Juan Carlos Mezo González
Gay Print Culture explores the history of gay magazines published in Mexico, Canada, and the United States from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. It traces the activists, editors, and artists involved in the production and circulation of these periodicals and the role of these publications in the history of gay activism in North America by focusing on a selection of community-based gay liberation publications and commercially oriented gay lifestyle and erotic magazines including Gay Sunshine (San Francisco, 1970-1982), The Body Politic (Toronto, 1971-1987), and Macho Tips (Mexico City, 1985-1989). The book situates these periodicals at the center of the transnational history of gay liberation, both because they facilitated the circulation of information across borders and because they produced images that visualized the political goals of the movement—goals that included the liberation of desires and sexual representations.
NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?
Juan Carlos Mezo González: I became interested in the history of gay periodicals in 2015, as an M.A. student at the University of Toronto. My readings and coursework at that time focused mostly on the histories of gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ activism, and they sparked my curiosity about the role of print media in the formation of gay identities and communities. I began doing research on this topic at The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives in Toronto, which houses an extensive collection of queer periodicals from around the world. One of the first periodicals I studied was The Body Politic (Canada’s first gay liberation publication). The ArQuives houses a full run of this publication and its archive (comprised of more than a hundred boxes). By the time I began my PhD in 2016, I was already expanding the scope of my project to trace the connections among the activists, editors, and artists who produced or contributed to gay periodicals in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Naturally, some of the questions I still have concern the histories, exchanges, and connections of other gay magazines from across the Americas (and elsewhere) and their roles in the specific transnational history that my book explores. As with any other project, I needed to establish some geographical and temporal limits.
NOTCHES: Why will people want to read your book?
JMG: People may want to read Gay Print Culture because it furthers understandings of queer activism and its cultural expressions across the American continent (though with a particular focus on North America). Its interdisciplinary methodology and transnational focus may appeal to scholars, students, and non-academic readers interested in LGBTQ+ history, social movements, transnational history and frameworks, print media and visual culture studies, among other areas such as the history of sexuality in Mexico.
NOTCHES: How did you research the book?
JMG: Gay Print Culture draws from a variety of documentary, oral, and visual sources. The former include, first and foremost, gay magazines and newspapers. They also include the administrative files, subscription lists, and correspondence of these publications, which are now located in various archives and Special Collections in university libraries across North America. Some of these repositories include The ArQuives in Toronto, the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, the University of Texas San Antonio Libraries Special Collections, and the Comisión Calificadora de Publicaciones y Revistas Ilustradas in Mexico City, to name just a few. In addition to these archival materials, I conducted around 30 oral history interviews between 2016 and 2022 with individuals who produced, read, or contributed to gay periodicals, including activists, editors, writers, photographers, illustrators, and artists. I conducted these interviews in various locations, some online, and in both English and Spanish. Finally, I also worked with visual sources: photographs, drawings, collages, and other types of visual art and erotic imagery produced for or circulated through gay periodicals.
One of the biggest challenges I faced was the disparate levels of documentation that gay periodicals left behind. Some left dozens of archival materials, but others left very few documents that are scattered in various archives. To give one example, the archives of the Mexican magazine Macho Tips are virtually lost—its creator passed away in the 1990s and no one knows where his personal papers are located. Furthermore, the above-mentioned Comisión Calificadora de Publicaciones y Revistas Ilustradas is a government body that evaluates and keeps records of magazines published in Mexico. According to one of their archivists, they destroyed the Macho Tips file many years ago. They do have a Hermes file (a refurbished version of Macho Tips) comprised of more that 40 pages which I was able to access. Though the magazines themselves are excellent sources, and oral history interviews helped me fill in some gaps, the Macho Tips archives would shed so much light into the history of what I consider a fascinating magazine.
NOTCHES: Why study gay periodicals rather than street protests or legal battles as your window into gay liberation?
JMG: When I began my research in 2015, it seemed to me that much of the scholarship on gay activism had focused precisely on those elements: street protests and legal battles. Despite the central role of gay periodicals within those forms of activism, most historians were using them as sources but not as objects of study. Notable exceptions included the works of David Churchill, David Johnson, Marc Stein, Martin Meeker, and Richard Meyer. I was inspired by them, and I saw an opportunity to expand our understanding of gay liberation by looking closely at the cultural expressions of the movement, digging deeper into the histories of gay magazines, and tracing the kinds of connections that they enabled at local, national, and international levels. Since periodicals were meant to circulate, they were the perfect object of study for someone interested in transnational gay history, cultural history, and interdisciplinary methods.
NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?
JMG: Had I had the time, energy, and resources, I would have explored the histories, contents, and exchanges of many more magazines from across the Americas, particularly from South America. I had to be realistic, though. I knew that a truly hemispheric project would require many more years of work and was not feasible at this stage of my career. Focusing on a selection of titles from North America satisfied my desire to conduct transnational research and still dialogue with scholarship from across the continent.
NOTCHES: What insights emerged from studying periodicals across three countries that a single national focus would have missed?
JMG: When I began my project, my plan was to research the histories of gay periodicals and embark on a comparative analysis of their production, content, reception, and circulation. As my research progressed, I realized that the histories of many periodicals were significantly intertwined. While they were produced in specific locations (e.g. Toronto, San Francisco, or Mexico City), their contributors and readers were not necessarily based there. Gay activists aimed to produce, contribute to, and circulate periodicals because they recognized the importance of those materials in advancing the gay liberation movement: they were important to spread inform, report on local and international news, and build connections. For entrepreneurs and artists, the circulation of periodicals was also significant to expand their markets and publics, as well as to make bigger profits. In my view, a nation-bound framework did not do justice to the international focus of these periodicals and to the efforts of activists, editors, artists, and readers to establish connections across borders. I do not mean to undermine studies of gay print culture that do not adopt a transnational lens. I simply say that the kinds of histories in which I was interested required a transnational approach.
NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?
JMG: I think it all started during my undergraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where I earned my Licenciatura en Historia. My program was very comprehensive and spanned many regions and contexts from ancient to contemporary history, but I never had a course specifically focused on the history of sexuality. As a gay man, I was deeply interested in this topic and spent hours reading fiction and non-fiction centered on male homosexuality, as well as watching gay films and studying homoerotic art. When I finished my program in 2014 and began applying for graduate school, I was already thinking about pursuing this interest further. But this time, rather that reading about and studying gay cultural production, I wanted to conduct research on it and write about it. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I enrolled in several courses on the history of sexuality and LGBT history, and this allowed me to identify possible areas of research and how I could contribute to the field.
NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?
JMG: When I teach courses that explore the social movements and activism of the 1960s-1980s period in the Americas, I always talk about print culture and how it was used to challenge authoritarian regimes, capitalism, imperialism, and other structures of oppression during the Cold War. For example, Elena Shtromberg’s Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s and Christopher Dunn’s Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil are brilliant books with chapters that explore how activists and publishers circumvent censorship and used the alternative press to challenge the military dictatorship in this country. Though in a different context, Gay Print Culture also speaks to the power of the alternative press in subverting dominant narratives and fighting oppression. I could see my book (or portions of it) being assigned with this type of scholarship.
When it comes to teaching LGBT history in the twentieth century, there are of course many other possibilities. I would assign Gay Print Culture with the outstanding works of Augusta da Silveira de Oliveira, Felipe Caro Romero, Javier Fernández Galeano, Martín González Romero, and Patricio Simonetto on Latin American contexts; or with the (also outstanding) works of Łukasz Szulc, Nicholas Hrynyk, and Rachel Corbman on European, Canadian, and U.S. contexts, to name just a few. We are all part of a new generation of queer scholars working in the field of LGBT history, so I am particularly excited about their scholarship. Of course, it would also be an honour to see Gay Print Culture assigned with foundational works in the field.
Finally, I would also assign Gay Print Culture in lectures, courses, or seminars that focus on transnational studies, interdisciplinary methods, visual culture, and oral history. In more specific courses on Mexican, Canadian, or U.S. history, instructors could assign a specific chapter that examines gay cultural expressions in these countries during the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?
JMG: LGBT history matters because it shows that sexual diversity is inherent to the human experience. This diversity, however, has been suppressed or criminalized among different societies. For that reason, our histories are not as well documented as others, and we are in a constant struggle for representation and acceptance, as well as against erasure. I see all LGBT scholarship as intrinsic to this struggle. It helps to normalize sexual diversity, it brings visibility to the subject, and, like any other type of history, it illuminates our knowledge of the past and the present.
NOTCHES: Your next project examines the devil in modern Mexican popular culture. What connections do you see with your work on gay print culture?
JMG: This new project emerges from my interest in print culture, visual culture, and the histories of gender, sexuality, race, and social movements. The project examines how artists and activists in modern Mexico have used the figure of the devil to grapple with the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and state violence, as well as to denounce a range of issues, including social inequality, sexism, and homophobia. Queer print culture features prominently among my sources but I am also looking at materials that are not explicitly queer. In addition to the above-mentioned themes, I have always been fascinated by the study of death, the afterlife, and the supernatural (from a historical perspective). In my view, the figure of the devil—closely associated with these themes and with transgressive sexual desires—offers an excellent vehicle to bridge all my intellectual interests.
Juan Carlos Mezo González is Assistant Professor of gender and sexuality at Mount Royal University. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Toronto. His research examines the relationship between print media, visual culture, and the histories of gender, sexuality, race, and social movements in Mexican and transnational contexts.
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