page_title: LGBT history in Mexico
section_title: The conquest
hierarchical_section_title: LGBT history in Mexico / The conquest
caption_attribution_description: English: Vasco Núñez de Balboa executing indigenous Panamanians by war dog for same-sex practice.
context_page_description: The study of homosexuality in Mexico can be divided into three separate periods, coinciding with the three main periods of Mexican history: pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-independence, in spite of the fact that the rejection of homosexuality forms a connecting thread that crosses the three periods.
  The data on the pre-Columbian people and those of the period of colonization is scarce and obscure. Historians often described the indigenous customs that surprised them or that they disapproved of, but tended to take a position of accusation or apology, which makes it impossible to distinguish between reality and propaganda. In general, it seems that the Mexica were as homophobic as the Spanish, and that other indigenous peoples tended to be much more tolerant, to the point of honoring Two-Spirit people as shamans.
  The history of homosexuality in the colonial period and after independence is still in great part yet to be studied. Above all, the 1658 executions of sodomites and the 1901 Dance of the Forty-One, two great scandals in Mexican public life, dominate the scene.
context_section_description: Since the first contacts of the Spanish with the indigenous people there was established the equivalence of Indian, cannibal, and sodomite.  It was a doctor accompanying Columbus, Diego Alvarez Chanca, in a letter from 1494, who first gave news of that.  He spoke of the Carib custom of capturing young men to those who removed all the masculine organs.  These developed "feminine characteristics and the Caribbeans employed them for the practice of sodomy in a manner similar to that which the Arabs enjoy their young people like eunuchs and two-spirits.  ... A time grown men, the Caribs kill them and eat them."
  In 1511, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera published his De orbe novo decades, with the information that he was able to get about the first explorers thanks to his friendship with Isabella I of Castile.  D'Anghiera told how Vasco Núñez de Balboa, during his exploration of Quarequa, in the Isthmus of Panama, in 1513, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs.  D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected".  After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire.  [... The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God.  [... And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."
  In an account on the indigenous people realized in 1519 for the council of the town of Veracruz to report to Charles I, attributed to Hernán Cortés, it is mentioned that they had "managed to know for certain that they are all sodomites and practice that abominable sin".  In another account from an anonymous Italian conquistador, it is said that the men and women of Pánuco worship a masculine member and have erect phalluses in their temples and public plazas to worship them: "the multitude of methods used by the men to satisfy their abominable vice [is] almost too unbelievable to be sure. [...] the devil contained in their idols has possessed them.  It has given them instructions to sacrifice their fellow men, to extract their hearts and to offer the hearts, as well as the blood taken from the tongue, the ears, the legs and the arms, all to the idols".  Finally, he comments that "all the inhabitants of New Spain and those of other adjacent provinces ate human flesh, all commonly practiced sodomy and drank to excess", comparing some of the customs of the indigenous people with those of the ungodly saracens.
  In the middle of the 16th century the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the soldier Juan de Grijalva write about scenes of sodomy carved into the architecture, in gold jewelry, in terracota and in statues. The West Indies explorer and gold smelting manager Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés included specifics in his 1526 La Natural hystoria de las Indias (his Sumario), expanded in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535, further expanded in 1851 from his previously unpublished papers). Around the same time, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca writes:
  diabolical practices [...] a man married to another man, amarionados or effeminate, impotent men that dressed like women and performed women's duties, nevertheless, they fired the bow and the arrow and could carry heavy loads on their persons.  We saw many amarionados, although taller and sturdier than the other men.  Many of these men practiced the sin against nature.
  — Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
  Isabella of Portugal, wife of Charles V, possibly driven by these accounts, banned in 1529 the planting or use of maguey for the fermentation of pulque.  The queen thought that it caused "drunkenness and drove the Indians to carry out" human sacrifices and unspeakab
caption: Engraving by Theodor de Bry that represents the scene in which Balboa sets his dogs on some two-spirits (1594); Public library of New York.
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