Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art, 1810-Today (review)

The international lesbian and gay rights movements have engendered many historical studies of same-sex desire and sociability in Europe and the United States, ranging from social histories of urban constructed communities to cultural studies of the interaction between marginalized and hegemonic patterns of sexual and gender behavior. In Latin America, as elsewhere, literary and anthropological studies have forged ahead of historical research to theorize the specificities of homoerotic desire and its cultural manifestations. In contrast, scholars still only have a handful of archivally based historical studies upon which to build an overall analysis of the relationship between (homo)sexuality and society. Images of Ambiente offers an important and innovative interpretation of Latin American art and its relationship to sexually charged homosocial sensibilities that become visible in the late nineteenth century and can be detected in cultural production throughout the continent.

The very use of the term ambiente ("atmosphere," a widely used code word that references the overt and covert milieu, or "life," of men and women who desire sexual, romantic, and intimate relations with same-sex partners) suggests a sense of community and self-conscious identity. Yet, the author seeks to read examples of Latin American art through multiple prisms without necessarily documenting or insisting on the specific sexual preference or orientation of a given artist. In his broad survey, Bleys focuses on Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Latino artists in the United States. The notion of homotexuality, borrowedfrom queer theory-
influenced literary studies, permits a broad range of possibilities for interpreting the homoerotic content of these works. Bleys recognizes that the very nature of homophobia in Latin America has often encouraged ambiguity and subterfuge on the part of the artist. At times a given artist may have used a canvas or a block of marble to express an inner or personal desire, but just as easily the artistic work might have conveyed a homoerotic meaning to members of a receptive public without that being the artist's conscious intent.

Generously and richly illustrated, the volume first focuses on portrayals of the nude male body—one of the favorite themes of academic art produced in the new national art schools of the nineteenth century. Classical art, myths, and religious subjects offered many artists the opportunity to experiment with portraying the unclad male body at a moment when naked female models were uncommon in respectable studios. Was the detailed attention to the male nude merely an attempt to perfect the art of capturing accurate anatomy, or did some artists' gazes reflect erotic desire? Having little documented evidence about the homoerotic proclivities of the artists studied or public reaction to these works, Bleys is rightly cautious in his speculations.

Although modernism brought artistic innovations to Latin America, it also generally rejected images that suggested homoerotic desire. Artists and critics saw many of the academic nudes as relics of the fin-de-siècle decadence movement. Moreover, the influence of socialist realist art, especially that of the Mexican muralists, insisted on traditional and rigid gendered imagery. Diego Rivera's famous murals on the history of Mexico, for example, conflated homosexuality and effeminacy with bourgeois decadence, a vision pervasive in the Latin American Left and ironically shared by conservative Catholic forces as well.

The emergence of more self-conscious and visible homosexual worlds in postwar Latin America, and especially the influence of gay liberation in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s, provoked new, more daring artistic representations of homoerotic themes. In this period, Bleys admits, it is easier to draw the connections between the personal lives of artists and their production and to argue the relationship between homosexual desire and its artistic expression. The author ends this work examining overtly gay themes in the art of U.S. Latinos.

In covering such an extensive and complicated topic over...