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SCREENINGS
Letter From Mexico: The Queer Mainstream
Paul Julian Smith
What does it mean for a film to be both queer and mainstream? Recent Mexican features with lesbian, gay, and trans
themes pose this question. They are audience-friendly genre
movies, either romantic comedies or thrillers, naturalistic in
style, apolitical in attitude, and commercially produced in
the hope of exhibition in theaters. Reaching out through
social media to a queer community of viewers, they also
seek to connect closely with their audience. In all these
ways they differ from the auteurist homoerotic cinema of,
say, Julián Hernández (a perennial festival favorite) and
return perhaps to the more accessible aesthetic of Mexico’s
first and most durable gay director, Jaime Humberto
Hermosillo (Doña Herlinda y su hijo [Doña Herlinda and
Her Son, 1985]).1
But the cultural climate has changed radically since
Hermosillo’s heyday. Marriage and adoption equality have
been a reality, in Mexico City at least, since 2010. And in
2013 the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that the use of
homophobic slurs was a violation of fundamental human
rights. A flurry of books has also appeared. One is a posthumous collection of essays by respected intellectual Carlos
Monsiváis on “sexual diversity,” which focuses on such issues
as the continuing coexistence of a traditional gendered
model of queerness (male/female identification) with the
newer international model of object choice (gay/straight
affiliation).2 Another offers a history of LGBT activism in
the northern metropolis of Monterrey.3 And a third attempts
an academic rehabilitation of the slur “joto” (“fag”).4 All are
available at Voces en Tinta [Lives in Ink], the indispensable
queer book store, café, and community center in Zona Rosa,
the capital’s gay village.
Anecdotally, young queers in the capital seem confidently
visible, happy to express affection. Mexico City’s iconic Latin
American Tower, a glass and steel replica of the Empire
State Building, was once a location for a straight romantic
comedy, Alfonso Cuarón’s Solo con tu pareja (Only with Your
Partner, 1991). On my recent visit to its viewing platform,
Film Quarterly, Vol. 69, Number 4, pp. 78–81, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630.
© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2016.69.4.78.
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Times have changed in the capital city since the days of the
decidedly straight Alfonso Cuarón comedy Solo con tu
pareja (1991).
no one turned a hair as a lesbian couple shared a passionate
kiss at sunset.
Same-sex relations have, then, been partly normalized in
everyday life. Meanwhile, in the realm of film, two longterm initiatives have served to create communities of cinephilia and local configurations of pleasure. Perhaps they also
cleared the way for new mainstream LGBT features. The
extensive annual Mix México Festival of Diversity in Film
and Video, now in its twentieth edition, claims to be the oldest in Latin America. And Mecos (“Cum”) Films is also
unique on the continent as an established porn producer that
bares distinctively Mexican male bodies for loyal local audiences. Mecos even riffs on political issues. One of its titles,
Corrupción en México (Corruption in Mexico, 2010), boasts
performers playing police and narcos and a scene unnervingly entitled “Kidnapping the Fresa [Rich Kid].” The first
videos from Mecos, back in 2004, starred masked wrestlers,
queering local icons in a porn setting.
It is in this new social and cinematic context of assimilation, then, that the mainstream queer cinema has emerged.
Rejecting both political and formal radicalism, it has also disavowed the auteurist privilege of art cinema in its quest for a
wider and more intimate audience. However, it still tends to
depend on film schools and festivals for its development
A scene from an early Mecos Films title.
funding and initial distribution. The three films I treat here
are Todo el mundo tiene a alguién menos yo (Everybody’s Got
Somebody . . . Not Me, Raúl Fuentes, 2012), Cuatro lunas
(Four Moons, Sergio Tovar Velarde, 2014), and Carmín tropical (Rigoberto Pérezcano, 2014).
Todo el mundo tiene a alguién menos yo is a romantic comedy that hews the closest of these three features to an art or
indie aesthetic. This befits its director, a graduate of CUEC,
the state film school known for its artistic ethos. The film’s
screwball premise is simple. When a neurotic older woman
meets a kooky teenager, still in high school, she falls finally
head over heels. In typically charming, everyday sequences
the couple exchange makeup (“Lipstick should be shared
only between smart people”) or kiss in a near-deserted art
house (we hear the unseen film’s lugubrious German dialogue in the background). Yet, shooting in moody black and
white, director Fuentes cannot help but invoke to some
extent Mexican cinema’s more miserabilist auteur tradition
(Julián Hernández’s first feature was also monochrome).
Although made available on the Mexican Netflix service
after its Guadalajara Festival premiere, Todo el mundo seems
to have had the least impact of the three films. Its director
declared to the press that he didn’t make “gay films, but love
stories,” and claimed to be opposed to “caricatures and labels.” As we shall see, this assimilationist attitude is characteristic of the other two films in my mainstream queer
school.5
Cuatro lunas (made in 2014, but not released theatrically
in Mexico until 2015) won greater acceptance. Developed
with support from Mexico’s two main festivals (Morelia and
Guadalajara), it went on to win prizes (most recently, Best
Picture at the Bravo awards) and was supported on its release by an active presence on Twitter and extensive personal
appearances by its large and comely cast. The strategy led to
a twenty-week stay in theaters. Transmedia brand extension
even included the publication of a novelization by the director-screenwriter, surely a first in Mexican queer cinema.6
Belying its somewhat cumbersome astronomical metaphor, Cuatro lunas tells the charming story of four ages of
(gay) man through the trope of the phases of the moon: the
new moon is the tween youth becoming aware of his desire
for a cousin; the waxing moon is the inexperienced student
couple embarking on an affair that one of them insists on
keeping secret; the full moon is an established thirtyish pair
torn apart by an affair; and the waning moon is an elderly
poet, yearning for a rent boy he meets in a bathhouse.
This kind of interlocking narrative is familiar in Mexican
cinema from prize-winning but accessible films such as
El callejón de los milagros (Midaq Alley, Jorge Fons, 1995) and,
later and more famously, Amores Perros (Alejandro González
Iñárritu, 2000). Cuatro lunas invokes this middlebrow format
as it cuts between diverse narrative strands that barely intersect. But unlike Fons’s or González Iñárritu’s tragic visions
(or, once again, Julián Hernández’s equally pessimistic perspective), Tovar Velarde’s love stories work out just fine. The
little boy may be briefly bullied, but he will finally be reconciled with his macho father who teaches him how to defend
himself. The closeted young man will eventually introduce
his boyfriend to his conservative family. The mature couple
split up, but are reconciled to new lives of independence.
Even the apparently pathetic senior is inspired by his brief,
paid lover to write a new, somewhat ambiguous poem
(“I will always bear you inside of me . . . ”). The rent boy
even gives the older man, finally, the kiss he had previously
refused him, this time for free.
Cuatro lunas offers its broad target audience an optimistic
account of the gay life cycle, not to mention some crowdpleasing frontal nudity in the scenes at the baths and a sex
club. Its assimilationist motto may be undemanding (its tagline, widely disseminated in social media, was “Love is Love”)
as is its middle-class metropolitan milieu. But Tovar Velarde’s
film also comments in passing on the gender/object choice conundrum I mentioned earlier, such as the revelation that one
straight-acting bearded man who berates his partner’s supposed effeminacy actually prefers to bottom in sex. Widely
available in pirate video stalls on Mexico City streets (where
I purchased my copy), the low-budget Cuatro lunas also managed theatrical outings in New York and Los Angeles.
Finally, Carmín tropical won the prize for best Mexican
fiction feature at the Morelia festival and was released theatrically in Mexico in 2015. Pérezcano’s second film, a transgender
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Fuentes’s Todo el mundo brings a lesbian love story to the Mexican screen and Netflix Mexico.
An endearing story made Serio Velarde’s Cuatro lunas a
success despite its cumbersome metaphors.
murder mystery, tells the story of a muxe or trans woman
who returns to her hometown to investigate the murder of
her best friend. The setting is provincial, far from the sophisticated Mexico City of these other films: an isthmus in the
province of Oaxaca, famous for its community of third-sex
people who do not identify with modern models of sexuality.
Carmín tropical’s documentary intent testifies to a society
in which muxe identity is taken for granted by most, but in
spite of initial appearances, the film is really a mainstream
fiction feature. The glamorous protagonist is played by a
skilled professional actor who is neither transgender nor
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from Oaxaca. And her story is tightly constructed, with a
shocking twist: cutting between a musical number in a
nightclub and a romantic tryst in a hotel, the last sequence
transforms the audience’s understanding of the film up to
that point, revealing the true nature of the killer.
This proficient plotting is perhaps related to the fact that
Pérezcano wrote the script of Carmín with support from US
foundations. But it also proves that the new mainstream
queer cinema can assimilate the conventions of the thriller as
well as those of the romance and can stray far from the reassuring home territory of the tolerant metropolis. Moreover,
Carmín focuses on local Mexican subjects whose gender
identifications are irreducible to international templates
based on sexual object choice.
Finally, however, Carmín’s disturbing serial killer premise
suggests that, in spite of the relative acceptance of queer subjects, LGBT Mexicans can still be threatened by deadly homophobia. The new corpus that I suggest here, with these
three films, may perhaps be premature in rejecting the political and artistic radicalism of earlier Mexican queer cinema.
Its great virtue, however, is that it aims to connect with an
audience beyond the art house that needs—in these changing, challenging times—to see its newly visible community
represented on the big screen.
Pérezcano’s Carmín tropical was scripted with support from foundations in the United States.
Notes
1. See my earlier interview with Hernández: “The Caress of the
Camera in the Cinema of Julián Hernández,” FQ 68:3
(Spring 2015): 81–86.
2. Carlos Monsiváis, Qué se abra esa puerta: Crónicas y ensayos sobre la diversidad social (Mexico City: Paidós, 2010).
3. Rodrigo Quintero Murguía, La ruta del arcoíris en la Sultana:
Historia del movimiento LGBT en Nuevo León (Monterrey:
Fondo Editorial de Nuevo León, 2015).
4. Antonio Marquet, El crepúsculo de heterolandia: Mester de
jotería (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2006).
5. Guillermo Montalvo Fuentes, “Entrevista: Yo no hago cine
gay, filmo historias de amor: Raúl Fuentes,” Notiese, March
11, 2013, www.notiese.org/notiese.php?ctn_id=6403.
6. Sergio Tovar Velarde, Cuatro lunas (Mexico City: Planeta,
2015).
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