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Frida Kahlo (left) with Diego Rivera
Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), a Cuban novelist, essayist, and poet,
was persecuted for his homosexuality by the Castro government he had
once championed.
Bisexual Mexican artist
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was a masterful
exponent of cross-dressing, deliberately using male drag to project
power and independence.
Cuban writer
José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), a major
Latin-American literary figure, included problematic homosexual
passages in his two best known novels.
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.
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, homosexual desire is central to the fiction.
Performer and singer
Chavela Vargas (b. 1919) became notorious
for the eroticism of her performances and for her open
expression of lesbian desire.
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.
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.
Photo
Credits: The
photograph of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera is a portrait by Carl van
Vechten and appears courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and
Photographs Division.
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