Prosecuting Same-Sex Acts in Bourbon Quito

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, royal authorities in the Audiencia of Quito dramatically increased their interest in the sex lives of their subjects. A network of neighborhood surveillance, nightly patrols, and prosecutorial initiative brought many individuals before an array of judicial officials. In addition to the numerous prosecutions of adultery and fornication, the Audiencia caught a number of so-called sodomitical relationships. This essay focuses on two of those cases, one involving two young women, and the other centering on a group of young men. In the first, the neighborhood magistrate of the parish of San Marcos arrested Manuela Palis and Josefa Lara when, tipped by neighborhood informants, he discovered the two sleeping in the same bed on the night of 29 July 1787. Almost one year later, in May 1788, Custodio Legendres was apprehended for “the ugly, abominable act and nefarious crime of sodomy against nature with various young men,” by order of a judge of the Audiencia Court. The ensuing investigation yielded allegations against no less than eight additional individuals. The defendants in both cases were denounced, investigated, and tried on the weight of neighborhood suspicions, articulated through both heavily-gendered misbehaviors and more general claims to moral turpitude. Based on the evidence from the two cases, I document the extent to which Bourbon-era prosecutions challenge patriarchal frameworks of the interpretation of aberrant sex and sexual hierarchies for colonial Spanish America.