The historical study of LGBTQ people in Mexico can be divided into three separate periods, coinciding with the three main periods of Mexican history: pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-independence, in spite of the fact that the rejection of LGBTQ identities forms a connecting thread that crosses the three periods.
The data on the pre-Columbian people and those of the period of colonization is scarce and obscure. Historians often described the indigenous customs that surprised them or that they disapproved of, but tended to take a position of accusation or apology, which makes it impossible to distinguish between reality and propaganda. In general, it seems that the Mexica were as homophobic as the Spanish, and that other Indigenous peoples tended to be much more tolerant,Chronology of Mexican Gay History Len Evans. Accessed 21-03-2008 to the point of honoring Two-Spirit people as shamans.
The history of LGBTQ people in the colonial period and after independence is still in great part yet to be studied. Above all, the 1658 executions of sodomites and the 1901 Dance of the Forty-One—two great scandals in Mexican public life—dominate the scene.
The situation is changing in the 21st century, in part thanks to the discovery of the LGBTQ community as potential consumers—the so-called pink peso—and tourists. Laws have been created to combat discrimination (2003), and two federal entities, the Federal District and Coahuila, have legalized civil unions for same-sex couples (2007). On December 21, 2009, despite opposition from the Church, the Government of Mexico City approved same-sex marriage, with 39 votes in favor, 20 against and 5 abstaining. It was the first city in Latin America to do so. Later, this right was recognized nationwide. However, in 2007 Mexico was still one of the countries in which the most crimes are committed against the LGBTQ community, with a person being murdered in a homophobic crime every two days.
Pre-Columbian era The majority of information on the pre-Columbian peoples comes from the reports of the Spanish conquest. These accounts must be taken with caution, given that the accusation of sodomy was used to justify the conquest, along with other accusations real or invented, such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, or idolatry. Given that the defenders of the natives manipulated information as much as those who opposed them, some trying to minimise the incidence of sodomy and others exaggerating the stories, it is impossible to get an accurate picture of homosexual behavior in pre-Columbian Mexico. The historian Antonio de Herrera arrived at that conclusion as early as 1601.
Among the indigenous peoples of the Americas the institution of the two-spirit people was widespread. The two-spirits, originally considered hermaphrodites and called "berdache" by the Spanish conquistadors, were men who took feminine duties and behaviors. They were considered neither men nor women by their societies, but were considered like a third sex and often held spiritual functions. The conquistadors often thought of them as passive homosexuals, and they were treated with contempt and cruelty.
Among the Maya, there was a strong association between ritual and homosexual behavior. Some shamans engaged in homosexual acts with their patients, and priests engaged in ritualized homosexual acts with their gods. When the Toltecs arrived to conquer the region, they brought more same-sex activity and public sex of all kinds. Then when Itzá conquered the area, they brought more anal sex, more eroticism and extensive sexual ceremonies.Peter Herman Sigal. From moon goddesses to virgins: the colonization of Yucatecan Maya sexual desire. p. 213. University of Texas Press, 2000. . However, the Maya, as a people with a hybrid culture, had differing views on homosexual sex. The Maya Chilam Balam books, for example, regularly contained sexual insults directed toward the Itzá. According to mythology contained in the book, homosexuals were responsible for destroying the order of Maya society by producing illegitimate children through their anuses who were unable to run society.
The Zapotecs of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southeastern Mexico did not develop a culture of conquest, which may explain their relaxed attitude toward masculinity.Reding, p. 18. The Zapotecs embraced the concept of a third gender, which they referred to as muxe, as an intermediate between male and female who played both gender roles in everyday life. “Two-spirit” (and similar native terms) refer to gender, not sexual orientation or biological sex. “Two-spirit” individuals may be heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual. To date, muxes still exist among Zapotec people and play a crucial role within the community.
The Mexica Evidence from by Juan de Torquemada suggests that same-sex sexual relationships between men and between women were not criminalised among the Mexica. Moreover, the Mexica had different worldviews than the Spanish authorities who compiled the sources presently available for study, making an understanding of pre-colonial Mexica gender and sexuality more difficult to understand since they were recorded through a Spanish-centric filter, and later texts from the early colonial-period like the have been mistranslated by Dibble and Anderson due to the homophobic prejudices which were prevalent in the United States at that time.
Social attitudes towards homosexual men and women were negative and ranged from disgust to amusement because they were perceived as violating Mexica gender roles, though attitudes were less negative towards homosexual women rather than men. Homosexual men during the period of the Aztec Empire had methods of publicly identifying each other, which made them highly visible in Mexica society.
According to certain records, homosexual intercourse was performed in Mexica bathhouses.
Nonetheless, executions of male homosexuals are not attested during this period, and the existence of public identification methods by homosexual men makes it unlikely that they would have been persecuted. While male and female homosexuality were known and disapproved of in Mexica society, there is no evidence of any suppression of homosexuality among Mexicas, with all homophobic persecutions having been introduced after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire after various forms of homosexuality acknowledged by the pre-colonial Mexica were redefined as "sodomy" and "sin" by Christian friars.
Homosexual men in Mexica society also had a religious role, with records suggesting that there was a connection between them and Titlacahuan, that is the trickster aspect of the god Tezcatlipoca. Titlacahuan himself was depicted carrying a flower signifying his eroticism and blowing on a phallic flute denoting penance and communication with the gods, and was associated with excessive sexual activity.
There were four terms in Classical Nahuatl which referred to homosexuality, and were defined by the sexual activities of their subjects rather than by psychological characteristics: , , , and .
Additionally, the Mexica referred to effeminate men as , meaning "one with a woman's heart," and to intersex people as , meaning "woman-man."
The Classical Nahuatl term was used to refer to a group of gender-variant people who wore women's clothing and performed women's tasks. This name was composed of the term , meaning "flower," to which was added the suffix , meaning "owner of," thus literally meaning "flower-bearer," due to the association of flowers with excess and sexual desire in Mexica culture.
The held an institutionalised, albeit degraded, role within Mexica society whereby they were kept as dependents of high-level nobles for whom they performed household chores, cleaned temples, and accompanied warriors in war and provided them with services including sexual ones.
The verb , made by using the prefix , denoting a human object of a verbal action, literally meant "to use flowers on someone" and was used metaphorically in the sense "to seduce someone."
The term referred to a sub-category of who held the passive role during sexual intercourse. The name was derived from the term , itself the non-active stem of the verb , meaning "to sexually penetrate someone." Thus, meant "one who is sexually penetrated."
The term was derived from a verb or , of uncertain meaning. This word was used to designate homosexual men.
The term was used to refer to homosexual women, and the verb was used to denote female homosexual intercourse.
The conquest
Since the first contacts of the Spanish with the indigenous people there was established the equivalence of Indian, cannibal, and sodomite. It was a doctor accompanying Columbus, Diego Alvarez Chanca, in a letter from 1494, who first gave news of that. He spoke of the Carib custom of capturing young men to those who removed all the masculine organs. These developed "feminine characteristics and the Caribbeans employed them for the practice of sodomy in a manner similar to that which the Arabs enjoy their young people like eunuchs and two-spirits. ... A time grown men, the Caribs kill them and eat them."
In 1511, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera published his De orbe novo decades, with the information that he was able to get about the first explorers thanks to his friendship with Isabella I of Castile. D'Anghiera told how Vasco Núñez de Balboa, during his exploration of Quarequa, in the Isthmus of Panama, in 1513, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs. D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected". After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. [... The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. [... And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."
In an account on the indigenous people realized in 1519 for the council of the town of Veracruz to report to Charles I, attributed to Hernán Cortés, it is mentioned that they had "managed to know for certain that they are all sodomites and practice that abominable sin". In another account from an anonymous Italian conquistador, it is said that the men and women of Pánuco worship a masculine member and have erect phalluses in their temples and public plazas to worship them: "the multitude of methods used by the men to satisfy their abominable vice [is] almost too unbelievable to be sure. [...] the devil contained in their idols has possessed them. It has given them instructions to sacrifice their fellow men, to extract their hearts and to offer the hearts, as well as the blood taken from the tongue, the ears, the legs and the arms, all to the idols". Finally, he comments that "all the inhabitants of New Spain and those of other adjacent provinces ate human flesh, all commonly practiced sodomy and drank to excess", comparing some of the customs of the indigenous people with those of the ungodly saracens.
In the middle of the 16th century the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the soldier Juan de Grijalva write about scenes of sodomy carved into the architecture, in gold jewelry, in terracota and in statues. The West Indies explorer and gold smelting manager Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés included specifics in his 1526 La Natural hystoria de las Indias (his Sumario), expanded in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535, further expanded in 1851 from his previously unpublished papers). Around the same time, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca writes: