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 Editorials | Opinions | August 2007 
To Dream With New Ideals
 Paco Calderon - Dallas Voice
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| | (Paco Calderon) |
A gay Mexican activist ponders 30 years of the movement for equality in Mexico
As we begin the new millenium, one can take stock of what has been and is now the gay Mexican movement, to look at the circumstances for gays in the social reality of our country and our struggle to live together inclusively. It is necessary to say that today, we live in a period without precedence in the acceptance and integration of gays within society, but it is still far from what we want. What we have reached through these years is only a tolerant coexistence.
For the new generation today, it could seem that things have always been equal - numerous bars and discotheques, magazines and other literature directed just to gays and lesbians, increasing discussion of homosexuality in different forums and even legislative success and politicians who are openly gay.
It has not always been that way. Our freedoms are the result of a sometimes winding road travelled by gays in Mexico and all over the world during the last 30 years.
The emotion of gay liberation in the seventies
After the movements of youth in the 1960s in different parts of the world - represented in Mexico by the student movement of 1968 and the hippie movement - and as a result of the so-called “Sexual Revolution”, the decade of the 1970s brought with it both unpublicized and well-known actions led by gay men and lesbians. In Mexico, gay liberation followed closely the movement started by gay North Americans, especially the brave men and women on Castro Street in San Francisco who faced police violence when officers tried to raid gay bars there.
When the world knew that gays in the U.S. were identifying as a powerful minority capable of acting collectively and demanding its rights, a movement was detonated in almost every western country by gays and lesbians demanding an end to isolation and discrimination. Other movements in Europe coincided with this, but in Mexico, it was the struggle in the U.S. that we knew the most about, one in which some Mexicans even took part.
In Mexico, principally in Mexico City, meeting places for gays and lesbians, in the form of parties, bars and discos, spread little by little through the 70s. To go to a bar or disco was an adventure because there was always the risk of the police storming in, rounding everyone up and taking them to detention, where they were insulted and abused just for being gay. The nightspots that became more successful were those that could offer a certain safety to their clients and a reasonable guarantee that there would be no problems with the police or photographers from tabloid newspapers.
We recall fondly some prominent characters of those days - the portly transvestite known as The Xochitl, the beautiful Nana, and also the big gay business leaders - Don Oscar Calatayud and Dona Martha Valdespino, still working. And there were memorable sites - Mio Mundo, the Penthouse, 24 Hours, the D’Val, the Baron and the most famous, Nine with French impressario Henry Donadieu. There were also drag contests with beautiful contestants from all over the republic and private parties in empty buildings with strippers and less fear of being harassed by the police.
It was not until 1978 that gays and lesbians in Mexico began to act collectively in defense of their civil rights and in opposition to discrimination. The movement in the U.S. and the liberation postulates of the previous decade finally sparked the organization of the first March for Lesbian and Gay Pride in Mexico City in the summer of that year.
That day, the walk began from the Monument to the Children’s Heroes to the foot of Chapultepec’s castle and up to the Chamber of Juarez, a journey of over three miles. To the amazement of passers-by, more than 700 men and women shouted to the winds their pride in being gay and lesbian. No politicians or union leaders led that march, only the convictions of a group of citizens who felt the need to break with the hypocrisy and troublesome bonds of the past. From that point, everything changed. That was the beginning of the visibility and growth of the Mexican gay community.
In the beginning, the number of people who lived out of the closet were relatively small compared to subsequent decades. They were closeknit and knew each other. They saw each other on Genoa Street in the Zona Rosa, some other street in the Roman Colony or on Aguascalientes. Also, in the paradise of Acapulco, the Gallery discotheque was born, where the greatest drag show in Mexico appeared for many years, attracting tourists and eventually becoming a popular resort spot for foreign gays. In the end, the seventies were a great period of coming out for many gays and lesbians in Mexico.
The eighties - we are more and know ourselves less
The 1980s witnessed the mass marketing of gay culture in Mexico and with it an explosion in the numbers of gays and lesbians going out to the clubs and other meeting places. The gay clubs were no longer selling just a guarantee of safety from the police, but the illusion of full gay liberation, that is, the stereotyped illusion we saw coming from gay life in the U.S.
Unfortunately, much of the window of that life we saw was through pornography and sex. Sexual freedom was interpreted as the freedom to go to bed with as many people as you could. It was synonomous with total freedom.
In just a few years, the abundance of gay bars grew rapidly, leading to the perception that the older bars were dated. Donadieu’s Nine, the trendiest and always full of wealthy gays at the end of the 70s, began to fade and had to close. Regrettably, we lost that space where we listened for the first time to the music of Botellita de Jerez and La Maldita Vecindad, or heard poetry from the lips of Guadelupe “Pita” Amor.
People were going to bigger discos with more varied crowds - El Taller, The Don, The New York. Sex shops opened, along with leather and cowboy bars, recreating U.S. stereotypes removed from the idiosyncrasy of Mexican life. Poppers became prevalent and the baths - Ecuador, the The Finisterre and the Senorial - gained more and more clients. There were huge parties in Mexico City, Acapulco and Cuernavaca, and in cities like Guadalajara, Tijuana and Monterrey, wonderful gay clubs opened. Escort services also began, and in certain streets in the Roman Colony and Cuauhtemoc, a couple of circles around the block was all it took to meet a boy for sexual adventure.
We were feeling free, believing that our freedom was finally being realized, although our marginality was quietly becoming institutionalized. We did not see it while we were happily exploring from bed to bed. Then, unexpected as any tragedy is, AIDS came before the decade was even half over. The advance of the Mexican gay community ran into a wall and revealed that, in essence, there had been little advance. Communities take, as a basic characteristic, a solidarity between their members, something that was frankly not found to be a given among gay and lesbian Mexicans in the 1980s.
When people began to fall ill and die of AIDS, many did so alone, often without the support of people who were once friends. Denial was the first response of many - “it won’t happen to me” - withdrawal was the response of others. But many people became informed and changed their behavior.
By the end of the 80s, the presence of AIDS was difficult for anyone to ignore. It was hard for some to give up the “freedom” of the years before AIDS, and the consequences could be devastating, but as time passed, the urgency to redefine our concept of freedom and our way of life was a necessity for survival.
We saw how the community in the U.S. had the capacity to come together in the face of AIDS, and how they managed to create important organizations of support for those affected by AIDS. Luckily, in Mexico, we also had persons - some inside the government - who saw the need to slow the advance of the epidemic, and significant organizations and joint efforts arose.
The safe-sex 90s and love on talk shows
In the 90s, there was practically no one who didn’t have a friend or know someone who had AIDS or had died. The spread of the disease was dizzying during the early years of the decade, but, luckily, there began to be more information about it.
A lot of people became sick during the 80s, but also many in the early 90s because of a poor economy, deterioration in the quality of life and a lack of education. That hindered campaigns to prevent AIDS, and those programs were also stalled by the emergence of rightwing conservative groups like Provida, the Association of Parents of Families and the conservative wing of the Catholic Church. Those groups influenced political decisions by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and systematically blocked any government campaign to encourage the use of condoms. CONASIDA (the federal AIDS agency) once occupied two small offices in the city to test for AIDS and distribute condoms. From that almost non-existent presence, even those offices disappeared.
But among gays, condom use was a fact of life. Many teens used them from the first time they had sex and practically never knew what it was to have relations without latex. Still, the concept of “freedom” inherited from the 70s and 80s persisted. People used condoms, but saw no need to change their behavior. Even today, we continue to struggle to find an authentic and transcendent sense of our freedom.
The presence of AIDS also made the topic of homosexuality more visible and a new discussion was opened in society. But that also stamped a new stigma on us that we still find hard to understand. Our freedom began now to be defined by the rest of society, and what they considered to be freedom for gays often did not include our input and desires.
The voice of gays was transformed in the 90s into a lament interpreted by the whims of whoever judged us. The essence of our lives became the topic of talk shows where homophobia and ignorance reigned. We can regret this excess of democracy - as we seek to deal and fight for our freedom, a great portion of the public, inflamed with prejudice and bigotry, weaves and reshapes the box they would call “gay liberation” and enclose us in. They would have us be phenomena like the guests on talk shows and wrap us in pink latex so that our condition would be innocuous and we wouldn’t infect anybody.
The new millenium and where we are
The outlook at the beginning of the new century is not completely encouraging for those who dream of living harmoniously and with full equality. Opposing that dream is the power of the radical and conservative right in Mexico. For those of us who do not accept hypocritical tolerance or want to always be on the defensive, there still is some reason for limited optimism that we will achieve a world in which sexual orientation will not be a factor in living together in society.
Today, the structures of discrimination and exclusion against gay and lesbian individuals are still in force in Mexico despite our years of activism. Seeing the homophobic trends in some state and local governments influenced by the conservative National Action Party, the horizon is very much clouded.
Gay political activism will have to grow stronger. Recently, that effort has been led by the lesbian legislator Enoe Uranga, working in favor of the community to obtain legal recognition of civil unions. The gay and lesbian community has a great challenge to overcome opposition to this, and there also remains the constant task of identifying the acts of discrimination and homophobia that continue to occur, especially now that the country is increasingly governed by the radical right.
For the young gay men and lesbians of Mexico, the challenge will be to dream with new ideals and to restate the boundaries of our freedom. Far from basing that freedom solely on their aptitude for sex, I believe they will have to question what it is that this community really wants, the gay and lesbian community of the new millenium.
They will have to decide if community happens only in the bars and discos or also in other ways and spaces of expression. If it is the former, they will continue to live permanently in the margins that are skillfully manipulated by the conservatives and homophobes. I am not opposed to having fun in bars and discos. I simply wonder if the youth today do not want more - more arts, more political visibility, more businesses and organizations, more personal and professional fulfillment, more love - more of everything.
Finally, we must train ourselves to better communicate who we are. Through that commitment, we can move toward a better quality of life for gays and lesbians. We must express the fact that we are gay and lesbian in the 21st century, and that we are a universe in expansion looking for a new sense of our freedom. |
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