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Editor's Note: Mateo Sancho Cardiel is a writer, journalist and sociologist. Linked as a journalist to the Efe Agency from 2006 to 2015 - he was a correspondent in New York in the last two years - and a contributor to media such as El País, El Confidencial, GQ or ICON, he currently teaches Sociology at the University of the City of New York (CUNY) and Narrative at the Pratt Institute. Finalist for the Anagram Essay Award in 2012 for "The sexual revolution" and co-author of the film and lie essay "Ceremonies of the False" (2016), has just published in the United States his first novel "New York of a Plumazo". In addition, he participated in the Force Fest theater festival in New York with his work "Anticlímax" (2018) and last his doctoral thesis on homosexuality and aging. The opinions expressed in this column belong only to the author.
(CNN Spanish) - "Everyone knows that a Latino man is a cold man in bed." This is how a Latino man of more than 70 years in New York described his partner, also Latin, for my doctoral thesis on homosexuality and aging. This observation, dispatched by the interviewee as an absolute truth, completely reverses the stereotype of fiery and passionate lover that pursues our culture. It connected, unknowingly, with that concept of Joane Nagel called “ethnic borders”, referring to the sexual prejudices and norms that accompany each ethnic group or race. And it opened in me the sociological question: what is the effect of that intersection between Latin culture, LGTBQ collective and emigration?
Looking at the half-empty glass, this issue is broken down into several: do you experience double discrimination as emigrants and members of the LGTBQ collective? What takes us away, how does it turn us off to be sexually non-normative in our countries of Catholic and sexist tradition? And how does that add to the tear and diatribe of the emigrant? Looking at the half-full glass, several questions also arise: does this feeling of uprooting placate the greater sexual tolerance in the host country? And, why not, what do Latinos contribute to the American LGTBQ collective?
In sociology, Everett Hughes coined the term master status in the 1940s to describe that characteristic of the individual that eclipses all others. And many members of the LGTBQ community saw how in our countries of origin our sexual orientation was, for years, the only thing others seemed to see. The effeminate and the lesbian of the town or the trans neighbor. Thus, many of us arrive in the United States with the intention of living our sexuality more freely but, at the same time, with the desire that this sexuality does not hijack all the plots of the rest of life. An intimate improvement, supported by a group of stateless rules and codes of stateless subculture, which outshines the possible worries from abroad. Several literary pieces of 2019 such as Las Biuty Queens, by the Chilean writer two spirits Iván Monalisa Ojeda, or New York of a Plumazo, written by the signer of this article, start from that feeling of normality, self-discovery and even euphoria that this trip brings.
But the cooling of which the interviewee spoke come on two fronts. In the specific generational case (the older LGTBQ), it cannot be forgotten that they were crossed by institutional homophobia, by the AIDS crisis (controlled by a medical degree, but never properly treated as emotional trauma) or by so many emotions hindered by clandestinity or social stigma. In the Latin case, beyond generational issues, cooling is inherited from a society with a hegemonic family presence. This, on the one hand, gives a more solid affective structure than Anglo-Saxon individualist societies. This is reflected in the culture of the ballroom and the voguing of the late 70s (now claimed by Ryan Murphy's Pose series), which was one of the main cultural contributions of minorities to the LGTB collective.
In it, Latinos and African Americans expelled from their homes created their own family structure houses such as the Xtravaganza or the Ninja. However, in its less luminous part, this so-called "familism" shows the group's social control over the individual and that causes, in the search for a non-normative sexual orientation (in a Catholic and sexist social context), the feeling of Self-censorship, sin and break the status quo are much greater. And that, as Manuel Montoya Tajón pointed out in his study on Identity Development of Latino Gay Men (2009), ends up filtering the most intimate plots: there, the passive sexual role is stigmatized rather than the active one - in sex between men- and The gender role survives according to which masculinity does not show its feelings. Not to mention an idea of a sexually invisible woman who turns lesbians into practically asexual beings. Or transphobia, where all prejudices converge and are enhanced. Concepts that, with social and geographical change, perhaps we thought ideologically outdated in our minds but with cultural roots so deep that, unfortunately, they still lie in our beds.
Discrimination