This essay is both a historiographical review of male homosexuality in Latin America and a historical synthesis of the intellectual and cultural traditions of attitudes, mores, and laws regarding homosexuality.1 The topic of male homosexuality is a powerful lens through which historians can address and problematize the dilemmas of reconstructing the social past.2 Taken originally as a corrective against overly diplomatic and political history, the new social history of the 1970s still bears crucially on the subject of homosexuality because the available scholarship still struggles with the basic issues of reconstruction.
The history of homosexuality bears centrally on the nature of sexual relations, reproduction, marriage, and family, all central components of social values. Unfortunately, the scarcity of extant sources and the nascent quality of its historiography render the study of homosexuality in Latin America difficult. Scholars of this subject wrestle quite consciously over the dilemma of “realistic reconstruction”...
