Since colonial times, the figuration of the Latin(o) male homosexual has been highly exoticized and troped in western media accounts (Shohat and Stam 1994; Ramirez Berg 2002), as they are depicted as hypermasculine figures whose raw sexuality functions as an unquestionable sign of their inner primal machismo. This view on male (homo)sexuality has been further reinforced through the kind of images of Latin(o) men that have been presented in male gay pornography. Such stereotyped representations of male (homo)sexuality have permeated into a global, socio-sexual imaginary that persists in placing such men within a sexual and erotic order in which their bodies convey an extreme form of primal sexuality. As a result, the emergence of national gay pornographic industry(ies) in Mexico has resulted in a re-evaluation of the social and sexual notions commonly associated with male (homo)sexuality. The mestizo (mixed race) gay man is both deconstructed from his positions of sexual subordination (differently from submission) to a white subject (even when such coloured individuals take the active role during sex) and reconstructed in a new space of libidinal economy. This article offers an analysis of the role that national gay pornography has played in shaping Mexican gay men's perception of their own sexuality taking as a point of departure their own national and ethnic background. The research will focus on a number of films made by Mecos Films and Eros Digital in Mexico, and demonstrate that such films have challenged notions of gender and sexual universalism, and instead offer new alternatives for the production and execution of desire amongst coloured men.

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This article aims to offer an analysis of the way that issues of national and ethnic self identity are structured and constructed in Mexican gay pornography. Unlike theorists who regard pornography as a matter of sex discrimination and argue that it simply undermines any positive attitudes towards homosexuality, this article argues that Mexican gay male pornography has served as a point of self reference for homosexual men in the country, while it has also helped to foster a degree of visibility for the gay community in mainstream culture. Through an analysis of the film La Putiza (2006), made by the emerging porn house Mecos Films, it will be demonstrated that Mexican male homosexuals do not regard pornography as a cultural product intended to the objectification of the gay community and its members. This film clearly stresses ethnic and national identity as the basis to contest the hegemony of Anglo-European gay pornography in which notions of Latin(o) identity have been caricaturised and heavily troped. This film borrows elements that are pertinent to the specificity of the national gay imagery, as well as film genres that are regarded as quintessentially Mexican. Therefore, the combination of Aztec heritage narrative and wrestling subtexts permit to posit this film as an alternative to the kind of images of Latin(o) homosexuality that are portrayed in Western pornography, while it also stresses national identity by using themes that circulate in the national imaginary as exclusively Mexican. In short, the emerging Mexican gay pornographic industry and the film that it produces prove to be a site of contestation of the hegemony of ''Latinised'' images that have been offered in foreign pornographic accounts, while they also become a site of validation for gay men whose physicality or ethnic heritage has been rejected within the politics of the erotic.

This article explores the way cross-dressing has been used as a tool of dissent by queer subjects in the fi lm Mariposas en el andamio . This documentary not only advocates the integration of homosexuals in the realm of Cuban society, but also evidences the establishment of a culture of transvestism on the island. The ultimate intention of Mariposas is to posit the male-to-female transvestite as a fi gure that contests hegemonic heteronormativity as well as the machista values predicated by the Cuban revolution. The fi lm not only opposes sexist heteronormativity (machismo in Latin American societies), but also establishes a link between homosexuality and cross-dressing practices in Latin America, as transvestism becomes an externalisation of these individuals' homosexual identity. Furthermore, the fi lm seems to suggest that the transvestites feel trapped in the wrong biological sex. The second focus of this article is on the geographical spaces where such transvestic practices are permissible on the island. Although the fi lm makes a case for a more open and inclusive Cuban society, it fails to show that same-sex desire and cross-dressing can be played out outside the neighbourhood's canteen in which the show takes place. Finally, I intend to show how camp becomes the best strategy for the transvestites to challenge the idea of homosexuals as anti-revolutionary fi gures as well as Latin American heteronormativity. To this end, I engage in a study of a strategy of gender subversion that I call 'camp fuck'. This type of campness de-constructs the idea of a bourgeois camp to transform it into a more political device, which permits the contesting of heteronormativity through elements that have traditionally been regarded as frivolous and apolitical.

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