Today, although military service is mandatory for all young males, sodomy is condemned by the
armed forces
. Enlistees are often subjected to psychological screenings regarding sexual preference; those found to be homosexual may be institutionalized, or else dishonorably discharged. In 1997, the first Festival of Queer
Cinema
in Seoul was closed down by the police, which considered it illegal and obscene (it took place successfully the following year). South Korea’s first gay magazine, which launched in 1998, has been consistently prohibited by the Korean Publication Ethics Committee from being sold to minors. In 1999, a school textbook described gays as carriers of
AIDS
and as sexual perverts. Anti-AIDS policies in South Korea are, for the most part, anti-gay policies; associations fighting against AIDS are supposed to fight the disease, but in fact mostly fight against the “spread” of homosexuality by promoting homophobia and strictly conservative sexual morals. In 2000, a famous South Korean actor, Hong Suk-chon, came out of the closet, but the very next day, he was fired by the television network that employed him (in 2003, however, Hong began a promising return to film and television).
In 2001, the Ministry of Information and Communication adopted a system which classified LGBT sites as “harmful
media
,” requiring that they be filtered on all computers accessible to youth, that is, in
schools
, libraries, and Internet cafés. In the criteria defining indecent websites, homosexuality is classified under the category of “obscenity and perversion.” The first case of legal action was in November 2001, against the owner of South Korea’s first and largest gay website; he was threatened with two years in jail unless he labeled his site as “harmful” and installed filters (with a price tag of $10,000 US).
Despite this negative legacy, discussions on the subject of homosexuality are at least now tolerated in day-to-day life, and anti-discriminatory measures are being put into place. And in April 2003, the Korean National Human Rights Committee ordered that anti-gay language be removed from the Youth Protection Act, which had been originated to protect youth from evils such as homosexuality. Even today, people believed to be homosexual are becoming targets of physical violence.
—Huso Yi
Herdt, Gilbert.
Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives
. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
Murray, Stepheno.
Homosexualities
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.
Dong-Sae, Han. “Sexual Perversions in Korea,”
Journal of Korean Neuropsychiatry
9, no. 1 (1970).
Chung, In-Ji, Jong-Seo Kim, and Bo-In Hwang.
Sejong Shilrok
[History of Sejong the king, from 1418 to 1450] (n.p, n.d.).
Yi, Huso. “Homosexuality in South Korea,” In
The International Encyclopedia of Sexuality
. Vol. 4. Edited by Robert T. Francoeur and Raymond J. Noonan. New York: Continuum, 2001.
––—. [Korean translation of
Is It a Choice?: Answers to 300 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions about Gay and Lesbian People
]. Seoul: Park Young-Yul Publisher, 2000.
—Buddhism; China; Communism; Japan; Southeast Asia.
LATIN AMERICA
When Latin America was discovered by Spain, and, in the case of Brazil, by Portugal, at the end of the fifteenth century, the two European countries were experiencing the most intolerant period in their respective histories with regard to the “abominable” sin of sodomy. At that time, more than a dozen tribunals of the Holy Office of the
Inquisition
were established in the Iberian Peninsula, and among its decisions, declared sodomy as heinous a crime as
treason
or regicide. In Spanish America, a good number of tribunals were also set up in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. In Brazil, visitors and “friends” of the Holy Office made regular inspections in all parts of the Portuguese colony, denouncing and arresting sodomites as they were discovered. The
sin
of sodomy was one of the rare crimes for which the first governors of Brazil could impose the death penalty without having to first consult the king of Portugal.
Still today, in Latin America, homophobia is strongly entrenched in Iberian male chauvinism, whose presupposed ideologies are inspired by tracts on moral
theology
dating from the time of the conquests: “Of all the sins, sodomy is the most shameful, the dirtiest and the most corrupt, and there is no other that is as regrettable in the eyes of God and man. Because of this sin, God flooded the Earth, and for this sin, he destroyed the cities of
Sodom and Gomorrah
. Because of sodomy, the Knights Templar were destroyed in all of Christendom in a single day. This is why we ordain that all men who have committed such a sin be burned and reduced to ash by the fire, in such a way as there remain no memory of their body or tomb.” During this time, homosexuals were persecuted by three different tribunals: the king’s justice, the Holy Inquisition, and the bishop.
When they arrived in the New World, the Spaniards and Portuguese discovered a great diversity of peoples and civilizations whose practices were very different from the Judeo-Christian cultural matrix, and even sometimes diametrically opposed with regard to nudity, the concept of honor, virginity, incest, polygamy, divorce, and especially homosexuality, transvestism, and transsexuality.
The
História General y Natural de las Indias
reveals that as early as 1514 the native taste for the
vitium nefandum
was everywhere, in the Caribbean islands as well as in the territories of
Tierra Firme
. The conquistadors were profoundly scandalized by the sculptures and idols venerated by the native population, which included explicit representations of homoerotic relations. Whether in Mexico, Central America, or South America, whether in the Andes or the Amazon, the Europeans repeatedly referred to the natives as “sodomites” in their journals, whether male or female. As well, a good number of chroniclers associated sodomy with irreligiousness: according to one, “As the natives do not know the real God and Father, they commit every day the worst of sins: idolatry, human sacrifice, ingestion of human flesh, speaking with the Devil, sodomy, etc.”
This is not to say that all Native American cultures in this region looked favorably upon love between persons of the same gender. According to Franciscan chroniclers, the Maya and the Aztecs believed that “the patient sodomite is abominable,
nefandum
and detestable, deserving of contempt and ridicule.” It is interesting to note a contradiction observed in pre-Columbian civilizations: on one hand, they believed in an extremely Dionysian mythology, valuing hermaphrodism and homosexuality, but on the other, engaged in a rather repressive, Apollonian moral practice that allowed for the death sentence in certain cases of homoseuxal activity. Nevertheless, as Venezuelan historian Antonio Raquena, author of groundbreaking studies on homosexuality in the New World, stated in 1945, “Accepted or excluded, honored or severely chastised depending on the nation where it is practiced, homosexuality was present from the Bering Strait to the Strait of Magellan.”
In the history of homophobia in the New World, 1513 stands as a particularly tragic date. As described by the sixteenth-century historian Pietro Martire D’anghiera, upon discovering many homosexual natives in the Isthmus of Panama, conquistador Vasco Balboa had forty of them arrested and subsequently devoured by his hounds. In 1548, even homosexual European colonists could not escape institutional persecution: in Guatemala, seven sodomites were arrested, among whom were four clerics. However, at the moment they were tied to the stake, they escaped punishment thanks to an uprising of the local populace.
The first deportation to the Americas for reason of sodomy took place in 1549, when a young Portuguese man, Estêvão Redondo, ex-servant of the governor of Lisbon, was permanently exiled to northeastern Brazil. Some twenty years later, in 1571, the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition took up residence in Mexico and in Peru and later in 1610, in the city of Cartagena in Columbia. However, in these Spanish colonies, contrary to the Portuguese colony of Brazil, the Holy Office did not have the power to persecute the sin of sodomy, as it fell under the king’s justice and that of the bishop.
In Brazil, between 1591 and 1620, some 283 men and women were charged with sodomy, with forty-four condemned, many of whom were sentenced to the king’s galleys or deported to the far reaches of Africa or
India
. Among the twenty-nine lesbians denounced, five suffered financial and spiritual punishment, three were deported, and two were sentenced to public flogging. (Under the initiative of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, Filipa de Sousa, the most famous of these lesbians, was remembered centuries later with the establishment of an international human rights award in her name.) In 1646, the Portuguese Inquisition decriminalized lesbianism, but although lesbians could now escape the death penalty, they continued to be persecuted by royal and Episcopal justice.
Documents, meanwhile, confirm the executions of two young homosexuals in Brazil. In 1613, in St-Louis du Maranhão, by order of French invaders under the instigation of Capuchin missionaries, a Tupinamba native, known for being
tibira
, or a passive sodomite, was tied to the mouth of a cannon, his body shred to pieces by the mortar, “to purify the Earth of their evils.” Then in 1678, in the Sergipe region of northeast Brazil, a young black slave “was flogged to death for having committed the sin of sodomy with a white soldier.”
However, it was in Mexico that the persecution of native Latin American sodomites was the most violent during the colonial period. In 1658, 123
mariquitas
living in the capital region were exposed; nineteen were arrested and fourteen were burned. One of the condemned, a boy under the age of fifteen, escaped the flames, but he nonetheless received 200 lashes and was condemned to six years of hard labor. In 1673, another persecution took place, this time in the region of Mixoac, where seven mulatto, black, and mixed-race
sométicos
were burned at the stake.
With the end of the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions, the tribunals of Holy Office disappeared from Latin America: from Mexico and Peru in 1820 and from Cartagena and Brazil in 1821. Though the
Monstrum horribile
was officially destroyed, attitudes were not. To this day, the spectre of the Inquisition remains alive throughout Latin America, not only in an ideology that is moralist and intolerant toward sexual minorities, but also in the very makeup of the local governments, whose traditional roots come directly from the merciless friends and commissioners of the Holy Office.
Taking inspiration from the Napoleonic Code, the majority of the new Latin American nations eventually decriminalized sodomy. However, prejudice and
discrimination
against homosexuals continued during the nineteeth century, specifically against sexual “passivity.” Under the pretext of curbing indecency or prostitution, and in the case of transvestites, ideological falsity, many homosexuals continued to be blackmailed, incarcerated, and tortured by agents of the new police order. Thus, homosexuals moved from the clutches of the Inquisition to those of the
police
. At the same time, many doctors and scientists showed their so-called good will, shielding women and “inverted” men from
prisons
and police stations, by testing their cures for homosexuality in clinics and hospitals. However, in so doing, they effectively acted as the watchdogs of official
morality
. With regard to “curing” the
maricones
, they were sometimes subjected to torturous therapies, including electric shocks, high doses of hormones, dangerous drugs, and even transplantation of monkey testicles—all of which, of course, met with little success.
In the twentieth century, marginality, secrecy, self-loathing, violence, and even assassination had become the daily bread for millions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Latin Americans who were rejected by their families, humiliated in the streets, and refused
work
. In Brazil, home to more than seventeen-million homosexuals, research has revealed that among all social minorities, gays and lesbians are by far the most hated. The continuum of discrimination spans from verbal insults to homophobic murders, and from public violence to arbitrary incarceration. To this day, Mexican gays are still nicknamed the “forty-one,” an allusion to the forty-one homosexuals arrested one night in 1901 and subjected to shameful punishments.
Today, according to the
Spartacus International Gay Guide
, gay cruising areas and gay-friendly bars and businesses exist in every Latin American and Caribbean nation. Nonetheless, the sporadic existence of LGBT rights groups—in roughly only half of these countries—attests to the fact that progress is still yet to be made with respect to gay rights.
Despite the great socio-economic and cultural diversity of the region, Latin America’s history is marked by the extreme virulence of male chauvinism and homophobia that, reinforced by the omnipresent, Christian church-influenced familial control, inhibits the gays from coming out, which in part explains the precariousness of LGBT rights groups. The stigmatization is so strong, in fact that it is often said that “one must be very macho in order to be gay in Latin America.” (The word
marica
and its regional variants,
mariquita, mariquinha
, and
maricona
, are used everywhere in Latin America, including in Brazilian Portuguese, and are the most frequent insults aimed at homosexuals.) The same hostility also affects lesbians, who are often victims of severe acts of violence committed by members of their own families, or by male ex-lovers/spouses, motivated by misogynistic and
lesbophobic
ideology that interprets the love between two women as an outrage and a threat to male chauvinist hegemony.
Among the countries of Latin America, the Republic of Cuba has unfortunately distinguished itself during the 1960s through government-sanctioned violence and persecution of homosexuality, being deemed a sign of capitalist
decadence
. Many books and films, such as Tomás Gutierréz Alea’s 1993 film,
Fresa y chocolate
[
Strawberry and Chocolate
], and Reinaldo
Arenas
’ 1992 book,
Antes que anochezca
[
Before Nights Falls
; adapted to film in 2000], reveal Cuba’s homophobic intolerance during this period. Today, though there is no information on any organized gay movements in Cuba, it is well known that in its urban centers at least, lesbians and gays are gaining freedom, benefiting from the relative
tolerance
of authorities. (This new attitude of respect with regard to sexual orientation or questions of gender was publicly observed during official UN meetings held during the World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, where Cuba was the only Latin American country to defend every anti-discriminatory reference founded on sexual orientation.)