This essay is both a historiographical review of male homosexuality in Latin America and a historical synthesis of the intellectual and cultural traditions of attitudes, mores, and laws regarding homosexuality.1 The topic of male homosexuality is a powerful lens through which historians can address and problematize the dilemmas of reconstructing the social past.2 Taken originally as a corrective against overly diplomatic and political history, the new social history of the 1970s still bears crucially on the subject of homosexuality because the available scholarship still struggles with the basic issues of reconstruction.The history of homosexuality bears centrally on the nature of sexual relations, reproduction, marriage, and family, all central components of social values. Unfortunately, the scarcity of extant sources and the nascent quality of its historiography render the study of homosexuality in Latin America difficult. Scholars of this subject wrestle quite consciously over the dilemma of “realistic reconstruction” of action as opposed to the study of collective representations. The lack of narratives by gay men, the issues of “filtration” of sources through those who wrote about the “objects” of crime and sin, and the overall scarcity of material contribute to this dilemma. As a result, the use of espistemology as a framework retains strong allure for many scholars working on Latin American homosexuality. Precisely because there is scant documentation of the actual social behavior and cultural worlds of homosexuals in Latin America, scholars have understandably been drawn to theoretical models of gender and sexuality.Two concerns are woven together into a strand of social, cultural, and intellectual history; in other words, homosexuality conjures the dilemma between behavior and proscription. On the one hand, there exist intellectual and cultural traditions of attitudes, mores, and laws regarding homosexuality. Taken in their broadest terms, Michel Vovelle defines this territory as both ideology and mentality. In this model, ideology represents the more formalized discussions that bear on a particular subject. Consequently, law, theology, military sanction, governmental policy, and propaganda constitute ideology. Mentalities are less definable, more fluid, and, as the famous annaliste historian Marc Bloch understood them, derive from collective representations.3 For our purposes here, mentality concerning homosexuality includes popular attitudes, social customs, response to Church teachings, reaction to law, as well as the beliefs, customs, and concerns of homosexual and bisexual men.This essay is divided into several sections because the scholarship is fragmented along geographical and epochal boundaries: section 1 focuses on the Spanish colonial period, drawing on Mexican and Iberian theological and legal traditions to provide a fuller understanding of colonial attitudes toward homosexuality; section 2 offers a critical overview of the historiography of colonial Brazil; the third section is a speculative discussion of the period from roughly 1700 to 1870, a period marked by a near-complete absence of historiographic attention for the subject under review. Studies of the so-called period of modernization that followed showcase a growing body of scholarship on homo sexuality. For the most part, such work tends to show how attitudes toward homosexuality gained a positivist and psychiatric distinction. The essay concludes with a discussion of the works of anthropologists and sociologists, from 1940 to 2000.The long-cherished assumptions of patriarchy and male-dominated sexuality have guided the historiography of homosexuality in Latin America. Two theoretical models inform this classification. First, the honor-shame paradigm of Latin American and Mediterranean society suggests that sexuality is a key component of the system of honor and shame. A classic formulation of this paradigm is Julian Pitt-Rivers’s discussion of the sexual honor in the Mediterranean. Pitt-Rivers argues that penetration is the overriding metaphor for such honor; thus before marriage, a woman needed to be a virgin in order to protect her honor and man should not have been sexually penetrated.4 Numerous Latin Americanists who specialize in gender studies have shown that this system is indeed endemic to domestic and marital culture,5 but the problem for the subject of homosexuality is that sexual metaphors and the honor-shame model do not always map neatly onto male-male sexual interaction. The result is that numerous scholars have taken the honor-shame paradigm as a for the and of male-male sexual model on which numerous scholars for theoretical is the by a the that and of about the nature of Mexican sexual have a over the historiography and of Mexican and Latin American In argues that the both of Mexican sexuality and is to to and the the Mexican to for the who her to this to is to and the sexually is the the metaphor of sexual penetration for and that homosexuality in to a system in which the are and the are as their male nature through the penetration of a have such a of homosexual behavior as the The is with and the male is with and because this system in that a on to the and is to male models that Latin American homosexuality is on a many scholars that the ideology of cultural and sexual over that the of homosexuality The is and the is to be and the of the This essay show that there is in the sexual ideology of Latin America the that male and and the that this not as many scholars that the homosexual from legal and social the of the and as a on for and In this wrote that the of man as as the and of that to be one of the of and one of the most of the that a that the but to to the in as the to to who of the most and critical discussions of sexual and for of and the several of in between a virgin with a and the to be in its the the of this sin, of and the and in the the Latin theological that the to the man on of the the in terms, by by this with the against both of which understood as male homosexuality. of this quite is a of the in the and of the body of the who the that is for the of from this that the of a man with be as as that of in but that the of less between discussion of in this subject and, one of the historians of homosexuality for our period, the in of homosexuality in the In focuses on of the more concerning homosexuality as well as discussion of works in a The of in As and of as male homosexuality to in the period, and understood to 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