MarcosLopez

The photography of the Argentine Marcos López has attracted enormous international
attention. Working in sometimes garish colors (his prints routinely include hand coloring),
López mixes a parody of postmodern commercial advertising with an acerbic critique of the
kitschy detritus of contemporary globalized daily life, especially in its urban Argentine
version (for general characterizations of López's photography, see Foster, “El kitsch
argentino”; Casatellote; González; Panera Cuevas). Whether focusing on specific
commercial products, often ones that are icons of modern living like Coca-Cola, or on
patriotic and quasi-patriotic symbols (the Argentine flag, Che Guevara, respectively), López
relies on his audience to understand the clever, surprising, and often jolting utilization of pop-
art and kitsch as an artistic strategy for critiquing the morass of conflicting ideologies and
their motifs that engulfs—assaults—our visual perception of the world. López's employment
of forms of hyperrealism as found in one range of glossy advertising transforms the
ideal/idealized universes of the latter into outrageous interventions in common domestic
spaces of staged parodies of the quotidian, whether the latter is a common object, like the
Coca-Cola bottle, or customarily trivialized motifs like those of religion, sociopolitical
commitments, routine cultural values, and the like: the "stuff" of our systems of identity and
understanding.

One of López's most recognized images is Asado criollo (fig. 1), [1] which is a recasting of Da
Vinci's The Last Supper. In the place of the sacred Last Supper of Jesus Christ and the
Twelve Apostles, the founding event figured in the Holy Mass of the Catholic Church as a
commemoration of Christ's sacrifice for the salvation of mankind, we have the virtually
sacralized ritual of the Argentine barbecue, where the blood-bathed sacrifice of edible beef is
the privileged figure of Argentine communal identity. If wherever Catholics assemble they
will celebrate Christ's sacrifice for the salvation of mankind, wherever Argentines assemble
they will celebrate the sacrifice of beef for the affirmation of "Argentinity." [2] This is all a
pretty hilarious and irreverent network of associations, part of whose resonance is the way in
which so many Argentines are not particularly overtly religious, on either a formal or folkloric
level—not, at least, in the way in which one associates popular Christianity as so essentially
part of the fabric of everyday life in a society like Mexico, for example.

Images like Asado criollo (Carnaval criollo is another) have contributed to López's growing
reputation, and, in addition to Argentina, his work has been shown in Spain, Mexico, and
elsewhere in Latin America, and most recently in New York, in a show February 25-March
14, 2005 at the White Box gallery (www.whiteboxny.org) called Al sur del realismo/South of
Realism. [3]

Although I have examined elsewhere López's use of kitsch in order to critique globalized
values through parody (Foster, "El kitsch argentino"), I would like here to address issues of
homosocialism, homoeroticism, and their interrelationship in López's images, particularly in
those that appear in a small portfolio, Marcos López, published in Mexico City in 2004.

Let us first define our terms. By "homosocialism" (one could also invest here in the term
"homosociality"), one understands the strong and exclusivizing bond between members of
the same sex. Such a definition, and its implied or overt sanction—and implied or overt
disapproval—by various intersecting social institutions, is predicated on a conception of
stable sex identity, such that there is a clear-cut separation between male and female. This is
a stability that is maintained, in the main, by both transgendering (the movement from one
sexual identity to another) and by transexuality (the anatomical reconfiguration of a body in
order for it to migrate from one sexual identity to another); homosocialism becomes
problematical wherever queer theory destabilizes binary sexual identity. In Sedgwick's
famous formulation, which originally applied only to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century British literature, but which has been extensively adapted to a wide array of societies
by masculinity studies (see Connell for one early survey; Gutman for pertinent research in
Latin America), homosocialism is the pact, the so-called gentleman's agreement, whereby
power is circulated between men, who are bonded together by a number of social networks
and practices: marriage, business, fraternal association, guilds, societies, shared initiations
and acculturations, and the like. Women are both excluded but used by homosocialism as a
token or shifter of masculine power. Two typical narratives are the accession to the realm of
the boss by marrying his daughter or the use of the sexuality of women as a way of
displaying to other men one's legitimating heterosexuality. Such narratives depend on an
interaction with women to demonstrate the male's appropriate participation in the
hegemonic codes of a male-dominated society.

It is significant to note that, while homosociality may be sustained by an undercurrent of
(weak) homoerotic desire, as in the simple comfort of being with other men in all-male
sphere, strong homoerotic desire and the acting upon that desire through the staging of a
number of specifically genital and orgasmic scripts, are taboo and would disrupt the
homosocial pact. [4] But there is unquestioningly a segue between homosocialism as the
approved assembling of men and homoeroticism as what might happen among assembled
men under the "right" conditions, such as having had too much to drink or sharing
traumatic experiences. [5] To be sure, another dimension of this issue is exactly what
constitutes homoeroticism: that is, exactly when is it present and how might we detect it
(beyond manifest signs such a penile tumescence or specific acts we can agree to call
homoerotic)? This is the problem of what to make of fraternity initiations, especially where
practices like spanking are involved (see Mattoso's extensive analysis of these phenomena in
German, American, and Brazilian university societies), or of the hugging and butt-slapping
of team sports, not to mention the display of the male buttocks promoted by tight fitting
uniforms, as in American baseball, and the fetishizing of the legs of soccer players
(Manrique); also legendary is the display of the male body in bullfighting (see Afanador's
photography, and Foster's study of it, "Toreros de moda") and the way in which the all-male
world of bullfighting has always involved a dimension of homoeroticism, as Lorca so
eloquently captures it in his famous "Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejía" (see other
references in my study of Afanador's photography).

Thus, if we reserve the term "homoeroticism" for a series of acts and their accompanying
narratives that confirm the possibility of the fulfillment of sexual desire between same-sex
partners, it is, nevertheless, evident that the homosocialism that cements the personal
relationships between men in the exercise of patriarchal authority may often (perhaps
always?) contain an undercurrent of the physical, but customarily tabooed and therefore
unfulfilled, attraction between male bodies. [6] Such weak homoeroticism can rarely be the
subject of overt social discourse, although one does occasionally hear calls for the boys to cut
down a bit on the butt-slapping, while Homosocialism—"getting together with the fellows"
—is an accepted and promoted intercultural norm of modern society. [7]

There is, then, an interesting vein of male homosocial imagery in recent work of López
which has unmistakable homoerotic overtones, even if it is only a weak homoeroticism that
the viewer can "strengthen," so to speak, in an attentive contemplation of the insinuations of
and the insertions into real-world experience which López images critique through parody.

Certainly, the homosocial is an issue in López's by now rather legendary Asado criollo
composition. In the first place, it evokes the founding or grounding homosociality of
Leonardo Da Vinci's depiction of the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples. Leaving aside
the question of whether or not there is a feminine presence in the painting in the person of
Mary Magdalene, as touted by Dan Brown in his controversial and transgressive 2003 best
selling novel, The Da Vinci Code (which also expounds on Mary Magdalene as the wife of
Christ), the assemblage of the thirteen men of Da Vinci's painting and the endless
reproduction of it which the concept of kitsch helps us to understand confirm a monumental
paradigm of homosocialism in Western culture. Now, it is important to stress that López
does not simply plug in substitutions for the arrangement, clothes, gestures, and interactions
of the participants in the Da Vinci painting; this would be rather facile and the essence of
noncritical or unreflective kitsch. Rather, he retains the six-against-six balance of the men on
each side of the central figure, but has them more in the postures of the consumption of food
and drink than in the case of the Da Vinci original. Moreover, while the latter is encased in
an idealized Renaissance banquet room, López's denizens surround an improvised open-air
table, with the unmistakable humid Pampas landscape of central Argentina in the
background: that is, where Da Vinci's image is stylized and dehistoricized, López's
photograph evokes a specific sociohistorical reality, that of the gritty texture of the Argentine
barbecue.

I use the word "gritty" here advisedly, because the texture of the carefully staged image is
that of a casual, real-life weekend convocation of men to eat, drink, and enjoy each other's
company. They are all dressed casually, some so casually as to project an offensive image to
other more formal social arbiters, especially given the sacred context evoked by the image.
Both the man we can call the Jesus stand-in and two of his "apostles" appear shirtless, one
other wears a sleeveless undershirt, while two others wear shirts open to reveal more chest
than some would consider decorous. One man, who bleeds off the left margin of the image,
appears to be wearing a short-sleeved undershirt, leaving six men whose torso is respectably
clothed. Undoubtedly, a major Argentine cultural referent here are the humorous drawings
Buenos Aires en camiseta, drawn by Alejandro del Prado (Calé) for Guillermo Divito's
popular magazine Rico Tipo in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Calé, in satirizing broadly the
tics of the Argentine petit-bourgeois male, also captured the way in which his habits veered
from the rigorous standards of the sartorially perfect English gentleman the national upper
middle-class and oligarchy aspired to emulate. Too, Da Vinci's painting represents Jesus
and the apostles as impeccably clothed or robed, and López's image subverts as much the
decorum of the Renaissance work as it evokes an alleged Argentine careless vulgarity.

Of special note is the way in which the Jesus stand-in does specifically evoke the Savior in
ways in which his companions do not merely replicate the apostles (beyond their balanced
six-by-six distribution). The stand-in, who towers imposingly over his companions, has both
the long hair and the beard of the Jesus original, just the sort of hirsuteness that
(paradoxically, given the accompanying allegation of femininity) the Argentine neofascist
guardians of public morals in the late 1960s and again in the 1970s considered a sign of
homosexuality. Da Vinci's Jesus is seated, with his hands outstretched in the sign of the first
offering of his sacrifice, but López's counterimage is masterfully wielding the knife in the
central ritual of the asado, the cutting and distribution of the cooked meat. Not only is the
latter shirtless, but his cutting action emphasizes pectoral muscles, which are
complemented by what for some might be the erotic nature of a fleshy belly button and
pants that ride just low enough to be right at the nevertheless concealed pubic line. While
there is little here that one can call (homo)erotic beyond the possibilities inherent in the
unkempt display of the body of the guests at this table and the physicality of dedicated
eating and drinking that is crucial to a good asado, this assertedly homosocial gathering
reminds one that the ur-homosocial drinking and eating party is Plato's Convivium, where
one of the crucial topics of conversation is human sexuality, including Plato's Diotima's
intriguing account of the bases and the defense of what we have come to call Greek
homosexuality. These convivial Argentines might well discuss the women, the minas, but
never at the expense of the ritualized shared physicality of their meal. [8]

One detail of the cultural horizons of Da Vinci's Last Supper, so pregnant with meaning as to
the founding event of Christian homosociality, is Da Vinci's own homosexuality, a detail that
the Vatican, and popular art history, would choose emphatically to ignore. Yet no serious art
historian can overlook this dimension of the Italian Renaissance artist giant's biography and,
therefore, its appearance, if only latently in his work. [9] Therefore, it would be rather risky, if
not outrageous, to suggest that there is a hidden homosexuality about Da Vinci's painting,
although viewers are always entitled to see what they (want to) see. Since no "protective veil
of the sacred" envelops López's photography and since, indeed, one of the licenses of
parody is to encourage outrageous meanings, one may feel more comfortable with teasing
out the latent homoeroticism of what one might call Asado criollo's "la gran comilona de los
muchachos." Boy-men will be boy-men.

The homoerotic is more clearly evident in the cover image of Marcos López, where the same
model is used for both the carefully groomed hospital aide and his long-haired severely
injured patient (the image in turn has a definite intertextuality with Frida Kahlo's signature
work Las dos Fridas, which need not necessarily evoke Kahlo's well known
bisexuality/lesbianism [10]).

This image (titled Hospital [fig. 2]) would be relatively uninteresting—serving, perhaps at
best, as a poster for a national nurses/hospital orderly association—if it weren't for the
bonding between the two men that is underscored by their both being enacted by the same
model: photography and cinema has a venerable tradition of dual (even multiple) parts being
played by the same actor, often around the ages-old motif of the evil twin, as in Bette Davis's
1964 Dead Ringer (dir. Paul Henreid) or Jeremy Irons's 1988 reprise of the Davis film, Dead
Ringers (dir. David Cronenberg). [11] Got up differently—the long-haired, partially nude
patient; the soberly neat aid—they are also differentiated by the accompanying details of
their role. The patient, of course, has the trappings of his treatment (bandages, the IV
connection, the walker to support the traumatized right leg), and the aide his own typical
equipment (the simple green cotton scrubs, the stethoscope worn around the neck, the IV
drip). The pair is photographed in what appears to be one of the halls of an old hospital from
the generation of the Rivadavia or the Ramos Mejía.

But where the expected is disrupted, wherein lies the Barthean punctum that hooks the
attentive viewer's gaze, is the fact that the left forearm of the patient is bound to the right
forearm of his aide by a tightly wrapped bandage of bloody gauze. There is no indication of
why the patient should be wearing such a wrapping, since the patient's contusions appear to
be confined to his left side, and it is left to the curious speculation of the viewer why the
patient should be bound to the aide in this fashion. Of course, one could attribute an
allegorical function to this detail: the patient needs the assistance of the aide in order to
mend or even in order to survive. But that bond is already allegorized by the presence of the
IV, which the aide holds (and will subsequently hang from the appropriate suspension
apparatus) for the patient, insuring the continued administration of whatever the bag
contains. Again, there is nothing directly erotic about this image, except to the
handsomeness of the actor, part of whose body is minimally revealed in the enactment of the
patient: much more suggestive would have been an image of the aide dangling an enema
bag whose hose is inserted into the patient's rectum, although this would be an unlikely
occurrence in the sort of transfer from one place to another that might be the "real-life"
circumstance of the event captured by the photo.

Yet, the disruption of the everyday occurrence of a transfer from one place to the next in the
modern hospital that comes with the detail of the shared bandage provokes speculation as to
the figured relationship between the two. The hospital is the setting for frequent (homo)
erotic fantasies, and playing nurse/doctor is one of the ways in which children first discover
each other's bodies: nurses and doctors are customarily the first nonparental authority
figures who manipulate and invade our body in what can be later resemanticized in erotic
terms (see the topic of rape by medical instrument as it is developed in the Irons film
mentioned above). The intimacy with the body of the patient required in many routine
medical procedures, in turn, is one of the reasons, even before the threat of STDs, why some
medical personal is uncomfortable with treating patients they know or suspect to engage in
same-sex acts; for others, this will be part of the pleasure of the other's body. [12] Even when
the body of the patient is neither manipulated nor invaded (unquestionably where the vagina
or the rectum is involved, or metaphorically—the insertion of an IV or even an ear
examination), the proximity between the two bodies, the one ministering and the one being
ministered to, can be suggestive. [13] The fact that such a proximity is sealed here, one
might say, by the bloody bandage cannot, therefore, be dismissed as a quirky disruption of
naturally occurring circumstances.

Two other images in the volume equally allow for the displacement from naturally occurring
circumstances to the homoerotic. It is questionable to what degree the homosocial is
involved in the hospital scene, except for a general policy whereby male patients are tended
to by male aides and female patients by female aides. However, one of the most homosocial
spaces in modern society is the locker room, which is closely associated with other athletic
and gymnasium spaces like the shower, the steam room, the jacuzzi, the massage room,
and the infirmary. The bath house/sauna was, before AIDS, one of the great meeting places
for gay men, and the fancy gym is, for today's guppy, one major site for same-sex cruising
(American university sports centers are notorious in this regard). [14] The homoerotic
dimensions of sports has long been maintained (Prongher), and it is difficult to forget that
the original Olympics were performed in the nude; homoerotic overtones have also long
been associated with European soccer, and Bazán recalls the 1995 controversy surrounding
the Argentine national team (433-34). The sociologist Juan José Sebreli first broached the
subject in print in a book from 1981, Fútbol y masas, but develops it as a major theme in his
1998 La era del fútbol (see also his "Historia secreta").

In López's image—titled El vestuario (fig. 3),—one is particularly struck by the fact that
none of the seven men (athletes and trainers) whose faces can be seen (there is an eighth
man stretched out on a massage table, his face hidden by one of the other players) looks
anywhere else but directly at the camera: no one peeks out of the closet here at the body of
another man… Moreover, all of the men visible are hypermasculine, confident in their pose
before the camera, with marked secondary sexual characteristics well in evidence, such as
hairy chest and legs, heavy beard, mustaches, muscular torso and legs, with appropriate
tertiary accoutrements such as athletic wear, soccer ball, the ankle bandage and what
appears to be a tube or container of ointment that are metonymies of strenuous physical
activity. The file of identical lockers against the back wall iconicizes the continuity between
these men where the sameness of their macho presence guarantees the easy circulation of
the norms of homosociality without any trace of the discrepancy from these norms that
would signal the contramasculine, the effeminate, the threat of homosexuality. True, one of
the men, to the left of the image, somewhat older than the others, is fleshier than one
associates with a sustained athletic life, while, in the right-hand background there is a
frankly paunchy individual with long hair (he is, nevertheless, properly uniformed for athletic
play). But these are, if they are discordant notes, minor ones that only serve to affirm the
overall conventional hypermasculinity of the men we see in the foreground. [15] In short, this
is a world of men and for men, and if resolute homosociality were ever to segue into
homoeroticism, it is not likely to include any sign of the feminine. It is precisely the
homoerotic undertones of the hypermasculine universe of soccer that both Bazán and
Sebreli speak of, and, while Archetti underscores the way in which soccer—like many all-
male sports—transculturally serve to assimilate young men to the codes of masculine
homosociality, there is no way of categorically specifying when the frisson of the homoerotic
will occur. [16]

One of López's most outrageous compositions is Tomando sol en la terraza (fig. 4), which
was used for the invitation and publicity for the exhibit for the early 2005 show of his work
at the White Box. Unlike the images I have discussed up until now, this image and the next
one to be discussed involve a single male model; hence, there is no immediate homosocial
context. Yet, by contrast, the two images both more readily evoke the homoerotic, which is
located here in the display of the partially naked male body. Indeed, the lack of an explicit
homosocial context would indicate, precisely, that sunbathing (or, below, being a masculine
mermaid) is not routine masculine behavior. [17] And although the image of the partially
naked male body is legitimated in certain contexts, such as that of the athletic locker room,
it does not customarily involve the privileged exposure of the penis.

Tomando sol is constructed around the common occurrence of sunbathing, which in an
apartment-dwelling metropolis like Buenos Aires often means stretching out on a towel on
the rooftop of one's high-rise building. Certainly, the majority of sunbathers are women, and
sports and other physically active undertakings are the most appropriate way for the male
body to gain whatever are considered the beneficial aspects of direct exposure to the sun;
concomitantly, to lie inert in the sun is a female/womanlike activity. True, López's male
sunbather is surrounded by the details of a masculine world: various bottles of beer and a
bottle opener, along with a half-consumed glass of brew. There is an ashtray with the butts of
two consumed cigarettes, a carton of Malboros (unquestionably a real man's tobacco of
choice [18]), and there is a stack of magazines at hand, the top one of which appears to be a
sports magazine, as its cover carries a routine soccer image. One rather whimsical detail is
the garden hose (often laughingly referred to as a penis substitute), which runs alongside the
reclining man and loops its way around one of the beer bottles, as though it were a sunning
serpent; its two tones of green partially match the colors of the blanket on which the man lies
sunning.

The model here is, in all regards, one of López's by-now familiar hypermasculine bodies:
trim and muscular, with firm and hairy legs and a nicely matted chest; his strong facial
characteristics are manly in every regard: in sum, a man's man. What is jarring, however, is
the way he is dressed and what that dress leaves exposed. Nude sunbathing on a private
rooftop may be preferred by some men, although heterosexual men are less likely than
women (or homosexual men) to worry about tan lines: indeed, the tan line on a naked male
body might be viewed by some as sexy, since it frames the now exposed but usually
concealed genitals or buttocks. But the covering of the lower regions of the body means
wearing a swimsuit; even underwear might be permissible. However, López's model is
swathed in athletic bandages from his midriff to halfway down his thighs, something like an
improvised locker-room version of surfing shorts, although tighter and neutral in color, as
opposed to the often colorful and baggy original. Moreover, the athletic bandage around the
model's middle picks up on the more reasonable presence of the wrapping around both his
ankles and instep, such as one might find on an athlete's foot to prevent or remedy a sprain
from action in sports.

But what is specifically transgressive about Tomando sol is the way in which the model's
penis is exposed. The athletic bandage is wrapped around the man's waist, buttocks, and
upper thighs in such a way that, although some minor glimpses of skin are allowed, his
genitals are exposed, with his penis (notably uncircumcised from the point of view of a North
American viewer) resting on the edge of a strip of the bandage. One does not normally
sunbathe the penis without the rest of the lower body being exposed, and, aside from the
medical inadvisability of such exposure, one is unaware of any known fetish of the sunbathed
(or sunburned) penis. López is known for his over-the-top whimsicalness, and it is amply
evident in this composition, with its showcasing of the model's respectably sized penis and
the echoes of the strongly masculine phallus in the beer bottles, the cigarettes, and the
garden hose. The contemplation of the male body required by this composition, one that
underscores the phallic, disrupts the heterosexist homosocial convention whereby the male
body is masculine (a condition of the appropriate of the homosocial pact), but it is not erotic:
the genitals are assumed to be there, and with acceptable potency, but they can never be the
object of confirming scrutiny. Whenever the male body is the occasion for the spectacular
gaze, as the female body routinely is, it is placed at the disposal of a homoerotic interest that
is inadmissible within the manly homosocial pact. [19]

I would like to close with what I think is López's most brilliant composition, the Sireno del
Río de la Plata (fig. 5), a revision of one of the tritest motifs associated with the sea. The
sireno of the title of the composition is the non-occurring (at least in terms of academic
Spanish) masculine form of sirena, the siren of the sea or, in its more domesticated form, the
mermaid. [20] If one may use a queer designation, López's masculine mermaid is very much
of a parody of siren of the sea motif. [21]

Standard images of the siren—the most commonly evoked is the sculpture that is the symbol
of the city of Copenhagen—center on a series of ultrafeminine features: long blond hair, firm
and full breasts (but without being bosomy), curvaceous figure, languid pose. But López's
model is both a refutation of the feminine and an inscription of the hypermasculine. It might
be a matter of taste as to whether this male model is grotesque in his masculinity or whether
he is the male equivalent of female allure. The model is, without a doubt, as hard and trim as
the conventional female figure is delicately curved, and his hairy torso constitutes as
definitive a display of sex characteristics as does the former's breasts. But his pose is
anything but languid, as he strongly grips part of the stone shelf on which he is seated, with
an arm assertively akimbo. His jug-ears (the left ear appears larger than the right one),
unshaven face, almost scowling eyes, and unfriendly line of mouth may, in fact, suggest the
way in which the mythological mermaid was actually no friend to those who became
seduced by her fateful presence.

López's sireno suggests the threat implicit in male sexual attraction, whether addressed to a
woman or to another man. The fact that the landscape of the masculine mermaid is a
crumbling and garbage strewn beach also undercuts whatever conventional artistry there is
about Disneyesque depictions of this version of idealized feminine beauty. The effect of
coming upon this figure washed ashore is not that of the sensuous swoon, but rather the
shock of the radically disruptive of artistic conventions. Of a whole with the men represented
in images such as El vestuario, Tomando sol en la terraza, and Asado criollo—that is, the
unquestionably rigorously masculine body, with nothing of the conventions of the idealized
bodies of gay pornographic visual art, such a Ruven Afanador's previously mentioned
bullfighters—López's sireno both mocks the motif of the mermaid, while offering in its place
an aggressively masculine token. But to whom is this sireno offered? With its tapering tail
replacing the sexual attributes of the lower male torso, the masculine mermaid calls out
implicitly to the conventional audience of the siren—men. And the extent to which this male
body is not the androgyne of so much of gay male art, [22] López is offering the (homo)erotic
gaze of his spectator exactly the sort of image that confirms the all-male universe of the
homosocial pact.

Notes

[1] Also identified as Asado en Mendiolaza.

[2] The fact that Argentines may no longer so easily assemble to affirm their identity through
the ritual of the asado—beef has become too expensive for the twice daily consumption it
once had, or even the once-a-week-on-the-weekend blowout of more recent times—lends an
aura of nostalgia to Asado criollo. If, on the one hand, it is a clever framing of the importance
of the barbecue for Argentines, it is, on the other, a reminder that such rituals are no longer
so easily had. Like a religious persecution of the celebration of the mass, the consequences
of neoliberalism and globalization constitute something like the persecution of the
celebration of the asado.

[3] "South" here unquestionably refers to López's Southern Hemisphere origins, but, in the
context of his parodies of social and cultural icons, at least in English it evokes the phrase "to
go south" = "become inferior in quality or substance." Thus, the "south of realism" = "the
trivialization of realism."

[4] It is not completely clear why this should be so. In one sense, perhaps it is because
homosociality relies on a hierarchy of power that is disrupted and restructured in the throes
of passion. Perhaps it is because most versions of masculine heterosexism are grounded in
the belief that sex always involves a domination and submission that would both counter the
sociofinancial domination and submission of patriarchal society and produce irresolvably
conflicting structurings of it: a man cannot both be the active master in a sociofinancial
arrangement and the passive slave in an erotic one. Since women are, in patriarchal
heterosexuality, always passive, the "feminization" of one of the men in the homoerotic
coupling is radically destablizing. The fact that such a narrative may not be true of all, many,
or any homoerotic relationships is a problem of the imaginary of patriarchal heterosexuality,
not of verisimilar functioning of those relationships. On another level, homoeroticism may
involve the threat of a "truer" democracy of human relationships than is possible in
patriarchal heterosexuality (Newfield). This is the Whitmanesque principle, although it is
certainly at work in the feminist rejection of the deceits, as regards democracy and social
equality, of the patriarchy and its economics of capitalism, as in, for example, ecofeminism.
On the other hand, the so-called male homosexuality of ancient Greece (best synthesized by
Halperin) is founded on a tight system of male homosociality, whereby the two are not
incompatible. Carrillo discusses "nonsexual homosociality" in the context of homosexual
identities in Mexico (358-62).

[5] Hence, the Mexican narrative of the two men who wake up in bed together, and one says
to the other that he was so drunk last night that he can't remember what happened (a
version of this appears in Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 film Y tú mamá también) or the American
war movie motif of soldiers dying in each other's arms. See the Argentine variant on this
motif in José Hernández's Martin Fierro (Geirola) or the Brazilian one in Bruno Barreto's
1981 film Beijo no asfalto (Foster, Gender and Society 129-38).

[6] Military discipline—and certainly that of other quasimilitaristic organizations like
religious orders—may require the weak homoeroticism of homosocialism; see the American
motif of "two Marines and a six pack" and the phenomenon of "barracks buddies." The
homoerotic pornography of strong homoeroticism is often built around such real-life
circumstances. The Argentine sociologist Néstor Perlongher insisted on homoerotic—not
just homosocial—bonding as a factor in the network of survival among the São Paulo male
hustlers he studied.

[7] Homosociality among women, of course, works completely differently. While one form of
it may be promoted to keep the women entertained—the practice of women assembling in
the drawing room for coffee after a meal, while the men remain at table for a cigar and an
after-dinner drink—strong female-female bonding is frowned upon as virtually the top of the
slippery slope of men hating and lesbianism. On the other hand, female homosociality is
often viewed as an important strategic component, "sisterhood," of women united against
male oppression (see the entry on "Homosociality" in Kowaleski-Wallace). Queer sociality
would, therefore, have its own dimensions of solidarity, visibility, resistance, and social
revindication: "happy together" (see "Homosocialismo" in Mira's encyclopedia in Spanish
of queer culture).

[8] The importance of meat in Argentine culture and its relationship to violence,
homosociality, and homosexual rape was understood as early as the 1830s by Esteban
Echeverría, whose short story "El matadero" is a founding text of Argentine fiction (probably
written in the late 1830s, but not published until 1871). Echeverría describes the violence
surrounding the utilization of beef-eating as a political tool by the Rosas dictatorship, the
male homosociality of spaces like the slaughterhouse and the relationship of its denizens to
the violent politics of Rosas, and the use of homosexual rape, figured specifically in
Echeverria's story but present elsewhere in the period through the use of the corncob (the
mazorca) as an instrument of terror by the enforcers of the regime known as La Mazorca. In
the relationship between the enforcers and their victim, there is a displaced homosexuality (a
bull's pizzle is used in Echeverría's story), and, in their interpretation of the victim as
"rapable," there is the understanding of his body as open to feminization or as already
feminized—that is, as a male body available for sex at the hands of another (displaced) male
body. For the relevance of "El matadero" to the history of homosexuality in Argentina, see
Bazán (82-84); Piglia speaks of the violence in Echeverría's story (8-10), and his comments
are accompanied by Enrique Breccia's intense graphic representation (10-18). Not all
readers would agree that the bull's pizzle is used to penetrate the unfortunate unitario, since
specific reference is limited to whipping his bared buttocks. However, such same-sex
discipline is customarily understood as a form of homoeroticism that may or may not involve
subsequent penetration; Bazán clearly understands that rape is involved (82).

[9] Serge Brambly, one of Da Vinci's major biographers, includes a discussion of the latter's
homosexuality, and Freud's comments on the subject are famous.

[10] One of the two major sequences of Paul Leduc's 1986 film Frida, naturaleza viva involves
her nurse; one of the final memorable scenes of the film has the same nurse accompany
Frida, who is on a stretcher, into Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, for her first major
exhibition. The nurse is holding aloft a serum bottle.

[11] In Peter Medak's 1981 Zorro, the Gay Blade George Hamilton gives a queer twist to the
twin motif, when we discover that the supermacho Zorro has a gay twin, known as Bunny
Wigglesworth.

[12] Historically, gynecology has involved men manipulating women's bodies, and the
profession has always attempted to dispel the specter of medical rape in any of its stages by
draping the woman so that her body is hidden, by having a female present, and by averring
that the woman's body is no more than a medical specimen. Yet, a large number of women
prefer today female gynecologists (although this does not address the lesbian potential);
female proctologists with male patients, meanwhile, remain an essentially non-existent
species.

[13] Of many possible cultural references, one can think immediately of the doctor/patient
relationship in Peter Glenville's 1961 film Summer and Smoke, based on the drama of the
same name by Tennessee Williams; there is very much of the gay parable about this work
in both of its versions, despite the fact that the principal actors are a man and a woman.
However, the fact that in the film the doctor is played by the gay British actor Laurence
Harvey and his patient by Geraldine Page, who played women-who-might-really-be-gay-
men in a number of plays and movies works (in 1962, she also starred in the film version of
Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth) cannot be overlooked: in a still-closeted Hollywood (and
Broadway) such formulations were as close as one got to the circumstances of actual gay
lives.

[14] At least one major American gay play is built around the bath house, Terrence
McNally's The Ritz (1975); it is well known that gay-friendly Bette Midler got her start
performing in gay men's bath houses. The homosocial space of the bath house appears in
the Mexican Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's 1976 María de mi corazón (script by Gabriel
García Márquez), and the bath house as homoerotic space appears in another Mexican film,
Jorge Fons's 1995 El Callejón de los Milagros.

[15] In fact, there is the neighborhood masculine type that would fall into the category of the
groncho (=slob, bum), characterized by the look of the second of the two men referred to. In
the realm of soccer, as opposed to the hypermasculine and often frankly pretty-boy player,
the groncho relies for his appeal to his fans for his wild, animal magnetism. This is an image
that the great superstar Diego Maradona has often exploited.

[16] One of the most significant analyses of homoeroticism within macho hypermasculinity
for Latin America is Núñez Noriega's study, devoted to northwestern Mexico.

[17] Readers familiar with Mexican photography will immediately recognize that Tomando
sol en la terraza is a trope of Manuel Alvarez Bravo's 1939 La buena fama durmiendo (see
this image at http://www.getty.edu/bookstore/titles/postbravo.html).

[18] The Malboro Man ads have, for years, sold an image of hypermasculinity, undisturbed
by the feminine or the effeminate. However, the death from AIDS of Tom McBride, one of
the models for these ads, is a real-world remainder of the homoeroticism always already
present in the hypermasculine. Yet it remains to be seen to what extent Malboro ads in
Argentina exploit the appeal to the hypermasculine. (One of the anonymous reader's of this
essay contributes the following quote: "It is a little known fact that Marlboro was marked as
a 'feminine' cigarette (with lipstick-red-tipped filters) until the 1950s, when the Malboro Man
made his first appearance" [Sturkin 30]). Moreover, the carton this model has at hand is not
the standard American soft pack, but rather the flat, elongated box associated with French
cigarrettes as Gauloises. Nevertheless, even if one could not sustain the argument of the
masculine Malboro icon here, smoking itself is a mark of Argentine masculinity—men who
do not smoke are suspect—and smoking, like drinking and discussing women, is
paradigmatic of Western, if not global, homosociality in general.

[19] Other "penile" compositions authored by López include En el jardín botánico, where a
parody of Fidel Castro-Che Guevara army-fatigued macho brandishes a plastic pistol that is
somewhat flesh-colored rather than gun-metal gray (the famous photograph by the Cuban
fashion photographer Alberto Díaz—aka Korda—of the stern Che Guevara is parodied in La
Habana, where the lean revolutionary icon is juxtaposed to a fleshy (Argentine?) tourist
wearing a tank-top whose color and design evokes the Cuban flag). The way in which Cuba
was, throughout the 1990s until the Argentine economic bust of late 2001, a gay Mecca for
Argentine tourists is ironic, given Guevara's notorious homophobia. Walter Salles in his 2003
film Motorcycle Diaries plays up Guevara's heterosexual persona by using the Mexican
heartthrob Gael García Bernal to play the Argentine; see, on the other hand, the revision of
the Korda image in the Che Gay poster from the early 1970s (reproduced in Kunzle 95;
Kunzle claims that it is probably British in origin). Casatellote, in his excellent commentary
on López's work, refers specifically to the parody of Che Guevara (Marcos López 13-14). With
regard to García Bernal, it is important to note that the actor has upped the ante, so to
speak, on his acting persona, playing a gay/transvestite role in Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala
educación (2004). See also Antena, where a rosy-pink French tickler arises in the foreground
against the backdrop of the cactuses of the Argentine desert: the cylindrical botanical
features of the natural landscape are disrupted by the (probably imported) sex toys of urban
life.

[20] English does register "merman," although the concept belongs more to the realm of
circus sideshow hoaxes than to a centuries-old poetic tradition.

[21] A motif that, according to Conner at al. (306), has a lesbian dimension; certainly, the
siren that calls men to their death at sea is not a very comforting heterosexual formulation.

[22] The photographic and filmic record of which is examined by Waugh.

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