The Sexy Latino

I really feel among the least qualified persons to be writing about this, given that, well, sex just doesn't really interest me a lot.  No, I'm not lying, and Gentle Reader, please and kindly pull that dirty little mind of yours out of the gutter!  Thank you.

Of course, we all know the familiar cliches of the hot blooded Latinos, the Latin lover (or gigolo!)  Hot and sexy Salsa and other Latin music.  The partying, the revelling, the debauchery, the mythical insatiable Latin male and the equally mythical insatiable Latin female. 

I am going to hazard a guess here that a lot of the alleged Latin American sexiness is really a childish or adolescent reaction to historical and cultural sexual repression.  Latino culture owes much of its shape, texture and fabric to the Roman Catholic Church, one of the most historical machines of sexual repression.  Good muchachas criollas (which is to say, the good Latinas of pure European extraction) always kept their legs crossed and their mouths firmly sealed until the wedding night.  Los muchachos criollos (Latino boys of pure European extraction) not so much.

Of course the traditional double standard reigned supreme.  The young ladies kept themselves absolutely intact until their newly minted young husbands could totally embarrass themselves on the wedding night (I believe it was Oscar Wilde who coined after his first visit there that Niagara Falls must be the young bride's second great disappointment).  The young men were expected to sow their wild oats and gain a bit of sexual experience before the wedding night, for which reason existed whores, indigenous women and Mestizas.  Of course, no one of their high social standing gave so much as a tinker's damn about the poor marginalized women who were expected to stand in (or lie in)as practice mounts before the big day.  No one gave a thought about how those poor girls must have felt being used, exploited, being made to feel dirty, vile and unwanted by their young white swains.  And there were also the many bastard children born of those unions, many of whom formed the ancestry of the Latino Mestizaje. 

Institutionalized rape along with the puritanical rigid mores of the Catholic Church seem to have provided the backbone of Latino sexuality.  Given the traditional Catholicism and the agrarian culture it would stand to reason that the standards and expectations would be very conservative and extremely heterocentric, which is also to say heterosexist, or should I say blatantly homophobic.  Let's keep in mind here that the very concept of homosexuality was basically unknown until just over a hundred years ago. 

In which case I sometimes wonder, what would it have been like during the first four hundred years of the existence of Latin America to be a queer man or woman.  I understand that among the Aztec and Maya, and likely other indigenous cultures of the day, there was some allowance given to homosexuality, though cross-dressing was forbidden on pain of death.  So then let's try to imagine a queer young Aztec man just when Cortes and his fellow Spaniards were marching and riding strange beasts (horses) into Tenochtitlan, the original Mexico City.  To see those strange looking men with pale skins and beards.  It must have been incredibly disturbing for them, to say the very least. 

Let's call him Citlalli, which means star.  He, Citlalli, would be perhaps a young priest and suddenly and fiercely enthralled with those strangely handsome, though foul-smelling since they never bathed men with beards.

One of them, we'll call him Juan, catches his eye.  Juan, is not necessarily queer, but is subject to severe man-crushes, and this beautiful noble boy with the light brown skin and flawless lean musculature cannot leave his mind.  They have caught each other's eye.  There is no question of anything happening, since the Spanish are strictly heterocentric and would never so much as imagine the thought of two men loving each other.  But those two men love each other.

Soon, Tenochtitlan  is burned and destroyed, Citlalli is one of the fallen, though there is still life in him as he lies on the ground, bleeding, and peering imploringly at Juan as he raises his sword and lops of his head.

And so it has been throughout the sad and troubled history of  Latin America, but for recent reforms and developments.  I believe that Mexico City was one of the first jurisdictions to recognize and make legal same-sex marriage.  This has since happened throughout Mexico and in other Latin American countries, but not in all of them.  The major urban centres are naturally going to have the greatest concentrations of  progressive folk, just like here in liberal and progressive Canada, and just like liberal and progressive Canada there will be more conservative and anti-gay people the further out you get into the rural zones.

Are Latinos sexier than other people?  Well, how would I know and really why would I ask such a question?  I will say this much.  This is a culture founded on socially legitimized rape and religious sexual puritanism so I think what we really have to reckon with is an entire collective of survivors of sexual abuse.  This isn't meant as a blanket judgment of all Latinos by the way.  I am thinking here, rather, of cultural and historical trends that are still going to contain an enormous variation of experience and interpretation.