In February 1997, 1000 kms to the north of Mexico City, right in the center of power of Monterrey, one of the most conservative cities in Mexico, a spiritual earthquake was underway.
The Hartford Courant of Connecticut had broken the first story of sex abuse by Father Marcial Maciel, the head of the powerful catholic organization “The Legionaries of Christ” and by then the most important spiritual leader of the very influential Monterrey industrial elite.
Mexican journalist and news anchor Ciro Gomez Leyva of “CNI Canal 40” further investigated the story and truly broke the lid of that cesspool.
Father Maciel had abused children, some of them by ‘ 97 very respectable men that only told the story to reporters in their deathbed.
The powerful in Monterrey reacted by strongly pressuring the government and all of the business community to establish a publicity boycott against CNI, the news outlet that ousted “Padre Maciel”.
The channel didn’t budge in what today seems an almost comically honorable gesture of decent journalism, which contributed to the financial debt that ultimately led to the rather violent takeover of one of the best news outlets Mexico has ever known.
Other journalists like Carmen Aristegui and Javier Solórzano suffered similar fates as late as 2002 and beyond, until the Vatican agreed that, yeah, sure, Marcial Maciel was a pretty bad guy. Which did not happen until “El Padre” was six feet under.
You can find Monterrey by a three-hour car ride from the border crossing that unites the city of Laredo, Texas from Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. A nice bridge that brings our two nations together. One of the few glory-holes legally established in the very long Mexico-US border.
When you get here –if you have a keen eye for this kind of thing, you will realize the city has its own walls within. And also its few legal and illegal holes.
A long hill partitions the city from east to west called, rather unimaginatively, the “Loma Larga”. To the south of the Long Hill , you will find the richest municipality of Latin America, San Pedro Garza García with its 126,000 inhabitants. To the north live the rest of the 4 million souls in what we call the Metropolitan Area, composed of 12 municipalities chock full of heavy industry, middle class and blue-collar suburbs.
I've been living in this city for about 18 years. Just enough to figure out how different life can turn out for you as a gay man depending on which side of our long wall you were born in. If you are born to the richer southern side you just might be the heir to a global empire. Really the closest Mexico has to royalty.
One of our very own “Queens of England”, if I may.
The people in this picture are NOT GAY (or I dont know that they are). I just pulled it off google images to give an example of social events journalism in monterrey
Your christening, first communion, confirmation party and wedding will be written about in a special section of the local newspaper or, depending on your wealth, one of the no less than 13 local publications exclusively devoted to this sort of journalism.
Growing up, you will soon learn just how stern is the hand you have been dealt.
How impossible it is to get out of your condition as you pray, study in a single gendered Legionaire’ s of Christ ran catholic school from cradle to high school, go to a private college, get married, have as many kids as possible, run your empire, defend your version of Catholicism and die proudly surrounded by your grandchildren, the archbishop -if you are actually anybody worthy of mention- and the mother of el niño-dios, Our Lady La Virgen de Guadalupe. Si Señor!
Of course you will live the other side of your life in personal gay dating sites, on those long trips to daddy’ s factory in Beijing or maybe on that far away country house your wife hates and never goes to.
Radiohead’ s “Climbing up the Walls” seems fitting:
It’s always best when the light is off
It’s always better on the outside
Fifteen blows to the back of your head
Fifteen blows to your mind
Sometimes your story will be told in secret, like this one was to me, by that Xanax pumped wife of yours who knows about the whole thing but doesn’ t care provided she and your equally over-exposed kids get to have what she calls "the life we deserve".
And really, if she has to endure life with your sorry ass, she does deserve all the top-notch drugs your inheritance can buy - and then some.
Of course your millage may vary. The case I depict is real but admittedly a bit extreme. You may also be given the option to exile yourself to a civilized country far away from your family’s social circle and, in some more progressive cases, like some people I know of, you might even be born to smart, very rich and even very catholic people that can actually deal with your homosexuality in an adult manner. It’ s a long shot but some walls do, after all, break down in time.
Another more probable lucky break you may get though, is to be born north of the wall where parents don’ t parade you at all since, like most Mexicans, they just plain don’ t have time for that crap. They work like hell to achieve the miracle of clothing and feeding you.
A little while back I met a guy in his 20’ s from one of the poorest blue-collar neighborhoods in the city.
He had a pistol tattoo under his arm and told me the day before we met the police stopped and strip-searched him looking for drugs and, while punching him on his tattoo to “teach him a lesson” they rudely suggested he had sex with them.
He’ s a street-smart kid and this is not the first time he has had to go through something like that so he managed to talk himself out of this not uncommon experience.
You may think our “Queens of England” have it better than him, but I don’ t. This kid can look after himself and has had to openly assert his sexual preference in a very violent environment his entire life. He will probably lift himself out of poverty faster than his straight siblings for that very same reason, fall in love with a guy that loves him back and live as himself. So how much is that worth?
But that’ s not the only sort of wildling north of the wall that makes La Loma Larga.
The chic urban middle class “out”gay guy, of any and all age groups, usually clings to his safe marketed identity like a gay zombie might cuddle his lover’ s brains, as Bruce LaBruce has depicted so well.
He dreams of a rainbow colored prince that will give him what he imagines to be “the life he deserves”.
We might call him the Gucci little piggy, to keep with the Radiohead theme.
He may not be the rich wife of our Queen Elizabeth but he sure thinks he deserves to be.
And of course his gay prince exists. Hell, he’ s having breakfast with the Headmaster tomorrow to discuss the cost of admittance of his as-many-as-god-sent-him kids into their very expensive school and works hard to pay for his wife’ s perfect and more or less immaculate new tits.
The Queen might even let our piggy blow him in the country house from time to time, but it must be said that it doesn’ t seem all too likely he will divorce the wife to marry our pig in the immediate future although, alas, that very unlikely scenario happens all the time to the inevitable poor girl in the Mexican telenovelas still transmitted in the TV channels that had the good business sense not to criticize Marcial Maciel back in the day, so our Gucci Little Piggy never looses hope.
Now please understand anyone can physically get through the Long Hill that separates the normal people in Monterrey from the rich in San Pedro. It’s short cab ride or a long walk away from any part of the city.
Just like everyone in Mexico, or indeed in the United States, can get through the border crossing of the two Laredos, legally or illegally.
The walls we build around ourselves, on the other hand, seem to be much harder to get through.
So, how to be gay in Mexico and not turn straight trying? Radiohead answered that one a long time ago:
So lock the kids up safe tonight
Put the eyes in the cupboard
I’ ve got the smell of a local man
Who’ s got the loneliest feeling
That either way he turns I’ ll be there
Open up your skull
I’ ll be there
Climbing up the walls
Climbing up the walls
Este texto en inglés lo escribí hace años pero nunca vió la luz. Es sobre la experiencia homosexual en Monterrey desde la perspectiva de dos extremos de clases sociales. Gracias a Moisés Silva que como experto en la lengua inglesa le dió una leída y me ayudó con un par de cosas en aquel tórrido 2013.