The Mexican Connection: The Transnational Circulation and Translation of Homophile Publications, Exiled Spanish Republican Publishers, and Mexican Homophile Readers, 1954–60

This paper explores how the editorial board of ONE, Inc. and the Mattachine Society of New York attempted to create a homophile Mexican organization in 1954-1960 and established collaborative translation and distribution projects with exiled Spanish Republican publisher Rafael Giménez Siles (1900-1971) who owned a chain of bookstores in Mexico City. I reconstruct the transnational network of writers, translators, and publishers who acquainted Mexicans and other Latin Americans with the work of European and American homophiles. Restricted in their efforts to publish and disseminate homophile works in the U.S., ONE and Mattachine sought to publish in Mexico both English-language and Spanish-language editions of their publications to escape U.S. censorship. Through these connections, the writings of James (Barr) Fugate and Edward Sagarin became available to Mexicans and other Latin Americans, and disseminated among them a bilingual vocabulary of gayspeak. They made bootleg copies of American and European homophiles works available in English to American travelers and others from Mexican printers and bookstores. U.S. homophile publications covered Latin American news and published letters from Latin American subscribers. These reveal a curiosity about and a certain familiarity with European homophile literature. This paper show how Mexican homophiles collaborated in the global production and distribution of magazines, pamphlets, and books and developed what political theorists Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger have labeled the “global arena preoccupied with humanitarian international rights and human rights” regarded as indicative of the maturity, sophistication, and plurality of modern political systems.[1] The paper shows the important role that Spanish-language publishers played in translating and circulating European homophile works and in distributing U.S. homophile writings.

[1] Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, Politics of Exile in Latin America (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1-8.