We Must End Tolerance Here: Miguel Aroche Parra, Scandalous Media Homophobia, and Archiving Intolerance in the 1980s Mexican Left

In one of his more radical op-eds, Miguel Aroche Parra, a noted leftist whose accolades included leading the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) in the state of Guerrero and co-founding the Movement of Socialist Action and Unity (MAUS), claimed that the HIV/AIDS crisis was the result of the “unusual and inexplicable ‘tolerance’ of homosexuality and lesbianism that here [in Mexico] is presented as fashionable.” Arriving in 1982, his article appeared in print a little over a year after the entire partisan Left had declared solidarity with Mexico’s lesbian and gay movement. Thus, Parra’s comments were not only viscerally homophobic. They were dissident from the Left’s platform.

Using Parra as a lens, this paper explores how the seemingly enduring divide between sexual politics and leftist militancy underwent transformation during the late twentieth century. While earlier attacks on issues like sexual liberation had an ideological basis of bourgeois decadence, by the 1980s, the partisan Left had established a tenuous alliance with sexual rights activists. This paper aims to show how conservative militants like Parra utilized media and press scandal to pressure parties to abandon their progressive sexual politics platforms, implicating sexuality in partisan disputes, anti-imperialism, and economic nationalism during the time of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Embracing his position as a journalist, Parra frequently stoked scandal to criticize the Mexican left’s position on sexuality. Examining Parra’s article drafts, this paper also will show how his homophobic columns were carefully edited and crafted for the public, exceeding and subverting notions of irrational outbreak. Finally, borrowing the idea of an “archive of feeling” from Heather Love, this paper will use the collection of Parra to explore how he chose to save and highlight various media documents on sex scandals, homosexuality, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, essentially archiving his own intolerance and anxieties.