page_title: LGBT history in Mexico
section_title: Dance of the forty-one
hierarchical_section_title: LGBT history in Mexico / Dance of the forty-one
context_page_description: The study of homosexuality in Mexico can be divided into three separate periods, coinciding with the three main periods of Mexican history: pre-Columbian, colonial, and post-independence, in spite of the fact that the rejection of homosexuality forms a connecting thread that crosses the three periods.
  The data on the pre-Columbian people and those of the period of colonization is scarce and obscure. Historians often described the indigenous customs that surprised them or that they disapproved of, but tended to take a position of accusation or apology, which makes it impossible to distinguish between reality and propaganda. In general, it seems that the Mexica were as homophobic as the Spanish, and that other indigenous peoples tended to be much more tolerant, to the point of honoring Two-Spirit people as shamans.
  The history of homosexuality in the colonial period and after independence is still in great part yet to be studied. Above all, the 1658 executions of sodomites and the 1901 Dance of the Forty-One, two great scandals in Mexican public life, dominate the scene.
context_section_description: On the night of 20 November 1901, Mexico City police raided an affluent drag ball, arresting 42 men, half of them dressed as women, and dragging them off to Belón Prison. The resulting scandal, known as the Dance of the 41 Maricones, received massive press coverage and prompted a series of widely circulated prints by José Guadalupe Posada that depicted the dance. The cross-dressers were publicly humiliated, forced to sweep the streets under police guard, inducted into the 24th Battalion of the Mexican Army and sent to the southeastern state of Yucatán, where the Caste War was still being fought. Rumors that then-President Porfirio Díaz's nephew, Ignacio de la Torre, had attended the dance but was permitted to escape further added to the scandal's notoriety. Although the official account was that she was a "real woman." Historians, including well-known cultural commentator Carlos Monsiváis, argue that male homosexuality in the modern sense was "invented" in Mexico when the 1901 raid occurred. Since that time, the number 41 has come to symbolize male homosexuality in Mexican popular culture, figuring frequently in jokes and in casual teasing. Although the raid on the Dance of the 41 was followed by a less-publicized raid of a lesbian bar on 4 December 1901 in Santa Maria, the regime was soon worried by more serious threats such as the political and civil unrest that eventually led to the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
caption: Publication of newspaper Hoja Suelta in 1901. Illustration by famous Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, representing the Dance of the 41 Maricones.
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