Becoming Gay in Neoliberal Mexico

The Struggle to Be Gay—In Mexico, for Example
By Roger N. Lancaster
University of California Press, 280 pages, $29.95

As its title indicates, The Struggle to Be Gay—In Mexico, for Example is a book of paradoxes. Hardly any American reader would think of “gay” as a state of being that anyone would struggle to attain, in Mexico or anywhere else. Yet the anthropologist Roger Lancaster succeeds in dramatizing an often desperate striving, against obstacles of poverty, precarity, and prejudice, for the sense of status, security, and dignity that gay identity represents for many Mexicans. This struggle comes to life mainly in a long series of stories that the author heard or experienced over the course of two decades. 

Near the middle of the book, Lancaster recalls an evening in 2007 when he rearranged the furniture in his small apartment in the city of Puebla, struggling to fit chairs around a laptop perched on the end of his dining table. The previous day, he had been drinking at his favorite haunt, Luciérnaga (The Firefly), a cafe-bar catering to queer Mexicans in the city’s historic center, when an acquaintance asked him his opinion of the film Brokeback Mountain. When he confessed he had not seen it, a lesbian bartender, astonished and dismayed, insisted on bringing him a bootleg copy to watch; before he knew it, a dozen friends had invited themselves to the screening. As the tightly packed spectators watched and commented on the epic romance, Lancaster found himself unexpectedly moved, especially by the scenes in which the aging cowboy Ennis Del Mar, sinking into a life of poverty sustained by dismal odd jobs, lashes out at his lover, blaming him—and by implication, his own sexuality—for his dashed life hopes: “It’s because of you, Jack, that I’m like this. I’m nothin’. I’m nowhere.” The group fell quiet as the movie reached its wistful ending, in which Ennis, now alone, gazes on the few mementoes of his long-past affair. As Lancaster’s sniffles turned to outright weeping, a young Mexican man referred to as “Diego” put a comforting arm around his shoulder and reassured him: “Don’t cry, Róger. You have to remember, they lived in a different time from us. We have more chances to build a better life. We don’t have to live like that anymore.”

Many a conventional media theorist, as Lancaster points out, would take the scene of a dozen queer Mexicans forcing their gringo friend to watch a bootlegged Hollywood horse opera as a springboard to expound upon how “the globalized object of the movie,” transmitted via “black market circuits,” influences the “development of sexual subcultures.” One might find here an array of themes beloved of academic queer theorists: media-savvy cosmopolitanism enabling the quasi-illicit subversion of borders, laws, and—by providing an occasion for male expressions of emotion and intimacy—of normative masculinity. 

But Lancaster eschews these approaches and focuses instead on the words of the young man he calls Diego. Who, he asks, is the “we” he casually invokes, and with whom he contrasts an equally vague “them”?  The answer, in Lancaster’s estimation, is the imagined collective of gay men: an international fellowship that embraces both Roger and Diego in a common milieu of sex, slang, and status, as well as a shared narrative of progress and liberation.

Being “gay” was a novel and alluring possibility for Mexicans like Diego at the dawn of the 21st century, but not for the reasons an Anglo-American audience might assume. Neither homosexuality nor opportunities for men to seek sex and companionship with other men were new to Mexico; on the contrary, since at least the early decades of 20th century, the country harbored an extensive, sometimes vibrant homoerotic subculture, inhabiting a sprawling archipelago of cafes, clubs, cruising grounds, and bathhouses, many of which displayed shrines of patron saints beside their doorways. By midcentury, this floating world was an open secret in Mexican society, and it came to be called el ambiente—literally, “the environment,” but in this case meaning something closer to “the scene” or “the lifestyle.” The furtive question, “¿Eres de ambiente?” carried a similarly knowing import to the urbane Anglophone query, “Are you in the life?” (The ambiente even makes an appearance in Brokeback Mountain, in the form of the half-lit Mexican alley in which Jack seeks sex during a long separation from Ennis.)

The neoliberal reforms initiated during the presidency of Vicente Fox at the turn of the millennium allowed the ambiente to come part way out of the shadows. Relaxed censorship and the enactment of anti-discrimination laws allowed many to live more openly, and as part of the downsizing of the public sector, the state shifted resources towards private NGOs catering to the needs of niche demographic groups, the LGBT community prominent among them. Newly permissive and evenhanded attitudes eased the granting of licenses to gay and lesbian establishments, allowing for the emergence, in Mexico City and a few other major urban centers, of an open and flourishing Zona Rosa (“pink quarter”—so called because it was seen as intermediate between the white of respectable society and the red of prostitution). At the same time, liberalized trade under NAFTA opened the floodgates to American commodities and media—and with them, the image and outlook of the contemporary gay man, complete with designer clothes, a white-collar career, and a busy travel schedule taking him to fashionable locales from Berlin to Acapulco.

The new gay persona—open, proud, and prosperous—was in many ways foreign to the ambiente. Some of Lancaster’s subjects found that they preferred the old ways, which were more fluid and flexible—not to mention less expensive. The customs of the ambiente had reflected a view of sexuality as defined by overlapping realms or spaces, rather than fixed human types, meaning that its denizens could pursue a myriad of tastes across a secretive social map. One man quoted in the book bemoans the new obsession with labels, declaring that he doesn’t care whether the men he blows identify as “gay” or “straight.”

“The international gay world is hyper-conscious of image and status.”

Nonetheless, the gay identity has found fertile ground in Mexico. Lancaster describes young men in the Zona Rosa adopting the latest trends in clothes and speech, obtaining convincing designer knockoffs and turning to advice columns to keep up with new lingo like “polyamory.” The international gay world is hyper-conscious of image and status, urging participants to gauge their “value” on the dating “market,” in line with the neoliberal cultivation of “human capital.” 

But a gayness yoked to branding and consumption is frustratingly out of reach for most of the Mexicans who strive for it. Urban working-class men who can’t afford trendy nightclub covers are sometimes relegated to the old category of puto (the male form of “whore,” often applied to men who play the receptive role in sex). Meanwhile, rural men who “come out” often find it too financially and emotionally costly to uproot themselves and move to the cities; living with family, they must keep their sexual lives on hold or limit them to furtive nocturnal outings. Even middle-class but unfashionable men are marginal to gay life. Lancaster recounts that a friend who works in a bar despite holding a sociology degree, lamented to him that “gayness (is) essentially a consumer culture”; when the author insists that the two of them are gay despite their lack of trendy taste, the friend corrects him: “No, Róger, you and I are homosexuals.”

Lancaster resists the temptation to condescend to his subjects, or to dismiss the “gay” image that Mexican men seek as nothing but an exploitative mirage. What, he asks, is the point of telling people what they should or should not want? For one thing, these youths are as conscious as anyone else of their exploitation—many of them work in the same maquilas (border factories) that produce the high-end clothes that travel across the border to be stamped with designer labels, only to be shipped back to Mexico to be sold at enormous markups. Nonetheless, this awareness does not diminish their desires. Is it not part of ordinary human life to long for things—love, sex, status, security—that elude our grasp?

“Gay identity has taken hold in Mexico precisely because it is aspirational.”

Indeed, gay identity has taken hold in Mexico precisely because it is aspirational, rooted as it is in a liberal individualist myth of “coming out,” of breaking the constraints of old conventions and discovering one’s free and authentic self. This mythic narrative, Lancaster shrewdly observes, accords with the longstanding quest for modernization in Mexico. The hegemonic ideology of the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI—which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century—denigrated rural indigenous life as poor and primitive while celebrating the mestizo cities as productive and dynamic, the keys to the Mexican future. 

Diego, who comforts Roger at the end of Brokeback Mountain, springs from an indigenous village in the state of Oaxaca, yet he disavows his ancestral background, claiming the title of mestizo by virtue of his education, his refined style and manners, and his fluent Spanish. The fictional Ennis Del Mar, in this sense, personifies the background from which Diego hopes to distance himself, standing in at once for the fearful closeted man and for the country rustic who has failed to free himself from the ignorance and poverty of rural life—recall that the cowboy persona originated with the Mexican vaquero. His consoling words for Roger—affirming that we have the chance to live better than them—invoke at once the ideology of gay liberation and the narrative of modernization and its promises of freedom and abundance in the city.

But this is only the beginning of Diego’s story. His subsequent life, as Lancaster narrates it, encapsulates the bitter ironies and disappointments of gay life in Mexico and across much of the world. What neoliberal reform gives with one hand it takes away with the other; the same liberalization campaign that opened the door to the flourishing of the Zona Rosa also subjected Mexican cities to the instability of privatization and exposure to international financial shocks, making the social networking and self-cultivation of the gay ideal impossible for wage workers. 

While in his early twenties, Diego—attractive, smart, and outwardly masculine—constituted what one might call a “hot commodity,” but he lacked the time and money to keep up a steady social life; he worked at a restaurant, was repeatedly robbed, and withdrew from his social circle as he apparently resorted to prostitution. In his thirties, however, he was able to obtain subsidized higher education and a steady job as an accountant, making him the most economically successful working-class man that Lancaster met in Mexico. Nonetheless, he found himself lonely and his romantic life a bust. He worked 12-hour days, leaving little time for socializing beyond a small circle, and age took a heavy toll on his looks. Even for those who manage to climb the class ladder, the brute economic realities of long hours, precarity, and expensive housing make the dream of living a gay life practically unattainable. 

Moreover, the toleration of the gay identity brought with it a privatizing and atomizing drive. The legalization of gay marriage in the early 2010s, although exciting for Diego and affirming for the community, was materially beneficial only for a small number of couples with children or property, but also provided the state with cover from accusations of homophobia, enabling local governments to crack down on gay gathering places. In the mid-2010s, Mexico City sought to “clean up” the Zona Rosa and Puebla expunged queer hangouts from the city center, both cities hoping to redevelop the gay district for high-end tourism, and each one using supposed concerns over underage drinking as a pretext for targeted harassment. Lancaster describes a Kafkaesque scene he witnessed at Luciérnaga, in which city inspectors confronted the proprietor, Yuli, asking her, “don’t you think most of your clients are too young to be in a place like this?” When Yuli responded that the staff scrupulously checked visitors’ ID cards to ensure that they were over 18, and invited the inspectors to verify for themselves, the head inspector responded: “Yes, but even so, don’t you think they are still too young?” We may imagine Yuli’s and Roger’s wry bemusement as the other inspectors nodded in agreement; but the bar was shut down a few weeks later. By 2018, open gay life was more or less wiped out of central Puebla and severely curtailed in Mexico City, the fabled Zona Rosa a ghost of its former self. (The district partly recovered after the progressive Claudia Sheinbaum, now the president-elect of Mexico, became governor of Mexico City in 2018; but according to Lancaster, gay nightlife in Puebla has not.) 

The wave of suppression effectively bifurcated the community into, on the one hand, legal and domesticated “gay” life, and on the other, the ambiente, which persists in the dark corners of public spaces. What was lost was the “pink” middle ground, in which queer people of various backgrounds, genders, and classes could meet and socialize with a minimum of fear, and without which scenes like the viewing party at Roger’s apartment could not take place. Indeed, many patrons of gay nightlife theorized that the real motive for the crackdown was the fear of intermingling across class lines, which is often uniquely intense in homosexual spaces.

However, it would be foolish to think that class subversion was the purpose of the Zona Rosa or of any other queer space. Ironically, theorists who portray such spaces as fundamentally political agree with the city officials who suppressed the Zona Rosa in perceiving homosexuality as a threat to mainstream society. In contrast, Lancaster rightly insists that the point of sexual subcultures is not to subvert the social order, but to have fun—to go on adventures or take risks, to make merry or make friends, to find sexual liaisons or perhaps the love of your life. It is hard to see the point of gay relationships having legal sanction if there is no shared ground for them to meet in the first place: “I’d gladly give up gay marriage,” one of Lancaster’s subjects says, “if we could have the Zona back.” In this way, the struggle to be gay in Mexico is part of a global struggle over semi-public social spaces in a commercializing and atomizing world.

Diego’s story, like many of the others told in The Struggle to Be Gay, demonstrates that no matter how liberated the queer world may be, it will continue to be an arena of unfulfilled longings. Lancaster recalls making a remark about “effeminate” gay men, to which Diego retorts, “but Róger, I am effeminate.” The young man reveals that despite his masculine exterior, he has always considered himself to have a feminine and romantic nature. To defend himself while growing up in a conservative village, he developed a “butch” persona, which he maintains in the city because it makes him desirable on the sex and dating market. However, his partners tend to abandon him when he reveals that he wishes to take the receptive role in sex. 

Most of all, Diego longs for a loving long-term partner. He had, Lancaster recalls, one liaison with a French expatriate who appreciated his intelligence, engaged him in long conversations, happily took the active role in sex, and kissed him passionately and whispered French obscenities in his ear. Diego was enthralled—but broke off the relationship when the man refused to commit to monogamy. Years later, with his dating life largely over, Diego finds himself haunted by the short-lived romance (in a cruelly ironic parallel to Ennis at the end of Brokeback Mountain). Here, the mythical “coming out” has led into another closet, in which personal desires are hidden and subjected to the harsh demands of an economic and sexual “market.”

“Social and financial capital shape the gay world and the lives of men within it.”

Perhaps The Struggle to Be Gay should not lead us to give up hope for Diego—but it should force us to take seriously the obstacles to happiness, both internal and external, that men like him face. Lancaster, for his part, clearly struggles with how to sum up the significance of all that he has learned in Mexico. He repeatedly contrasts his approach to queer life with that of other theorists; at times he seems to say that his book’s main intervention is to illustrate the constitutive role of class in gay life. Certainly, Lancaster is correct that social and financial capital shape the gay world and the lives of men within it in ways that are too little appreciated; time will tell whether the book succeeds in awakening the fields of anthropology and queer theory to the importance of class. 

However, for the nonspecialist, the book’s more fundamental strength lies in Lancaster’s compassion, which any ordinary reader can perceive. This compassion underpins his insistence on viewing his subjects as fully-fledged people with rich inner lives and his concomitant refusal to reduce them to political props or setpieces of gender performance. The Struggle to Be Gay reveals that the particular dilemmas of the queer scene in a particular country revolve, after all, around matters of the heart.