The scholars contributing to this panel examine queer individuals whose entanglements in the politics of the 20^th century led them to renounce their homelands and start new lives in new lands. The individuals we study hold two things in common, their sexuality and their designation as political exiles. However, even more divides them: their degree of wealth and social clout, their racial identity and nationality, and the direction that they moved across the divide separating the Global North and South. As such, our collective work offers insight into the interplay between sexuality and status among queer exiles, each of whom relocated in the mid-20^th century to different countries in the Americas.

Associate Professor (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Luis de Pablo Hammeken’s work offers, chronologically, the earliest contribution to our panel, as he examines two queer exiles driven from Spain to Mexico by the violence of the Civil War and the intolerance of the Franco regime. At the same time, their differences in status and personality led to profoundly different exile experiences for musicologist Adolfo Salazar and folk singer Miguel de Molina. De Pablo’s juxtaposition of these two individuals instructs how similarly situated queer men in exile can nonetheless construct their lives in uniquely individualized ways.

Associate Professor (Kansas State University) Phil Tiemeyer examines the relocation in 1949 of the queer English playwright and stage actor Noel Coward to Jamaica. Designed, in part, as a self-imposed exile to escape the growing tax burdens in mainland Britain, Coward’s move to the colony of Jamaica also rendered him and his villa focal points of a growing elite expatriate homosexual community on Jamaica’s North Coast. Tiemeyer uses archival research on Coward’s life in Jamaica to elucidate the (neo)imperialist nature of this homosexual dislocation from the elite communities of London, New York, and Hollywood to Jamaica’s North Coast.

Assistant Professor (Washington University in St. Louis) René Esparza focuses on the relocation of queer Cuban refugees to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, as part of the Cuban Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Esparza traces the origins of the Positively Gay Cuban Refugee Task Force founded by gay liberationists Thom Higgins and Bruce Brockway to help about a hundred queer Cuban refugees find new homes in Minnesota. The refugees experienced culture shock. Some gay sponsors expected the refugees to serve as domestic workers and even as lovers. Esparza identifies how these queer Cuban exiles pushed back against “Minnesota Nice” narratives that, although benevolent, cast them as victims in need of rescue by gay sponsors.

Associate Professor (Florida International University) Julio Capó, whose book Welcome to Fairyland considers the rise of queer culture in Miami with a transnational perspective, will comment on the papers’ contributions to the interplay of sexuality and status in the lives of queer exiles.

Dean and Professor (Virginia Tech) Laura Belmonte, who recently authored The International LGBT Rights Movement, is well situated as Chair to contribute further insight to the panel.