De los Otros: Intimacy and Homosexuality Among Mexican Men.

By Joseph Carrier. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 321 + xxii pages. Cloth, $49.50; Paper, $16.50.

Reviewed by Manuel Fernandez, University of Southern California, Anthropology Department, Social Science Bldg. 154, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0032.

Joseph Carrier's monograph is the most complete work on Mexican male homosexual behavior appearing to date. Carrier's research is also pioneering. His 1972 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of California at Irvine, on which part of this book is based, was the first dissertation in anthropology to deal exclusively with homosexuality in any culture.

Carrier's work encompasses 25 years of studies of sexual behavior among lower-middle and upper-lower class males in Guadalajara and the northwestern regions of Mexico. Through patience and developing trust, Carrier was able to read the private script of Mexican society regarding sexuality--a script only revealed to the skilled ethnographer who has mastered qualitative research techniques. In this case, Carrier had the advantage of being considered an insider, because he is gay.

Carrier's goal was to study Mexican males' homosexual behaviors and their strategies for coping with feelings and situations generated in a society that is hostile to homosexuality. To do this, Carrier engaged in participant observation and qualitative analysis, which later were complemented by quantitative study.

Carrier's writing flows masterfully. He describes humorous situations without value judgment. He is also reflexive, by including himself in many descriptions of the events that took place during his research, although not to the point of describing his personal sexual encounters with informants over the years of living as part of the homosexual subculture in Mexico (pp. 45, 77).

Carrier sees the high incidence of same-sex behavior among Mexican males being due to the lack of available women (because most females' virginity is carefully guarded before marriage) (p. 46), gender segregation in the public, outside world (p. 31), and the fact that most Mexican males do not marry until their late 20s. This restricted access to females, Carrier argues, leads many males to choose other males as sexual outlets (p. 46). This is reinforced by the circum-Mediterranean-derived tradition that as long as a man plays the sexual role of the penetrator, he is still a "normal man." Young males learn from an early age that gender non-conforming males are appropriate objects to satisfy their sexual urges, and that this is acceptable, as long as it is not acknowledged publicly (pp. 16, 46, 188). Carrier found that anal intercourse is preferred to oral sex and that homosexual partners are usually categorized as either activo (active insertor) or pasivo (passive insertee).

Inequalities against pasivos or jotos ("faggots") are apparent in Carrier's descriptions, yet are not fully acknowledged in the book (p. 93). He does not acknowledge the cruelty of mayates. These heterosexually-identified insertors in same-sex intercourse and relationships usually charge money or another commodity for sex, and they often hold ambivalent feelings of desire and contempt toward the joto (pp. 83-84, 94, 100).

In Mexico, the little respect that exists for jotos' dignity is intertwined with a puzzling tolerance of certain behaviors and settings. For example, Carrier writes, "although these men followed different paths growing up, all of them have found acceptance within themselves and with their families and friends" (p. 97). This acceptance, however, is relative and needs to be placed in the context of a conspiracy of silence that is common in the Latin American, circum-Mediterranean-derived double standard that is the tradition of the public versus private. Because of crowded living conditions, especially in the lower classes, there is little privacy, even for sexual practices. Although families know what is going on, they act as if they do not (p. 109). Narratives on sexuality in general (and homosexuality in particular) belong, therefore, to the private script (p. 132).

Carrier's book contributes original data to the body of knowledge about the construction of the loca ("queen") identity. Initially, locas were differentiated from regular jotos in that locas were more flamboyant and behaved more "crazily" (loca means "crazy female"); they were less "serious" than "regular" homosexual males (pp. 104-106). Ultimately, however, every joto is a loca in the sense that a male who likes to be anally penetrated is not considered a serious person and by extrapolation becomes a loca. A man loses credibility--the ability to be taken seriously--by liking to be penetrated (p. 105). Therefore, the opposite of loca is serio (a serious person).

This book is especially valuable for sex researchers because of its original and pioneering ethnographic data on Mexican male sexuality. Although basically descriptive and not much influenced by newer theories, this book is uniquely valuable for students and investigators in the social sciences. Those interested in research methods and ethnographic techniques should find the book useful because of Carrier's in-depth, detailed description of methodology and research questionnaires.

Sexo entre Varones: Poder y Resistencia en el Campo Sexual (Sex among Males: Power and Resistance in the Sexual Field), by Guillermo Nunez Noriega, on the other hand, is very different from Carrier's book. This work is the first poststructuralist ethnographic study done by a Latin American scholar on the hegemonic representations of male homosexuality in Latin America. It was published in Spanish, the language in which the field work was conducted.

The book is divided into 4 parts and 11 chapters. The first three parts are framed following Pierre Bourdieu's model of sociological analysis. The fourth part provides conclusions.

The first part, "The field," presents a historical background of some of the most important theories of human sexuality. It describes how modem representations of sexuality in Western cultures have defined the sexual field.

The second part, "The habitus," focuses on the attitudes, skills, and perceptions that homosexual individuals in Hermosillo, Mexico, develop in response to the feeling of being different, which emerges when dealing with a sexual field and its hegemonic discourses. The difference is experienced as feelings of isolation during childhood. Testimonies by several homosexually-identified men are provided.

In part three, "The practices," Nunez Noriega expands the idea of social networks, diversity in lifestyles, and their borders among men who have sex with men (MSM). In brilliantly written Chapter 10, "El camping" (on "gay camp" or being "campy"), Nunez Noriega claims that camp is distinction and exclusiveness; camp belongs to the realm of festivity and celebration; camp belongs to a "time and space subtracted from the world of order and reason [surveilled] from the [Foucauldian] Panopticon" (p. 307).

The last section consists of a summary of the book and its conclusions. Nunez Noriega states that because of the multiplicity of sexual lifestyles that people can assume, "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" are limiting classifications within the full scope of human potentialities of sexual expression. Sex among males should not be classified as exclusively homosexual or being the opposite of heterosexual, but seen as a part of the polymorphous and perverse character of sexual impulse.

A major problem of this book is that it is written in its original university thesis format. It includes excessive information on theories about sexuality and the history of sexuality in the Western world, which, although related to the topic, does not have a direct impact on the subject of the book. There is an attempt to create a connection with Mexico, however, when Nunez Noriega reveals the existence of hegemonic representations of the sexual field in Hermosillo, which "would keep tight connections with a Christian value system and with medical discourses that appeared in Europe during the nineteenth century" (p. 104).

In addition, the book is almost entirely structured following Bourdieu's (1992) approach. Although the idea of describing Hermosillo homosexual males' lifestyles through Bourdieu's lens is original, this format does not compel the reader to formulate new questions as the findings are presented through the heavy screen of others' theories.

The book, however, needs to be placed in the context of the heavily conservative and traditionalist influence of Hermosillo's Colegio de Sonora (the book's publisher) over this work--a fearful influence, indeed, because of the challenging nature of the research for a society in which the Catholic Church still has great power. The book's format could not have been but what they considered "academic"--that is, requiring fully developed introductory and contextualizing chapters that justify the research topic and theoretical stances. The book, then, came out as an "academic report"--the only way it could have been published under those highly restrictive conditions.

A major weakness of this work is that Nunez Noriega conflates MSM with homosexually-identified and marginalized men. On the one hand, he seems to agree with scholars focused on MSM and their behaviors. He admits that "in spite of the [hegemonic] discourses and besides them, most people lead lifestyles which are rich, complex, contradictory, and transgressive. Ultimately, personal determination prevails over external imposition. Beyond the world of Reason there is the unchaste, the world of life, vita mundi" (p. 316). On the other hand, his work is focused almost exclusively on the self-definition and acceptance as homosexual, on the construction of a homosexual identity that the people interviewed (all of them homosexually-identified individuals) claimed to have experienced (p. 180). After reading the first two parts of this book, one wonders what happened to the vast majority of Mexican MSM who do not self-identity as homosexual. Only in parts three and four is a broader scope of MSM even briefly considered. MSM may build an identity around being jaladores or de ambiente but never around being homosexual; or they do not label themselves at all.

Finally, Nunez Noriega also ignores major differences in socioeconomic status and age range when considering the way MSM resist hegemonic discourses of sexuality. Because of this and the conflation mentioned previously, one wonders if the author is not essentializing male homosexuality in Hermosillo by presenting a monolithic view.

Because of its novelty within Latin American academic circles, a new revised edition of Sexo entre Varones should be published. The book's first edition consisted of only 500 copies. It is almost impossible to obtain in the U.S. This is indeed an important work that deserves to be translated into English and to be revised to go beyond the thesis version and the methodological limitations of its original fieldwork.

In contrast to Carrier's and Nunez Noriega's work, Leiner's major concern is sex education. If the book could be retitled, it should be called "Sex Education in Cuba: Machismo, Homosexuality, and AIDS," because sex education and its challenges in the age of AIDS, women's liberation, gay liberation and the crisis of Cuban revolution are the focus of this work.

Leiner claims that Cuba's harsh AIDS control measures, of isolating HIV-infected people in sanatoriums instead of stressing prevention and education as the rest of the Western world has done, has been a failure and a success at the same time. It has been a failure because it reflects the lack of faith that Cuban authorities have in education--specifically, sex education; and it has been a success in that Cuba has the lowest rates of AIDS infection in all of Latin America and also one of the lowest in the world. According to Leiner, an effective HIV-prevention and sex education plan has not been implemented in Cuba for a variety of reasons including the culture of machismo with its negative views of sex education, prejudice against male homosexuality (female homosexuality seems to be invisible for Cuban authorities and public opinion), and the belief that AIDS is a gay disease.

Because of the repressive political climate in Cuba, homophobia has become institutionalized. In 1965, Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) camps were created. There, many homosexual men were interned because they were considered social deviants. Although the UMAP camps no longer exist (they were closed in 1967 in response to international outcries), the quarantine policy of isolating people living with HIV shows that the Cuban government still takes repressive measures instead of relying on other less violent ways to deal with conflict. This is especially true of the AIDS quarantine as it reflects a continuum with the UMAP camps because of the very fact that AIDS is seen as a gay disease, even in a country where most infected people are heterosexual. The quarantine sanatoriums today, like the UMAP camps of the 1960s, reflect the government's use of macho control and its refusal to accept new ways of solving problems.

The belief that male sexuality is uncontrollable made Cuban authorities prefer the repressive quarantine instead of stressing education. Leiner uncritically provides this belief as an explanation for the existence of the quarantine. The question, however, is Why are women and children put in quarantine as well? The quarantine measures were developed during a time (1986) when AIDS was thought to be transmitted more easily than is known to be the case today. Better treatments had not yet appeared so people developed opportunistic infections sooner and died faster. Later, Leiner becomes more critical when he remarks that by maintaining old beliefs in the quarantine system, Cuban authorities are ignoring the existence of new treatments that delay the appearance of opportunistic infections and the onset of AIDS following HIV infection. In this way, quarantine policy today has become a burden for the Cuban economy because of the costs of maintaining sanatoriums and because healthy HIV-positive people have been removed from the active labor force in Cuba and placed in sanatoriums where they are not productive.

Finally, Leiner denounces another major obstacle for the eradication of the AIDS quarantine and the implementation of sex education in Cuba. Because of the double standard of public versus private, in which sexuality is only discussed in private, people (and the government) do not talk publicly about sex in a way that would be necessary to carry out public education. Quarantine, therefore, has been a way to avoid speaking publicly about sex.

One major weakness of Sexual Politics in Cuba is Leiner's uncritical presentation of others' ideas in his efforts to be "objective." He seems to believe every superstition of Cuban folklore, such as describing the appearance of the two white doves on Fidel Castro's shoulders after a speech (p. 5). Leiner also conveys information as presented by Cubans without critically commenting on them. For example, when describing a film on gays and lesbians in Cuba with the purpose of stressing how the situation has improved for them, he quotes some young Cubans' comments in the film on how free they are to express their sexuality as long as they do not go beyond the image that they are "just friends" (p. 50). What kind of freedom is this? By being uncritical, Leiner does not create a less biased, more "objective" treatment of the subject as he seems to pretend (p. xi), but he implicitly accepts these values. Other examples of uncritical thinking include his biologically deterministic and heterosexist comment about "the reciprocal attraction which unites men and women on the biological plane" (p. 98), or when he does not question traditional conceptions of the family (p. 99) nor sex education-related literature brought from Germany (p. 101).

He is also uncritical when writing about Fidel Castro. Even after admitting that Castro is a machista himself and acknowledging his overwhelming presence, Leiner puts aside Castro's homophobic narratives (p. 13). How is that possible in a work that is intended as a critique of machismo in Cuba? Leiner seems to answer this question when he claims that "existing discrimination [against homosexual people in Cuba] stems from individual social values and attitudes, not from official policies [sic]" (P. 51), clearly absolving politicians and leaders from responsibility about the persistence of machismo and homophobia in Cuba.

Later, however, Leiner presents himself as ambivalent regarding the impact of public policy in Cuba when claiming that "the AIDS crisis can be effectively faced without resorting to harsh measures, like quarantine, if the top leadership can put aside its own homophobia, machismo, and fear of losing control" (p. 147). The creation of quarantine sanatoriums is then based on irrational machista beliefs against male homosexuality and the public discussion of sex. Leiner suggests breaking the taboo of gays speaking publicly as gays about issues that concern them (in this case, AIDS) as a most important first step in improving the Cuban situation. He adds that a cultural revolution that will counter machismo and promote condom use will have to "confront the myth that men's sexual urge is uncontrollable and unable to change" (p. 148).

In spite of its weaknesses, this book remains an invaluable source of information about Cuban sexual politics and the role of sex education. Sexual Politics in Cuba will be an important book for educators and people interested in women and gay liberation movements within a Marxist context.

Although Carrier's, Nunez Noriega's, and Leiner's works are about homosexuality in Latin America, their approaches differ greatly. Whereas Carrier focused on sexual behavior and coping strategies among Mexican males, emphasizing fieldwork description and methodology, Nunez Noriega focused on sexual representations in Hermosillo, Mexico, using Bourdieu's Field, Habitus, and Practices model and Queer Theory (Bourdieu, 1992; Butler, 1990). Leiner focused on sex education in Cuba with an emphasis on how machismo, homosexuality, and AIDS have challenged the politics of these educations programs. To synthesize the direction of these works in the study of Latin American homosexualities: Carrier's is the behavior of sex, Nunez Noriega's is the philosophy of sex, and Leiner's is the education of sex--three different approaches that will enrich Latin American gender and sexuality studies.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1992). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press.

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.