ONE
Conceptualizing Sexual Migration
Around the time that I was beginning to conceive of the present study, I came across a newspaper article in the SF Weekly, a free newspaper in San Francisco.1 In the article, âYou Canât Be GayâYouâre Latino: A Gay Latino Identity Struggles to Emerge, Somewhere between the Macho Mission and Caucasian Castro,â reporter Joel P. Engardio sought to highlight what he saw as an inherent incompatibility between gay and Latino identities even in sexually liberal American cities such as San Francisco. Engardio interviewed Mexican and other Latin American gay and lesbian immigrants who had moved to San Franciscoâimmigrants who, he argued, had migrated to the United States because it was impossible for them to adopt gay identities in their home countries. Upon their arrival, they soon realized that even in San Francisco, their Latina/o and gay identities were somewhat incompatible.
Engardioâs account of a young man called Miguel caught my attention. Miguel told the reporter that he had migrated to San Francisco from Guadalajara, Mexicoâs second-largest city, because âin Mexico, gay doesnât exist.â More specifically, he maintained that being a man with same-sex desires in Mexico implied behaving âin a way that seems stereotypically gay. In that case, he says, you may exist, but âyouâre not considered a person.ââ Miguel imagined that the only options available in Mexico for a gay man were to become overtly effeminate and endure discrimination, or else hide and live a double life under constant fear of being discovered. Engardio argued that Mexicoâs staunch conservatism explained why Miguel and others like him were unable to adopt gay identities in their home country: âIn his conservative Mexican hometown, the Catholic Church has such a strong hold on the common culture it is difficult to find a drugstore that sells condoms. Homosexuality is not even open for discussion.â As a result, âwhen Miguel became convinced he could never be happy in Mexico, he emigrated to San Francisco. It was the gay mecca, he was told, the place where he would be accepted, as is.â
The finality of this straightforward explanation for Miguelâs transnational relocation surprised me, especially because it so easily accepted the notion that it would be impossible for anyone to be openly gay in Mexico. Given this presumption, it would be logical for a man such as Miguelâas for any other gay Mexican man, for that matterâto leave. But absent in this simple explanation for Miguelâs sexual migration was any recognition of the profound sociocultural transformations I had witnessed and analyzed as part of the research on sexuality that I had conducted in GuadalajaraâMiguelâs hometownâaround the time that Miguel was coming of age. Ironically, at the time this article appeared, I was in the middle of writing my book The Night Is Young, where I discuss just how much things were changing in Guadalajara in relation to sexuality. For one thing, gay and lesbian sexualities and lives had grown increasingly visible, to the point where Guadalajara was sometimes referred to as the San Francisco of Mexico.
To be sure, that city was known for being conservative and intensely Catholicâalong the lines described by Engardioâas well as the cradle of many quintessential and heteronormative Mexican traditions. So Guadalajara, as I describe in my book, was a complicated and contradictory place. But gay and lesbian peopleâparticularly gay menâhad become ubiquitously visible there and were crafting lives that resembled gay culture in many world cities, even if local expressions of that culture were not completely identical. One simple illustration of the growing visibility of gay culture in Guadalajara at the time was the inclusion of gay bars and dance clubs, along with HIV/AIDS communityâbased groups, in the weekly entertainment supplement of a prominent mainstream local newspaper. As I wrote in my book, âBy 1995, anyone could easily access information about the location and characteristics of the gay clubs in the section called âDe ambienteâ [a label that referred to the gay milieu in slightly veiled, coded fashion],â and by 1999 the gay bars and clubs âappeared under the rubric âFuera del closetâ (Out of the closet).â2 Had Miguel consulted this supplementâwhich in Guadalajara was equivalent to the âTime Outâ entertainment guides in other world citiesâhe could have learned about his hometownâs many options to explore a gay identity. And he would have been able to see the many ways in which gay men expressed themselvesâhe did not have to behave in any particular prescribed ways in order to be gay.
However, unlike the thousands of gay men and lesbians who regularly attended gay venues in Guadalajara, Miguel did not find his way to the cityâs gay culture and community. Instead, he concluded that it was impossible to be gay there (or, for that matter, anywhere in Mexico). Why had he been unable to adopt a gay identity in his hometown? Why had he felt that he needed to leave Mexico altogether, and become a sexual migrant in the process, in order to be gay?
If we go back to MĂĄximoâs story from the introduction, it contains some clues that may provide some initial answers to these questions. MĂĄximo had a gay life and a circle of gay friends who gathered regularly in his house in Hermosillo, but he was incapable of confronting the pressures emanating from his immediate heteronormative social and familial circles. His anxiety seemed partly connected to his fear that his relatives and coworkers might learn of his homosexuality. Thus, MĂĄximo not only felt impelled to pretend that he was straight within his everyday work and family life but also had to carefully manage and control who knew his sexual orientationâhe had to make sure that this information stayed within his gay circles. He was burdened by both the vulnerabilities of leading a double life and the enormous amounts of energy required to sustain it. And the pressure had become so great that he thought the only way to alleviate it was to leave Hermosillo and start anew somewhere else, away from his relatives and other people who had long known him as a straight man.
Note that MĂĄximo, unlike Miguel, did not blame his city or his country for his own inability to be openly gay there. But like Miguel, he credited his new life in the United States with giving him the possibility of finally achieving an integrated and fully open gay life and identity. And, as we will see, many other Mexican participants in the present study did believe that by migrating to the United States they had achieved a kind of sexual freedom they felt would have been hard for them to acquire in their home country, especially while living near their families and longtime friends and acquaintances, who knew them as âregular,â straight men.
For instance, Raimundo (born 1967), who like MĂĄximo grew up in Hermosillo, said that he migrated to San Diego âfor personal reasons; wanting my life as a gay man to be more open and more relaxed.â Similarly, Melchor (born 1972), who originally had been from the northern state of Chihuahua but grew up in the border city of Tijuana, said that he âwanted a changeâ because in Tijuana he felt âvery stereotypedâ within his immediate straight social circles. He âfelt tired and lonely (although I had my friends),â and most important, he had been aware since early on about his âsexual tendencies,â leading him to realize he would never fully fit in the straight life he was leading. As he put it:
I felt I would find more respect here [in San Diego], because in Tijuana I had to hide my sexual preference for years, in school, with my friends. . . . When my friends saw a homosexual, they would say, âLetâs beat him up.â And I thought, âIf they just knew that they have one standing here right next to them!â
Finally, CrispĂn (born 1980), who had grown up in Mexico City, mentioned that he stayed in the United States in part because his family in Mexico âdid not really accept me as I am.â However, he had never actually told them that he was gay.
Notably, these men emphasized their personal situations within their immediate social circles as the circumstances they felt most immediately would prevent them from achieving sexual freedom. And their assessments of their personal situations told them they would be better off leaving for a new location where no one knew them and starting a new gay life. MĂĄximo had considered going to Mexico City or other Mexican cities, but the first option that the other men thought of was moving to the United States. Closely analyzing why many of these men could not imagine crafting an openly gay life for themselves within Mexicoâespecially given that other gays and lesbians did just that, as the social conditions surrounding homosexuality were rapidly shifting in their home countryâand why they assessed that sexual freedom would be readily available to them only in the United States, is a central goal of this book.
Transnational Migration and Sexuality
Beginning around the mid-1990s, a number of scholars became interested in the connections between transnational migration and sexuality (particularly gay or queer sexualities).3 As Benigno SĂĄnchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton note in the introduction to their edited collection Queer Diasporas, âTranslocation itself, movement itself, now enter the picture as theoretically significant factors in the discussion of sexuality.â The term translocation in this statement refers to the back-and-forth relationship between the local and the global in sexual identity work, as well as the actual transportation of those identities across geographic space. Implied in this dual definition of translocationâin terms of both embodied identities and geographyâis the notion that âwhen a practitioner of âhomosexual acts,â or a body that carries any of many queering marks moves between officially designated spacesânation, region, metropole, neighborhood, or even culture, gender, religion, diseaseâintricate realignments of identity, politics, and desire take place.â4
Queering Migration Studies
These kinds of concerns emerged in the work of scholars in the social sciences and humanities who had become interested in the transnational sexual migration of gay men and lesbians as part of a series of studies that were brought under the rubrics of queer migration and queer diaspora.5 As scholars began to raise important questions about both the place of sexuality in migration studies and the place of migration in sexuality studies, the effect was to link two bodies of work that had previously remained separate. For instance, in the introduction to an edited collection published in 2005, Eithne LuibhĂ©id notes that âdespite rich scholarship about the causes and consequences of international migration, there has been little consideration of how sexual arrangements, ideologies, and modes of regulation shape migration to and incorporation into the United States.â6 The articles in this collection seek to address how sexuality shapes migration processes; how âconcerns about sexuality shape US immigration control strategies and constructions of citizenshipâ; how migration transforms âU.S. queer communities, cultures, and politicsâ; and how sexuality can be âa source of conflict within migrant communities, and between migrant and U.S. communities.â7 As these interrelated foci suggest, researchers studying the United States were examining the links between sexuality and transnational migration at the level of state policy and institutional formationâfor instance, in terms of immigration policies that excluded homosexuals, or domestic policies that turned American gay and lesbian citizens into second-class citizens by denying them the right to sponsor their partners for US residency or naturalization. And they were also conducting on-the-ground analyses of the lives of gay and lesbian immigrants that examined the processes of these migrantsâ incorporation into host societies.
This literature painted a picture of immigration as one of the policy arenas deeply shaped by state concerns about homosexuality, and it further suggested that absent consideration of those concerns, it is impossible to understand how the contemporary state in countries such as the United States came to take its current shape. This idea of a mutually constitutive relationship between homosexuality and state formation has been perhaps most compellingly argued by the historian Margot Canaday in her book The Straight State, which treats the domain of immigration control in the twentieth century as one of several important sites where the policing of sexuality has been linked to the expansion of state capacities.8 Other scholars have also considered specific immigration policies that regulated homosexual inclusion and mobility, including attempts to establish boundaries between âgoodâ and âbadâ sexual citizens,9 as well as the shifts in asylum policy generated by the emergence of the legal field of LGBT asylum beginning in the 1990s.10 Moreover, through attention to individual queer immigrants, the literature has generated helpful understandings of their motivations and processes of incorporation into their host societies (including into gay communities in countries such as the United States and Canada). It also has shown the importance of treating those immigrants ânot simply as sexual subjects, but also as racialized, classed, gendered subjects of particular regions and nations that exist in various historic relationships to US hegemony.â11
Indeed, Lionel CantĂșâs study with Mexican gay immigrantsâwhich is the most direct precursor of the present studyâbegan to examine how those menâs migration to Los Angeles is âinfluenced by sexuality,â and in turn how âsociostructural and migratory factorsâ shape their sexualities after migration.12 CantĂș simultaneously aimed to account for the processes through which âMexican gay immigrants adapt to, negotiate, and resist the constraints of their marginalization (in terms of their sexual orientation, gender, race/ethnicity, class, and legal status)â in the United States.13 And he challenged âthe presumption that Latin American society and culture are more oppressive and therefore create greater stress for queer individuals.â14 In Pathways of Desire, I have adopted but also expanded this framework, particularly with a goal toward further developing and theorizing the concept of sexual migration.
Gaps That Remain
Overall, this significant body of scholarly work has paved the way for the analysis in the present book. However, the literature has also left some significant gaps in our understanding of sexual migration (and more specifically queer migration or queer diaspora)âgaps that my research seeks to address.
One such gap concerns the need to examine the wide range of lives and experiences both before and after migration, and to attend to the complete trajectory of migration. The pioneering empirical studies that examined the lives of queer immigrants have produced nuanced descriptions of their post-migration incorporation into gay communities,15 but those studies typically were not designed to systematically analyze immigrantsâ lives pre-migration, the diversity of their lived experiences, or the social, political, and cultural sexuality-related changes taking place in their home countries.16 For instance, in Global Divas, Martin Manalansan provides background information about the cultural schemas of sexuality and gender to which his participants were previously exposed in the Philippinesâincluding an indigenous schema based on bakla identities (a local Tagalog term that, according to Manalansan, signals âeffeminate mannerism, feminine physical characteristics . . . and cross-dressingâ among men), which contrasted with the global gay identities his participants encountered while in the Philippines or later in their diasporic setting in New York.17 He notes that some of his participants favored strategies of sexual silence that are consistent with the bakla identity, while others incorporated the strategy of coming out that is seen as prerequisite for being ...