The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture

6. The Homosexual

≤ 6 ≤ THE HOMOSEXUAL Then if someone out of his torment cursed him as a cuiloni, he no longer had his pride when he said to him, ‘‘Titlacauan, great cuiloni, wretched cuiloni! You have had your pleasure with me! You have mocked me!’’ —Authors of the Florentine Codex When you were drunk, did you fall into the frightening sin? That called cuiloyotl; that which is with your fellow man? —Bartolomé de Alva, Confessionario mayor, y menor en lengva mexicana The cuiloni: the sodomite, the penetrated man, the homosexual , the passive, the third sex, the faggot, the queer. Cuiloyotl (or cuilonyotl): sodomy, homosexuality, the act without which the cuiloni could not exist.∞ The term cuiloni reveals much about sexuality and the many homosexualities present in early colonial discourse on the Nahuas. In this chapter, I argue that Nahua culture in the early colonial years provided male and female homosexualities a place in the tlazolli complex that exceeded the Catholic notion of sodomitical sin. Further, while we have little evidence of Nahua commoner homosexual practices, we do find some evidence that, while commoner views diverged from those of the nobles, 178 ≤ CHAPTER 6 they too did not understand homosexual activities as inherently sinful. Moreover, while categories to describe homosexualities existed both before and after the conquest, by the end of the seventeenth century, the colonial experience significantly altered these Nahua concepts. Little scholarship exists on homosexuality among the Nahuas,≤ and those few works rely on problematic translations of Nahuatl documents or insufficient evidence to generate significant conclusions, or they focus primarily on Spanish interpretations of Nahua realities. This chapter analyzes the extant primary sources on the topic, focusing particularly on documents written in Nahuatl. Scholars must critically decipher the postconquest documents to uncover the key factors at work here, which fall into three groups: (1) medieval and early modern European concepts of the relationship between sodomy and sin; (2) the tropes of conquest in which Spaniards often asserted the effeminacy of the conquered group; and (3) indigenous discourses that connected local homosexualities with a warrior motif fundamentally hostile to the ‘‘passive’’ partner in male homosexual acts. As I have shown in previous chapters, as the colonial years progressed, the Nahuas integrated the Catholic concept of sin into their cultural matrix, but sin never displaced the tlazolli complex. Modern scholars hold conflicting views concerning homosexualities among the pre- and postconquest Nahuas. Some say it was outlawed or repressed, others that it was part of the structures of society, yet others that it was part of religious ritual. Alfredo López Austin argues that the preconquest Nahuas had an ‘‘extremely negative image’’ of homosexuality . He states that the ‘‘death penalty was imposed on both female and male homosexuals, active or passive.’’≥ Similarly, Noemí Quezada argues that the Nahuas punished male and female homosexuality by death, as it violated the order of the ‘‘heterosexual couple’’ established by the creator gods.∂ Richard Trexler says that the preconquest Nahuas forcibly transvested certain men, often for life, and that they used those men as ‘‘passives .’’ The Nahuas viewed these men with disdain and saw them as dependent and effeminate. Trexler believes that the ‘‘active’’ partner was not denigrated like the passive, and he contends that ‘‘no laws against sodomy ’’ existed.∑ Cecelia Klein argues that the Nahuas believed that, while the passive partner caused great misfortune, the active played a role ‘‘essentially consonant with his biological sex.’’∏ Geoffrey Kimball states that ‘‘there is no evidence [for the preconquest era] for any kind of sup- THE HOMOSEXUAL ≤ 179 pression of homosexuality such as occurred after the Spanish conquest.’’π Clark Taylor says that ‘‘homosexuality played an important part in much of the religious life in México, and was commonly accepted in private life,’’ but that the Mexica engaged in ‘‘heavy repression’’ of homosexual activity.∫ The contradictions in these modern interpretations stem in part from some misreadings of the texts, but primarily from too little effort at situating the context of the sources. In an article regarding what there I term ‘‘queer Nahuatl colonial discourse,’’ I engage in a close analysis of a specific Nahuatl text, part of book 10 of the Florentine Codex.Ω There I show the importance of understanding the influences, contemporary and historical, upon the production of the source, its narrative strategy, its political vision, and its treatment of the past. In this chapter I engage in a similar analysis of...