Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (review)

This lively and varied collection of seven essays plus an introduction, written by specialists in history, anthropology, and literature, explores homosexuality among Native Americans, Spaniards, and Portuguese in Latin America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Four chapters focus on same-sex experiences and representations in indigenous cultures and continue a heated debate over Richard C. Trexler's Sex and Conquest (1995) concerning berdaches—men who dressed and lived as women. Here Trexler defends his thesis that berdaches were forced to become catamites and prostitutes for upper-class men. He lambasts scholars who suggest that berdaches made a free choice of gender identity that gave them a recognized and respected role in society. Trexler's anthropological arguments are cogent, but his language is intemperate. He accuses critics, whom he calls "modern-day romanticists," of "professional jealousy," "propaganda," and "nonsense." They constitute a "quasi-monopoly" of gay men writing homosexual history, and he calls for more "straight scholars in the field—to establish its bona fides."

Michael J. Horswell, one of Trexler's targets, uses such iconographical evidence as Spanish illustrations of Moche ceremonies to interpret the sacred and performative aspects of berdache behavior but argues that such rituals were temporally limited, connected primarily with agricultural rites, and did not constitute acceptance of a "third gender." Pete Sigal's work on Mesoamerica and Ward Stavig's chapter on the Andean highlands (both excellent pieces) discuss the effects of Spanish conquest on sexuality and the hybridity or syncretism produced by the intermingling of two cultures that both officially disapproved of sodomy. Nevertheless, David Higgs, in a case study of two Carmelites investigated by the Inquisition in Brazil, provides fascinating testimony about the failure of both the Catholic church and the colonial state to eradicate sodomy. Using Inquisition documents, Luiz Mott, defending an "essentialist" view of homosexuality, identifies a homosexual "subculture" in the Portuguese colony. These last authors note the occasional willingness of judges to impose lenient penalties for sodomy, especially if offenders came from the colonial elite. Serge Gruzinski's analysis of a witch hunt of sodomites in New Spain in 1658 nevertherless is a reminder that the rewards of sodomitical sin could be the stake.

These contributions show that homosexual activity—generally liaisons between younger and older men—were not uncommon in colonial Latin America. Situations such as the all-male promiscuity of the priesthood or hierarchies of power in both Native American and colonial societies facilitated contacts. Offenders confessed to multiple sexual partners, sometimes over a long period of time, despite the interdiction on sodomy, and to sexual arrangements ranging from rape to regular encounters with nascent self-identification and affirmation. This profile parallels the sexual cultures of early modern Europe—though with the presence of Native Americans and Africans as well as settlers—and demonstrates the reproduction of European norms (and flagrant dissent from them) in a colonial context. The evidence from Latin America, in Sigal's words, "does not support Foucault's conception of a sudden nineteenth-century shift in the discourse regarding homosexuality."

Some chapters descend into jargon (Horswell's approach is to "underscore the performativity of the subjectivity within a context of transculturation"). Mott's article is very poorly written, with randomly organized arguments, pedantic expressions, contestable assertions (characterizing sexual contact between a 13- and a 15-year-old as an "infant-juveline" relationship), and strange asides ("I ask the pure and unsullied reader what to make of this episode?"). Mott is badly served by his translator, who half-translates some phrases, unnecessarily leaves others in Portuguese or Latin, and occasionally overtranslates ("Michael [sic] Foucault"). Fortunately, other chapters, notably those by Stavig, Sigal, Gruzinski, and Higgs, are more agreeable to the reader.