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When I reflect on what it means to make movies starring LGBT characters in Mexico, I recall words uttered by a high-ranking official at the Secretariat of Culture’s Mexican Film Institute. When I tried to get his support for funding to finish my first film, Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jamás acabarás de ser amor (“A Thousand Clouds of Peace”) (2003), he told me, “The state doesn’t have to support movies about faggots.” The rage I felt then has since waned, if only a little, in the face of a shifting cinematic landscape. Today, a growing number of films feature LGBT characters and themes, and major venues, mostly in the three big cities of Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara, freely exhibit them. These films flicker in the darkness of theaters, but they are as powerful a force for activism as any march or protest movement.

Mexican queer cinema dates back to the 1930s when Manual Tamés played Don Pedrito, the nosey, effeminate male neighbor in Fernando de Fuentes’s 1939 film, La casa del ogro (“The House of the Ogre”). The character was seen as an example of bourgeois decadence, and de Fuentes, the greatest Mexican filmmaker of the 30s, unwittingly helped to fuel animosity toward gay and bisexual men. For generations, Mexican audiences mocked the effete male fashion designer or hairdresser, the gossipy waiter at the cabaret, or the ridiculous transvestite who often pretends to be an older lady or assumes the role of a prostitute.

Perhaps the most iconic example of this denigrated archetype is the 1969 film Modisto de señoras (“Ladies’ Fashion Designer”), in which comedian Mauricio Garcés plays a successful straight fashion designer who seduces the women who visit his atelier while feigning an extremely effeminate demeanor in order not to raise any suspicion from their husbands. There’s also a long tradition of cross-dressing comics, starting with La tía de las muchachas (“The Girls’ Aunt”) (1938), where Enrique Herrera pretends to be a venerable older lady so he can prevent his girlfriend from marrying a wealthy graybeard. Tellingly, the absurd procedure Herrera’s character goes through to become more feminine is to take a hormone concoction in order to change his voice and demeanor.

This trope blew up throughout the 70s and 80s, when comedians and leading men alike, such as Alfonso Zayas, Lalo ‘El Mimo’, or Alberto ‘El Caballo’ Rojas, played characters who pretended to be women mostly to evade capture after committing a crime or simply to win over the women they loved by getting into their dressing rooms, beauty parlors, and bedrooms. What mainstream audiences saw in LGBT characters, or characters aping some LGBT stereotype, was comic relief, not realistic portrayals. The entire paradigm of LGBT was reduced to a vehicle for romantic and sexual misunderstandings in classic cinema, and homophobic double-entendres in sex comedies.

This dynamic is directly related to the machismo of Mexican society, where socio-cultural progress has been slow — and for decades, invisible — for a community practicing the “unspeakable sin” (that’s how sodomy was described during the colonial era). Although homosexuality was decriminalized in Mexico in the 19th century, gay and bisexual men have remained particular targets of systematic persecution, imprisonment, harassment, and discrimination for violating “morals and good customs” — in other words, the laws may have changed but machismo was still the lay of the land.

If the 1970s were the crescendo of homophobic misrepresentations in cinema, they also saw the birth of the first notable exceptions. Arturo Ripstein’s perfect 1978 tragedy, El lugar sin límites (“The Place Without Limits”) about a transvestite who commands a small town’s brothel, included the first kiss between two men seen on Mexican screens. The film went on to win the Special Jury Prize at the prestigious San Sebastián Film Festival. Throughout his career, Ripstein’s body of work consistently depicted the hardships LGBT Mexicans faced.

Another rara avis of that generation was the director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, who made a number of groundbreaking movies under extraordinary constraints. He explored same-sex relationships with films such as El cumpleaños del perro (“The Birthday of the Dog” (1975), Matinée (1977), and Doña Herlinda y su hijo (“Doña Herlinda and Her Son”) (1985), and in Las apariencias engañan (“Appearances Are Deceptive”) (1983), Hermosillo directed the first — and so far only — Mexican film with an intersex protagonist. That he achieved these milestones during an era when the Mexican film industry had been largely nationalized and under the control of institutional censors makes it that much more remarkable. Few filmmakers — in Mexico or elsewhere — can boast filmographies as fiercely independent as Hermosillo.

Indeed, gay and bi characters emerged as the bastard sons of state-backed cinema in the 70s and 80s, progressing through various stages of exploitation. The melodrama La primavera de los escorpiones (“The Spring of the Scorpions”) (1971) shows the ruin of a male couple’s relationship. The chili western Los marcados (“They called him Marcado”) (1971) features a pair of tormented outlaws who were both lovers as well as father and son. Recodo de purgatorio (“Purgatory Bend”) (1975), directed by and starring José Estrada, is an autobiographical ego trip in which Estrada scandalously explores homosexuality, sexual abuse, and gender-bending. The film was only ever screened a single time publicly and then hastily buried in university archives while the notoriety and infamy of its censorship and prohibition grew to legendary proportions. And El hombre de la mandolina (“The Man of the Mandolin”) (1985), depicts the tortuous life of a gay young man in small-town Mexico suffering under the yoke of his overbearing mother and a hostile community.

None of these stories had a happy ending. Condemnation, ignominy, and death always loomed over those who were considered different, but these films were nevertheless part of the same generation that took to the streets to stage the first public gay, lesbian, and bi demonstrations and demand their rights.

A young Jaime Humberto Hermosillo behind the scenes.

As a gay man and a filmmaker myself, I began making movies inspired by this rich tradition of queer Mexican cinema, and the many cinematic craftsmen who embraced both masculinity and same-sex love. Even in the early 90s, however, when I was making my first student films, cultural and institutional homophobia still greeted me at every turn. The urban homosexual young men I wanted to portray were completely absent from the official Mexican cinema world, so I made it my mission to depict them. I wasn’t trying to feature coming-out stories, or oppressive homes with castrating mothers or deadbeat fathers. The focus characters had to move away from their identity or orientation and focus instead on their burning search for affection. The desire for physical, bodily love became for me not merely a cinematic motif, but a political crusade.

That’s how I approached the subject in my 1995 feature-length thesis film, Hubo un tiempo en que los sueños dieron paso a largas noches de insomnio (“Long Sleepless Nights”), in which an impossible love blossoms between two young men, one of whom pushes the other into a life of prostitution and crime. In every one of my feature films since Mil Nubes de Paz, including El cielo dividido (“Broken Sky”) (2006), Rabioso sol, rabioso cielo (“Raging Sun, Raging Sky”) (2009), Yo soy la felicidad de este mundo (“I am happiness on Earth”) (2014), La huella de unos labios (“The trace of your lips”) (2023), and Los demonios del amanecer (“Demons at Dawn”) (2024), the protagonists are young men who have a very frontal — and occasionally explicit — vision of their sexuality.

During the many right-wing Mexican administrations in the early years of this century, queer filmmakers leaned into the cinema of sexual dissidence. The early days were tough. For years, our movies were sidelined from mainstream accessibility through the label of “gender cinema” or “gay cinema”, which completely disqualified any chance of funding or wide theatrical distribution. We were attempting cinematic approaches that strayed from conventional style. We were investigating, through the making of our films, the use of uninterrupted sequence shots, the fragmentation of bodies on screen, negative space, and so forth. We felt that we couldn’t do justice to LGBT visibility if we weren’t also creating visually striking imagery with shots that burst off the screen.

Eventually, the government had to support its first movie “about faggots” when my film Mil nubes was selected to participate in the Berlin International Film Festival in 2003, where it won the first Teddy Award for a Latin American film. This opened the doors for countless modern Mexican filmmakers to move beyond the label of “queer cinema” in order to reach broader audiences, thawing the sexual frigidity of mainstream cinema and thus doing the work of LGBT activism unintentionally.

Slowly, Mexico has changed, and cinema has accompanied legislative advances such as anti-discrimination laws and the legalization of same-sex marriage, but the troubling rise in anti-LGBT hate crimes, especially against trans people — only underscores the need for the “love that dare not speak its name” to keep reclaiming its space and for Mexican movies to keep pushing politics forward, one sensual film at a time.

Translated from Spanish by Chucho E. Quintero.

Published July 1, 2024