylor, another of Juan Jacobo' s friends, named Andre del Valle, and I began to talk about how gay life in Mexico was different from elsewhere. Dr. Taylor, who has written extensively on homosexual life in Mexico, said there were some things that foreigners would notice right away. For example, stylish clothes aren't as important, nor are fantasy costumes. Some American gays are fond of playing roles when they go out at night to meet other gays, Taylor noted. They dress in motorcycle leathers. Those who are hustlers play the Midnight Cowboy. Mexicans don't dress this way at all, Taylor said. There are padrotes, or hustlers. But most can't afford cowboy gear. Even if Mexican gays could afford a costume, he said, they wouldn't get all rigged out in leather. In Mexico there is no leather cult, an idea spawned in Northern Europe.

"Here it's more common to be yourself," said Juan Jacobo. "You wear the clothes you have."

American gays' preoccupation with looking tan, muscled, and youthful also doesn't exist among Mexico's homosexuals. Most Mexicans are mestizos, of mixed Spanish-lndian origin. They already have dark complexions. Tanning just isn't as important. A well-developed body is appreciated, but again, Taylor said, few people have the money to go to health clubs to work out.

Picking people up is different, too. "The life," as gays call homosexual living, is mostly in the streets. There are no gay community centers and few places other than some secluded bars where gays can meet. Juan Jacobo has met most of his lovers while going from one place to another in Mexico City. Others he has linked up with in public bathhouses, which many straight Mexicans use because so many homes are without bathrooms. Crowded subway cars are another favorite haunt. Juan Jacobo's technique is to give men "the look." It's hard to describe it, he said. He just knows how to give it and what it looks like in return. Mostly it's in the eyes, he said. If he gets a look back, he starts up a conversation to see if there is interest in a cup of coffee and perhaps something more.

The difficulty in meeting people may explain why Mexican gays aren't as particular as American or European homosexuals about looks. They are happy to find anyone. Age, so psychologically important to many gays in the United States, just isn't a very key value in a gay Mexican relationship. Fat gays date handsome gays. Short gays date tall gays. In fact, said Taylor, many middle-aged and older gays come down to Mexico from the United States, knowing they will be better treated than at home.

"What's important here is whether you have money," interjected Juan Jacobo. "If you have money, you can have any lover you want."

Sexual equality of partners is not as widespread in Mexico, either. Influenced by ideas of sexual liberation and equality, American gays have increasingly adopted sexual roles that allow each partner to be the dominant or submissive lover, depending on one's mood. But the old-fashioned gay relationship, derived from male-female roles of the '50s and '60s, prevails in Mexico. One partner is typically the active, or what Dr. Taylor called the inserter in the anal sex that is the purest form of homosexual activity. The other is the pasivo, or insertee. The pasivo, in some cases, adopts the role of a woman so thoroughly that he may wear dresses and makeup and affect extremely effeminate behavior.

Rather bizarrely, persons who act as an inserter in male-male sex acts are not always considered homosexuals in Mexico. "Masculine homosexuality is regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned," writes Mexican poet Octavio Paz. "The passive agent is an abject, degraded being. This ambiguous conception is made very clear in the word games or battles-full of obscene allusions and double meanings-that are so popular in Mexico City. Each of the speakers tries to humiliate his adversary with verbal traps and ingenious linguistic combinations, and the loser is the person who cannot think of a comeback, who has to swallow his opponent's jibes. These jibes are full of aggressive sexual allusions; the loser is possessed, is violated, by the winner, and the spectators laugh and sneer at him. Masculine homosexuality is tolerated, then, on condition that it consists in violating a passive agent. As with heterosexual relationships, the important thing is not to open oneself up and at the same time to break open one's opponent."

Many male prostitutes who consider themselves heterosexual or at most bisexual offer their services to homosexuals as inserters but never as pasivos. They refuse to hug or kiss those homosexuals who hire them. All of this, I was told, stems from the rather complex idea of machismo in Mexico, an attitude that pervades so much human activity in the country.

Foreigners have the mistaken impression that machismo in Mexico has to do with aggressive behavior that is blind to danger. This is not the case. In some Hispanic countries, machismo means doing whatever is necessary to defend one's honor. In Mexico, it has more to do with the fear of betrayal and the ability to suffer pain. Some Mexicans argue that the fear of betrayal and the fragile masculinity that makes Mexicans act so macho stems from the time of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. Conquistadors violated Indian women, some of whom remained with the Spanish soldiers, spurning their own men. The most famous of these was La Malinche, an Indian woman who served as Hernán Cortes' concubine and translator. Her name is synonymous with betrayal of what is Mexican.

Of machismo, Paz also says: "For other people the manly ideal consists in an open and aggressive fondness for combat, where we emphasize defensiveness, the readiness to repel any attack. The Mexican 'macho'-the male-is a hermetic being, closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. Manliness is judged according to one's invulnerability to enemy arms or the impact of the outside world. Stoicism is the most exalted of our military and political attitudes. Our history is full of expressions and incidents that demonstrate the indifference of our heroes toward suffering or danger. We are taught from childhood to accept defeat with dignity, a conception that is certainly not ignoble. And if we are not all good stoics . . . at least we can be resigned and patient and long-suffering. Resignation is one of our most popular virtues. We admire fortitude in the face of adversity more than the most brilliant triumph."

Machismo is no different with homosexuals. In fact, given the stoicism required to be homosexual in Mexico, Mexican gays, one could argue, are the most macho of all Mexicans. For some gays, the pressure to be macho is so great that they pretend they are really bisexual. They make forays into the gay world, telling friends they are so oversexed that women alone will not satisfy them. Sometimes they get drunk to explain away their behavior. When they are done, they return to their wives and children. For most gays, however, machismo means being able to endure the rejection of their families, who feel ashamed, or their fellow workers, who shun them. The luckiest gays are those who only have to humor parents who persist in the pretense that their son is not a homosexual. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, a gay Mexican director, captured this pretense of parents in his droll film "Doña Herlinda y sus Hijos". In it, a mother persists in trying to marry her son off to a nice woman, ignoring all the while the existence of his obviously gay lover, whom she writes off as no more than a close pal.

Threats or violence can require stoicism too. Homophobic Mexican men are prone to shout "maricon," "joto," "puto," or other epithets that are the equivalent of "queer" when they see men they think are gay. Some gay-bashers go beyond that, beating up homosexuals indiscriminately or, sometimes, killing them.

"I've had three researchers who have been murdered," said Dr. Taylor, who is affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Human Sexuality in San Francisco and has taught classes at Stanford University's medical school and at San Francisco State.

Police are also a threat. Typically, they stake out known gay bars, picking out potential blackmail victims. They check out peoples clothes and cars. They are locking for rich gays, government officials or business executives who don't want their colleagues to know they are gay.

"If you're rich and get caught," said Dr. Taylor, "you pay and pay and pay."

Notwithstanding all this menacing, in some ways it is easier to be gay in Mexico than in many countries. Mexico is what Dr. Taylor called a "homo-social" country. Men go out socially with men. They spend hours together on the street. They think nothing of putting their arms around each other's shoulders in public. They give each other hugs-abrazos, which are an important Hispanic form of greeting and a desired sign of respect. Some hold hands while walking. They touch their own genitals in front of others with none of the self-consciousness of American men, who have a much more prudish body language.

With all of this camouflage, Mexican gays can transform a cantina into a gay bar without most of the clients realizing it. Dr. Taylor explained how this might happen. Mexican gays might pick a bar with a mariachi band or a bullfight motif. They would sit together, hidden amongst tables of Mexican women or of families celebrating a birthday or wedding. Maybe only the shoe-shine boy would know what is really going on. He would keep track of who is gay and where the police are. For tips, he would pass a message that So-and-So wants to buy So-and-So a drink. The man offering the drink might be waved over to join the table, or a meeting could be arranged later on. As the hours grow late, the heterosexuals would leave, and more and more gays would arrive. Those few heteros who remain would ignore what is happening. But the later it gets, the gayer it gets.

The key to enjoying all this cultural protection, said Dr. Taylor, is not getting caught flagrante "You can be gay as a goose," he said, "but if you get caught, you may be ruined for life." As long as straight Mexicans can have some fig leaf to cling to in
refusing to acknowledge that a boy or man is homosexual, they will use it. They provide what Dr. Taylor called counterfeit secrecy. Andre put it best: "Here in Mexico, appearances are more important than reality." If one gives straight Mexicans no choice but to accept one's homosexuality, however, one can expect vilification, violence, or even worse.

My ABC lesson finished just as Mario came on stage and began to tune his guitar. Mario, dressed in leather pants, a sailor shirt, and a rhinestone belt, had not yet begun when a rumpus occurred behind us. A reporter-cameraman-soundman team from one of the government television stations had arrived. They had come to El Taller to film the gay community in situ as part of their coverage of the AIDS crisis. The owner of El Taller announced to the hundred or so clients assembled what was about to occur. He advised those who wanted to remain incognito to move to the side of Mario's stage, out of camera range. I must admit I was hoping Juan Jacobo, Dr. Taylor, and Andre would want a little anonymity. But no such luck. When I returned home in the early hours of the morning, I told my half-awake wife that I had good news and bad news. The good news was that I was going to be on television. The bad news was that some of our friends might start to whisper if they saw me.

The cameraman panned the dimly lit bar. His blazing spotlight illuminated the faces of the crowd, including those of our group. Most of his videotape recorded Mario, whose songs such as "Angel, My Sweet" and "Put Your Hand Here" seemed to make the crew even more uncomfortable than they had been when they came in. Mario sang of love in the night in out-of-the-way places. From time to time, he blew kisses to fans or friends in the audience, who applauded rabidly after each number. After about an hour, Mario took a break. The talk turned to AIDS.

Dr. Taylor said he was in town to give some "safe sex" lectures designed to help Mexicans avoid AIDS. His writings had earned him the nickname "Dr. Safe Sex," he told me. He had copies of his Guide to Safe Sex with him. One publicity blurb on the cover caught my eye. The reviewer had said of the book: "It should be next to the KY Jelly on everyone's bed stand."

Juan Jacobo was a safe-sex promoter, too. He told me he always carried condoms, and even handed out freebies to friends. The condoms were not always well received. Mexican men-gay or straight-have traditionally disliked condoms, which are thought to reduce sensitivity and are not considered macho. Some caveman gays even reject condoms as an unmanly way of dealing with AIDS. Dr. Taylor acknowledged that it would take some doing to get the sexually febrile Mexicans to accept the protection of condoms and dental dams as erotic accompaniments to foreplay. To arouse interest, he had drafted some suggested come-on lines in his book, which was intended not only for gays but for the many Mexican women whose husbands or lovers were bisexual. One proposed foreplay remark was: "I can't wait to get my mouth around your condom-clad rod." I told him this didn't do too much for me. But maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

The government, which often pretends sex does not exist, had even gotten into the safe-sex act. Each week, it gave away thousands of matchbooks with vibrantly colored condoms inside. It ran safe-sex ads. It deferred to gay leaders for the best advice on how to avoid the spread of the disease. But Juan Jacobo was not as sanguine as some others that all this government-gay cooperation might one day lead to at least a quasi-respectable status for homosexuals in Mexican society. As we had seen in the United States, he remarked, the numbers of AIDS cases can grow geometrically. With only a few hundred cases to worry about in mid-1987, the Mexican public hadn't really reacted yet to the danger of a possible AIDS epidemic. Mexican dentists weren't wearing surgical gloves. Hospital workers weren't demanding extraordinary protection. Parents of schoolchildren were not up in arms about infected students. If the number of confirmed cases did grow dramatically, however, as some health officials thought it might, then things might turn very nasty. Mexicans did not have a very positive attitude toward homosexuality in the first place, Juan Jacobo reminded me. If the numbers went up, it was unlikely the public would look beyond the gay community to fix the blame.

"Right now," said Juan Jacobo, "people are saying AIDS is a public disease, not a gay disease. That's good. But I fear there could be a backlash."

Almost a year after that night at El Taller, I decided I should see what had happened to all those hopes and promises that Juan Jacobo and the others had talked about. Was macho Mexico at last accepting gayness, as so many other nations had? I phoned Juan Jacobo. He wasn't there, but Mario answered. Mario said Juan Jacobo was in Europe. He was giving some seminars on gay life in Mexico and presenting a play he had written. I asked Mario if he could stop by sometime to talk about what had been happening in the time since we had met. He agreed. One rainy Tuesday afternoon he arrived at my door.

In the months that followed the beginning of the government's anti-AIDS campaign, there had been no backlash, he said. In fact, there had not been much of anything. The presidential campaign of 1988 began in earnest in October 1987, when the ruling party had named a candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The amount of publicity about him and the opposition candidates had pushed AIDS off the pages of Mexico's newspapers. Daily reports about the government's latest economic plan to save Mexico made the AIDS crisis seem even more invisible. What did not disappear was the problem. The number of AIDS victims continued to grow.

Juan Jacobo quit Macho Tips around the time Salinas was nominated, Mario told me. Juan Jacobo hadn't liked what the magazine represented. It was careful, conservative, and safe. Its photographs of men were not very provocative. They were certainly less pornographic than those in the heterosexual skin magazines. Juan Jacobo thought Mexican gays needed more. With Mario and some other leaders of the Mexican gay movement, Juan Jacobo had spent the beginning of 1988 trying to launch a biweekly gay newspaper. The newspaper, to be called Mexico Gay, was supposed to be all the things Macho Tips was not. It would provide serious debate about gay issues. It would present gays as more than the stereotype of limp-wristed sissies. It would demand gay rights.

This editorial line mirrored the plot of Juan Jacobo's play. Called The Dark Side of the Moon, it was a work about a transsexual named Brenda who gets arrested and beaten up by the police on her way to a fiesta. Brenda, whose character is based on a real person who was savagely beaten by the police, represents the most embarrassing personification of gay life. She is a man-woman who has developed women's breasts through injections and has had her sexual organs changed. This outrageous human species is what the police like to hold up to the public as a typical homosexual, even though transsexuals strain the definition. Juan Jacobo used Brenda to show that even this vain demimonde creature on the fringe of gay life could have dignity, inner beauty, and a desire for respect and human rights.

Mario, whose delicate features, soft speaking voice, and wispy black hair belie a personal ferocity, said he wasn't sure the government would allow a newspaper to publish a serious message of gay normalcy. Nor did he know if hands-off treatment of the newspaper would be a harbinger of official reaction to a host of other gay projects for the late 1980s: community centers, gay records, gay music festivals, and many other things that had become commonplace in other countries.

"I think there have been sufficient advances in public opinion for 1the newspaper] to succeed," said Mario. "I worry about how the right [wing] will react, of course. I hope things will go well. But if they do not, we will survive. We have for a very long time".