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Latin American machismo has limited glbtq expression in the arts. Consequently, Latin American Art by glbtq artists often portrays a desire for both sexual and political liberation.
By contrast, Latin American Literature has included gay and lesbian characters since before the turn of the twentieth century, but is easy for anglophones to misunderstand because traditional Latin American constructions of sexuality differ markedly from the medico-legal tradition familiar in North American and European glbtq history.
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Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990) was persecuted for his homosexuality by the Castro government he had once championed. Nevertheless, he challenged all types of ideological dogmatism and was unapologetic and explicit when he wrote about his own homosexual escapades.
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Luis Caballero Holguín (1943-1995), one of the most significant Latin American painters of the second half of the twentieth century, considered his homosexuality a fundamental component of his artistic expression.
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Roberta Close (b.1964), a Brazilian model, actress, and television performer, is one of the world's most famous transsexual celebrities. Her tell-all autobiography Muito Prazer, Roberta Close (Much Pleasure, Roberta Close, 1998) was a best-seller in Brazil.
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Léonor Fini (1908-1996) is an Argentinian-born artist who is associated with the European Surrealist movement. Her work's emphasis on female power and autonomy can be seen as a response to the patriarchal assumptions of Surrealism.
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Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), a bisexual Mexican artist, was a masterful exponent of cross-dressing, deliberately using male drag to project power and independence.
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José Lezama Lima (1910-1976) is an important Cuban writer and a major Latin-American literary figure. He included problematic homosexual passages in his two best-known novels.
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Jaime Manrique (b. 1949) has written novels, short stories, poetry, and works of nonfiction. His fiction often addresses the homophobia and oppressive machismo of his native Colombia.
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Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), a Chilean educator, journalist, feminist, diplomat, and Nobel laureate, celebrated women and motherhood in poems and essays that are frequently homoerotic.
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Manuel Puig (1932-1990) included homosexual themes and motifs in a number of his eight novels, and in the best known of them, Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), homosexual desire is central to the fiction.
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Luis Zapata (b. 1951) is Mexico's most successful and productive gay writer. Between 1975 and 1990, he published four novels and a novelette in which the main character is either denotatively or connotatively gay.
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Nahum B. Zenil (b. 1947) emerged on the international art scene in the 1980s as part of a generation of Mexican artists who were re-examining the artistic traditions of their country. Zenil's art, mostly autobiographical, has consistently acknowledged and utilized his identity as a gay man to define his artistic personality.
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