James Thing
Empirical Paper Draft, 12.08.03
2
syncing a Spanish pop tune. The crowed roared with claps, hoots and hollers. With a
variety of outfits or costumes, hairstyles, performance styles, several different vestidas
performed for over an hour for an excited crowd.
As I looked around the crowd at this party that I recently attended, the diversity of
gay identities within this Angelino Latino community was quite evident. Similar to
scenes at parties, bars and discos that I attended throughout my stint of fieldwork in
Mexico, the mixture of vestidas, maricones, machos and gays at this party and the
textures of their gender performances and sexual identities reveals much about
contemporary male homosexuality in U.S. Latino communities as well as in Mexico.
Foregrounded and taking the spotlight – at this party, in the popular imagination of
Mexico (and Latino communities in the U.S.) and within the literature on Mexican male
homosexuality – are the vestidas, or transvestites/transgendered, as well as the
maricones, or “effeminate” homosexual men. Also within the mix, however, gender-
conforming “gay” men abound.
Increasingly, scholars have been aware of the coexistence of two major models of
Mexican male homosexuality, one, a sex role based – gender-stratified – activo/pasivo
model, and, the other, an object choice construction similar to the gay model that
dominates in postindustrial western societies (Murray 2000). However, by focusing on
and exaggerating the dominance of the activo/pasivo form of homosexuality, much of the
literature on Mexican male homosexuality, while overemphasizing the most visible or
prominent image of homosexuality (i.e., the vestidas, or maricones), has tended to
downplay, at best, or, ignore, at worst, the growing presence of gay identities which do
not follow the active/passive form. This tendency to focus on the activo/pasivo form has
Convention