"Queering the Homeboy Aesthetic"

Almaguer’s article “Chicano Men: A Cartography of Homosexual Identity and Behavior” points to disheartening implications for Latino gays and the socialization of their sexual identities. The note of tragedy is highlighted in the inability of Chicanos to come out in a way that would be validated by their families because quite simply, “there is no cultural equivalent to the modern gay man”. In a social sphere, in which families uphold machismo as the cultural ideal of what constitutes a man, a family becomes an intolerant place of isolation, even humiliation. Beyond family life, the non-heterosexuality of a Chicano man further impairs his relationship to other integral parts of the community – church and school. As a gay Chicano, religion, especially those that uphold Catholic values of establishing defined sex roles in the family, can seen as a tremendous source of guilt and school as a hostile place that fosters doubt and insecurities and the view that being gay is completely antithetical to masculinity. This further draws disparaging implications that in upholding machismo as the socially coveted ideal, defining a man as the benefactor ultimately devalues women and “all that is feminine”, fracturing the Latino community with deep structural lines of power and dominance in a patriarchal Mexican culture. While Almaguer and many of us would readily suggest a “advance la causa”, defined as an agenda of empowerment to the Chicano movement, the deeply ingrained, "gender-coded" Mexican system questions whether Chicana lesbians and Chicano gay men can be "immune" to the hierarchical lines of discrimination and subordination if it means uprooting an entire culturally based way of life.