City and Body in Mexican Novels on Homosexual Themes

Abstract

This essay refers only to male homosexuality. The homosexual novel first came to light in Mexico in 1964, with the publication of Miguel Barbachano Ponce’s El diario de José Toledo. Since then and until the end of the century, some twenty novels on the subject were published.
Mexico City is a different environment for homosexuals looking for meeting places. These are ghettoes for the marginalized. Homosexuals have lived in an underworld, an alternative city covered by the protective shroud of darkness. They ramble around, stand on street corners, sit on park benches, hide in the darkness of movie theaters and forbidden clubs and show their bodies in steam baths.
The homosexual’s body language is different –it is enough to gaze at each other, as if exchanging the right password. Although most go unnoticed, the slightest insinuation of a gesture betrays him, any movement suffices. Sometimes homosexuals display ultramasculine manners as part and parcel of courtship rituals, hiding real desires.
This essay seeks to prove how wide the range of the homosexual novel is in recording a way of life which can only exist within such framework and which has used the city to embody an all-embracing idea of a certain reality where body and place fuse and inhabit each other. They are both authors and accomplices in a unique, simultaneous writing process.