I analyze racism in Sydney’s gay sauna scene through decolonial scholarship. In Sydney, there are three gay saunas; each of them caters to specific races and is decorated accordingly. Sauna 1 is popular among Asian men and their admirers and has an Oriental-like style. Sauna 2 is popular among white and non-Asian men and has a minimalist style featuring photographs of white, cisgender and muscular men. Sauna 3 is mostly visited by white and Middle Eastern straight-acting men and its décor does not reference race. Both patrons and venue owners are aware of the race dynamics in Sydney’s gay scene and actively reproduce them in the patronage of venues and organization and décor of space. I conclude that Sydney’s gay sauna scene is articulated by a combination of colonial understandings of race and Australian multicultural policies that privilege white and Anglo populations while avoiding explicit references to race.

Affect-based studies consider that peoples’ lives and behaviors cannot be entirely grasped and understood by rational choice models. The main goal of this article is to understand how factors like sexuality and migration affect the relations between people and spaces. Following Spinoza’s Ethics and subsequent interpretations, the article considers that bodies are influenced by previous interactions and act accordingly, and that space is a relational mode of substance perceived through attributes and modes affecting individuals and articulating the relationship of space, sexuality, and migration. This research studies same-sex-attracted men who moved to Tijuana, Mexico. Results show that affects (expressed through actions and passions) inform people’s relations to space based on their valorization of life events and expectations; that the meanings of space are personally constructed, relational, volatile, and invisible to others; and that most interviewees didn’t feel comfortable avowing to the gay identity but identified themselves as such, since, to some extent, gayness can escape from the moral stigma of male-male interaction in Latin America.

En este artículo analizo la representación de las relaciones entre hombres y la belleza de muchachos en la obra de Oswaldo Reynoso (1931-2016). Previos análisis sobre su obra versan sobre cuestiones lingüísticas, la recepción que ha tenido su narrativa y las relaciones entre hombres en algunos de sus libros. A manera de conclusión, considero que los encuentros y relaciones entre hombres y muchachos que Reynoso retrató puede dividirse en homosexuales y homoeróticos. Los primeros son una crítica a la sociedad peruana, especialmente a las clases altas, donde la homosexualidad es representada de manera evidente. Los segundos están velados dentro del texto y abarcan desde relaciones de amistad, camaradería y apoyo entre los personajes, hasta la abierta representación de la belleza de hombres jóvenes. Finalmente, considero que en la obra de Reynoso hay elementos que pueden considerarse como decoloniales, pues desafían las ideas sobre belleza y sexualidad presentes en la región.

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