Queer Mexico

Cinema and Television since 2000

Paul Julian Smith

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814342756
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études LGBT

Queer Mexico: Cinema and Television since 2000 provides critical analysis of both mainstream and independent audiovisual works, many of them little known, produced in Mexico since the turn of the twenty-first century. In the book, author Paul Julian Smith aims to tease out the symbiotic relationship between culture and queerness in Mexico. Smith begins with the year 2000 because of the political shift that happened within the government—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted out of national office after over seventy years in power. Judicial and social changes for LGBT Mexicans came in the wake of what was known at the time as simply "the change" ("el cambio") at the start of the millennium, bringing about an increased visibility and acknowledgment of the LGBT community. Divided into five chapters, Queer Mexico demonstrates the diversity of both representation and production processes in the Mexican film and television industry. It attempts also to reconstruct a queer cultural field for Mexico that incorporates multiple genres and techniques. The first chapter looks at LGBT festivals, porn production, and a web-distributed youth drama, claimed by its makers to be the first wholly gay series made in Mexico. The second chapter examines selected features and shorts by Mexico's sole internationally distributed art house director, Julián Hernández. The third chapter explores the rising genre of documentary on transgender themes. The fourth chapter charts the growing trend of a gay, lesbian, or trans-focused mainstream cinema. The final chapter addresses the rich and diverse history of queer representation in Mexico's dominant television genre and, arguably, national narrative: the telenovela. The book also includes an extensive interview with gay auteur Julián Hernández. The first book to come out of the Queer Screens series, Queer Mexico is a groundbreaking monograph for anyone interested in media or LGBT studies, especially as it relates to the culture of Latin America.

1 FESTIVALS, WEBSERIES, PORN

The camera moves slowly over an attractive male couple on a city balcony, clad only in speedos. We hear them argue as one sings languidly along to Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” The other man, who has handsome mestizo features and a dancer’s physique, leaves the apartment to sunbathe nude on their building’s roof. An attractive young woman approaches him and initiates sex (during the act he flashes back to his male lover’s face). When they have finished, the boy discovers that his clothes have been stolen. The girl then lends him her flimsy, flowery frock to return home in. His boyfriend, aroused at this unaccustomed costume, makes love to him on the kitchen counter. As they embrace, the partner flashes back to the girl he had just met on the roof.

This short video, which is made up entirely of still photos, is the trailer for the eighteenth edition of the Mix Festival (known more formally as “Festival of Sexual Diversity in Film and Video”), which was held in 2014 in Mexico City. And in this opening chapter I address three minor genres, practices, or discursive contexts that show better perhaps than major feature films how the audiovisual is embedded in everyday Mexican queer life. Once marginal, these practices are now central to academic inquiry (festivals are an established topic at, say, the annual conference of Society of Cinema and Media Studies). Yet my three objects of analysis remain little studied, indeed relatively little known, even in Mexico, their home country. They are the already mentioned Mix Festival; a teenage webseries made by small independent multimedia company Tres Tercios, said to be first wholly gay drama in the country; and a long-lasting porn producer called Mecos, allegedly named after an indigenous word for “cum.”

Although these three phenomena are clearly diverse in their production and reception, I will argue that they have much in common. To anticipate, they all embrace hybridity, transmedia, and entrepreneurship. Thus, as we shall see, the festival stages tensions between the domestic and the foreign and between the cultural and the erotic. The webseries combines a romantic, even utopian, vision of queer youth “at the end of the rainbow” with a more everyday social perspective, which acknowledges the necessary limits of gay life in the metropolis, especially for high school students. And the porn videos, surprisingly perhaps, head in a similar direction, moving out from the utopian promise of the purely erotic single scene to embrace (however slyly or ironically) more troubling social issues that are expressed in narrative form and at feature length. In all three cases the combination of existing artistic elements can thus lead to innovation, to the emergence of new sexual and artistic forms.

Hybrid by nature, my three examples are also transmediatic in their creation and distribution. Marginal to established cultural channels, they leave of necessity just a fragile remainder in print or on the web. Thus, the festival lives on only in its programs, posters, and promos (I consulted materials for early editions on paper in the library or Center of Documentation in Mexico City’s Cineteca). The webseries vanished from the Internet after its first staggered release and was only briefly available on DVD (I purchased it at a Mixup video store in the capital’s Historic Center). Mecos’s films are also edited on DVD (I bought one in a sex shop in the gay village of the Zona Rosa), but until recently are more likely to be accessed in blurry, roughly edited versions on free aggregation sites such as PornHub and XTube (Mecos’s online store is only accessible within Mexico).

Yet perhaps, as deconstruction taught us long ago, the center is dependent on the margin that it seeks in vain to exclude, marking as the latter does the limit of acceptable expression. Certainly, in all three cases these unauthorized and often collective practices are also the creation of little known individual auteurs, who, like their more consecrated counterparts, have long labored to produce original cultural work. Indeed, there are close and sometimes surprising links between my minor genres and mainstream audiovisual practitioners such as art house director Julián Hernández, the subject of my next chapter.

Entrepreneurship is also more complex than might first appear. One trade journal claims that it requires attention not only to ideas and profits but also to social goods (Brooks 2015). The entrepreneur thus engages simultaneously with the registers of the creative, the financial, and even the ethical. And his or her most important prerequisite is said to be “passion.” It follows, then, that in my context of minor entrepreneurship, investment in all these areas (festivals, webseries, porn production) is to be read as both commercial and libidinal. Indeed, given the uncertain economics of the queer audiovisual in Mexico, where no such business is likely to make much money, the pleasure of the producers (as well as that of the consumers) will doubtless take precedence over their profit.

The festival video with which I began this chapter bears the name Vestido or “Dressed” in honor of Mix’s theme that year. And it embodies the three characteristics mentioned earlier. Thus, it is hybrid in form, at once sweetly romantic and cheekily erotic, combining pop culture (that campy Nancy Sinatra song) with higher art: the trailer as a whole is in fact closely based on a short by established festival favorite François Ozon called Une Robe d’été (“A Summer Dress,” 1996). The Mexican remake’s refusal of moving pictures also mimics the technique of La Jetée (1962) by avant-garde pioneer Chris Marker. Mix’s boy and girl even signal the trailer’s debt to French cinephile tradition by exchanging a few words in that language.

The promo is also transmediatic, an insubstantial remainder of an event that now lives on only in the memories of festivalgoers and organizers or in the press cuttings of specialist reviewers. Indeed, it barely survives as a film itself: the version on YouTube is lacking in the crucial soundtrack, removed for copyright violation, and only the artier platform Vimeo currently hosts the full film.

Yet this ephemeral short also testifies obliquely to a sustained effort of entrepreneurship: it was produced by the founder and artistic director of Mix who has worked indefatigably for the festival for almost twenty years. And his declared mission to subvert or challenge viewers is clear even here in this trailer. The theme of “sexual diversity” (the label by which the festival has been officially named throughout its lifetime) is in Vestido dramatized by a close (too close for comfort?) cohabitation between straight and gay, women and men. The boy’s first time with a girl, shown in the trailer, thus intermingles with his continuing affair with his male partner. It is a morale that would not necessarily prove palatable to mainstream gay audiences. On the other hand, the festival poster for that year is more reassuringly homoerotic: it shows rather the two men embracing in the kitchen, one naked and the other skimpily dressed in the newly torn summer dress. The girl, who is played by well-known film and TV actress Paulina Gaitán, is nowhere to be seen (she also appeared in Las Aparicio [Cadena 3/Argos, 2010], a telenovela, and later a feature film, with a feminist and lesbian theme).

Finally, the three phenomena I discuss in this chapter share a structuring metaphor: the journey or, even, “odyssey.” The latter is a word used by both the festival of its successive editions and the webseries of its developing characters. The porn producer, in addition to a series of “national selections” or model auditions located in its studios in the capital’s trendy colonia of La Roma, also offers in the most ambitious of its features an expedition exploring “corruption” across Mexico. Tracing the movement of queer bodies in time and space, then, the journey is a motif aptly suited for the study of these unsung audiovisual practices that have helped to create LGBT spaces and audiences in Mexico over almost two decades since the millennium.

Festival Trajectories: Mix (1997–present)

Mix Quince Años: XV Festival de Diversidad Sexual en Cine y Video

Fijación visual …

A quince años de nuestro nacimiento del Festival Mix se ha consolidado ya como el escaparate formal y arriesgado de las formas de vivir la diversidad sexual en el mundo. Con la cámara como testigo hemos recorrido—sin fronteras—caminos de deseos, sueños y necesidades que hace quince años considerábamos imposibles…. El cine ha sido arma de denuncia, elemento indispensable para incendiar la intimidad, generar la discusión y la comprensión, así como un lienzo de platino para descubrir nuevos discursos estéticos, retratos ocultos o visiones de un futuro brillante…. Y ahora gracias a ustedes, motivo de celebración: gracias por acompañarnos estos primeros quince años. Nuestra presentación a la sociedad ya se ha dado; ahora sigamos buscando la inserción bajo nuestros propios términos en una convivencia pacífica donde podamos mezclar ideas con libertad e inteligencia—sin etiquetas de por medio que sirvan de pretexto para detener este proceso de crecimiento democrático. Fijación visual: sin quitar la vista de lo que queremos ver, mostrar, interrogar, dialogar…. Pantalla para todos! (Arturo Castelán, 2011)

Fifteen Years of Mix: 15th Festival of Sexual Diversity in Cinema and Video

Visual fixation …

Fifteen years after our birth the Mix Festival has now established itself as the official and risky shop window for ways of living sexual diversity in the world. With the camera as our witness we have traveled—without borders—the paths of desires, dreams, and needs that fifteen years ago we thought impossible…. Cinema has been a weapon for social denunciation, an indispensable element for striking up intimacy, generating discussion and understanding, as well as a silver screen for discovering new aesthetic discourses, hidden portraits, or visions of a brilliant future…. And now, thanks to you, it is a cause for celebration: thanks for accompanying us for these first fifteen years. We have already introduced ourselves to society; now let’s keep seeking our integration on our own terms in a peaceful coexistence where we can mix up ideas with freedom and intelligence—without any labels in the way that serve as a pretext to stop this process of democratic growth. Visual fixation: let’s keep our eyes on what we want to see, show, question, discuss…. A screen for everyone!

This opening text from the 2011 edition of Mix is written, as ever, by Arturo Castelán, the founder and artistic director of the festival since its inauguration in 1997. It stresses first the “journey” traveled by organizers and viewers over a period of time that has now culminated in the fifteenth anniversary, the traditional age of maturity for Latinas commemorated in the quinceañera. Mix thus journeyed with (and contributed to) a social change in Mexico in a period when, as director Julián Hernández told me in an interview included at the end of this book, overt homophobia became no longer socially acceptable, in the film community at least.

Beyond this laudable continuity, the text is packed with contradictions and hybridities. Thus, Mix is said to be at once “official” (the Spanish word used is “formal,” also used of a steady boyfriend) and “risky.” Yet this official festival’s journey knows no borders and it arrives at a destination that was previously unimaginable.

Mix is moreover an instrument for public activism (“social denunciation”) but also for the structuring of private intimacy and the forging of artistic novelty. The festival organizers (“we”) address themselves directly to their long-term public (also “we”), proposing a social or political project for (unnamed) sexual dissidents: having introduced themselves to Mexican society, they still need to be integrated into it, but on their own terms. Such a process is consciously nonconfrontational, seeking peaceful coexistence with a majority that, however, must be able to recognize and name the minority that seeks to be integrated into it. But the festival is also founded on fluidity (a “lack of labels”). Paradoxically once more the theme of the festival this year is not instability but “visual fixation,” a term used knowingly here in its psychic as well as social sense.

Two panels on festivals at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies meeting in 2015 presented similar conflicts or contradictions in a more general manner, thus revealing current critical debates in the field. One, whose respondent was Tamara Falikov, one of the most distinguished scholars of festivals in Latin America, dealt with “The Challenges of Curating Latin American Film in the 21st Century.” Here festival directors themselves gave presentations addressing the new “hybridity” of what are now known as “festival films” (Diana Sánchez) and the question of whether Latino festivals constitute “An Illusory Sense of Belonging or the Connecting Bridge of Communities” (Diana Vargas).

This problem of nationality or community is further complicated, as so often, by queerness. A second panel on “Speaking in (Queer) Tongues: LGBT Film Festivals and the Politics of Language” explored the thorny question of labeling (which vexed Mix), with special reference to Canada, a nation that is, like Mexico, a polyglot state ambivalent about its English-speaking superpower neighbor. One paper here explored “(Queer) Festival Programming as Translation” (Antoine Damiens), while a second meditated on “On Representation, Language, and Sexuality” (Ger Zielinski), and a third asked more explicitly “’What’s in a Name?’ The Language of Labelling Queer Film Festivals” (Stuart Richards). It should be said that Mix, to its credit, had anticipated these debates, appealing from the start to “sexual diversity.” It thus did not need to undergo the changes in title experienced by events that were previously held under the banner “lesbian and gay” or even just “gay.”

A recent report in Film Quarterly on India’s sole mainstream LGBT festival (called Kashish or “allurement”) brings these themes into closer focus, suggesting surprising correspondences with Mexico once more. Ani Maitra (2015) documents a paradoxical event: a state-supported queer festival in a country where (unlike in Mexico) homosexuality is still a criminal offense (60). Maitra writes that “without apparent irony” Kashish combined (like Mix) “incitement to rebellion” with (once more like Mix) a desire to “universalize queerness.” The Mumbai festival thus exhibits a “contradictory impulse to engage in dialogue with the body politic while maintaining a queer resistance to it.” Moreover Kashish, writes Maitra, took care to incorporate “cultural differences within [its] country,” examining the representation of hijras (traditional local transgender subjects analogous to what are called muxes in Mexico) (62).

Yet Kashish also addressed globalization (what Mix called “no borders”). Tensions were highest at a panel featuring Australian queer theorist Dennis Altman (Maitra 2015, 64). While Altman had written in 1997 (according to Maitra once more) that “Western LGBT identity politics has a global reach and can transcend regional differences,” he now emphasized rather “the fluidity of sexuality, the instability of sexual desire that labels like ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ and ‘transgender’ fail to capture.”

Maitra does not take this second argument seriously, however, because it fails to address the status of identity politics in an Indian context where, confusingly, homosexuality has recently been recriminalized but affirmative action has been legislated with respect to hijras and other transgender subjects. Maitra thus critiques in the context of queer festivals both the universalism of Western sexual identity politics and the false particularity that proposes fluidity as a panacea without engaging with local formulations of law and desire.

Mix clearly invokes the universal also, calling finally in the presentation cited above for “one screen for all.” Yet Mix’s media image is individual, not collective. Founder-director Castelán is the face of the festival, appearing in countless press, TV, and web interviews and authoring all of the program introductions. To use a Spanish idiom, he bravely “da la cara” (literally “gives his face,” metaphorically “faces the music”), often confronting criticism even from within his own queer constituency. Moreover, the complicity between the national and the international visible in Kashish is seen here in the circle of legitimation in which the festival director himself participates: Castelán imports much programming from abroad (indeed the first edition of Mix México was based on preexisting festivals of the same name in New York and Brazil), and he is in turn exported into foreign film circuits (he served on the jury of Berlin’s prestigious LGBT Teddy award).

Despite such hybridities (fixity/fluidity, domestic/foreign), the poster celebrating Mix’s quinceañera boasts an unambiguous image: a European-featured young man with light brown hair lolls naked on a bed, smiling seductively at the camera (in later editions the festival will post on Facebook teasing behind-the-scenes videos of its annual “Mix boy” shoot). And if we examine more closely the texts and images in Mix’s programs over the years, the contradiction between rebellion and institutionalization (or between erotics and aesthetics) becomes more evident.

Thus, the second festival program in 1998 seeks to establish the fledging event’s legitimacy (Mix 1998). Although Castelán’s text opens with an evocation of subjective fluidity and cites an “interminable flux of values and perspectives with respect to sexuality and art,” it soon stresses objective criteria of value in local, regional, and global conte...