Colonial Optics and the Desire for Latin America in Gay Sunshine Press Publications

In 1981 the San Francisco-based editor Winston Leyland published an English translation of the Mexican novel El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma (1979). The cover of this translation featured a black-and-white photograph of an Indigenous-looking young man leaning against a wooden wall. The cover stands in stark contrast with the Mexican editions of the novel, which have featured either pictures of white men, or images that seem inattentive to race—the protagonist of the story was not Indigenous. Leyland knew his market well, and with this book cover he appealed to U.S. gay consumers’ desires for an exotic, racialized, and sexually permissive Latin America.

This paper takes this photograph as a point of entry to discuss the complicated relationship between gay liberation, the visualization of homoerotic desire, and colonialism. As the editor of the San Francisco-based gay liberation journal Gay Sunshine, and the creator of Gay Sunshine Press, Leyland was particularly interested in producing Latin American content. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, he published two special Latin American issues of Gay Sunshine, two anthologies of Latin American gay literature, and the translation of El Vampiro. The images that illustrated these publications drew on colonial imaginaries and were carefully chosen to create a marketable depiction of the region and its people. The presentation critically examines the role of these publications, and of their visual content, in the transnational history gay liberation.