Family Life and the Formation of Modern Homosexual Identity in Argentina, Buenos Aires, 1930–60

This paper will discuss the strengthening of family life and its relation with the emergence of a modern homosexual identity in Buenos Aires, a process beginning in the 1930s and consolidating in the 1950s.  I will analyze phenomena like decreasing migration and the stabilization of the job market in the context of import-substitution industrialization affecting not only Argentina, but many other parts of Latin America. The growth of a stable job market and rising working-class income undermined crime and prostitution while strengthening family sociability. Increasing access to the private home and the formation of neighborhoods around factories in the suburbs led to a working-class culture where family bonds were highly valued. These social changes precipitated the increasing isolation of men who engaged in same-sex sexuality, who previously had been relatively integrated into the popular classes but now became stigmatized as sexual deviants threatening society. The division between “normal” people and “homosexuals” helped to consolidate the former as the subject of populist politics and the latter as the enemies of the charismatic figure of President Juan Domingo Perón. In order to chart these changes, my work provides an in-depth account of the social life of the urban lower classes (which has been ignored by a historiography narrowly concerned with labor politics) and in so doing provides a new perspective on the gendered basis of populist mobilization.