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.
The data on the pre-Columbian people and those of the period of colonization is scarce and obscure as most civilizations did not take into account homosexuals. With exceptions like Nezahualcoyotl leader of Texcoco, Texcoco was the legal and intellectual center of the triple alliance who's laws regarding homosexuals are documented by Ixtlilxochitl. The punishment for homosexuality in Texcoco and the Mexica empire was death, for the penetrated partner it was a very gruesome death, the insides of the partner who had been penetrated were taken out of the body and then the victim was covered in ashes and thrown into flames while the dominant partner was suffocated in ash and also thrown into the flames, it was not ritual it was punishment. Ixtlilxochitl's exact words: "And for the good governance of his kingdom as well as all the empire, he established eighty laws which he deemed fitting for the republic at that time and season... among them, the abominable sin, which was punished with great rigor: the active partner, tied to a stake, was covered by all the boys of the city with ash, such that he was buried within it; and the passive partner had his entrails extracted through his lower parts, and was likewise buried in ash." The Florentine codex defines "Cuiloni" and what happened to them: "The sodomite [is] an effeminate — a defilement, a corruption, filth; a taster of filth, revolting, perverse, full of affliction. [He merits] laughter, ridicule, mockery, [he is] detestable, nauseating. Disgusting, he makes one acutely sick. Womanish, playing the part of a woman, he merits being committed to flames, burned, consumed by fire. He burns; he is consumed by fire. He talks like a woman, he takes the part of a woman." 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 or more homophobic than the Spanish, while small groups like the Muxe people did accept homosexuality; it was very few cultures who were tolerant of it.
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.
The situation is changing in the 21st century, in part by the discovery of the LGBT community as potential consumers, the so-called pink peso, and tourists. Laws have been created to combat discrimination (2003), and two federal entities, the Federal District and Coahuila, have legalized civil unions for same-sex couples (2007). On 21 December 2009, despite opposition from the Catholic Church, the government of Mexico City approved same-sex marriage, with 39 votes in favor, 20 against and 5 abstaining. It was the first city in Latin America to do so. However, Mexico in 2007 was still one of the countries in which the most crimes were committed against the LGBT community, with the murder of a person in a homophobic crime every two days.
Pre-Columbian Mexico The majority of information on the pre-Columbian peoples comes from the reports of the Spanish conquest. Those accounts must be taken with caution since the accusation of sodomy was used to justify the conquest, along with other accusations real or invented such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, or idolatry. Given that the defenders of the natives manipulated the information to their opinion as much as those who were opposed by them, some trying to minimize the incidence of sodomy and others exaggerating the stories, it proves impossible to get an adequate picture of homosexuality in pre-Columbian Mexico. The historian Antonio de Herrera arrived at that conclusion as early as 1601.
Maya The Maya were relatively tolerant[clarification needed] of homosexuality. It is known that there were orgies among the Maya that included homosexual sex though sodomy was punishable by death.
Mayan society considered homosexuality preferable to premarital heterosexual sex and so the nobles got sex slaves for their children.
Mexica The Mexica had different worldviews from the Spanish authorities who compiled the sources presently available for study, which makes understanding of pre-colonial Mexica gender and sexuality more difficult to understand since they were recorded through a Spanish filter. Geoffrey Kimball argues that later texts from the early colonial-period like the Florentine Codex have been mistranslated because of the homophobic prejudices that were prevalent in the United States at the time.
Social attitudes towards homosexual men and women were negative and ranged from disgust to amusement because they were perceived as violating Mexica gender roles, but attitudes were less negative on homosexuality for women than men. Homosexual men during the period of the Aztec Empire had methods of publicly identifying each other, which made them highly visible in Mexica society, and according to certain records, homosexual intercourse was performed in Mexica bathhouses.
Nonetheless, executions of male homosexuals are not attested during this period, and the existence of public identification methods by homosexual men makes it unlikely that they would have been persecuted; evidence from Monarquia Indiana by Juan de Torquemada suggests that same-sex sexual relationships between men and between women were not criminalized.
While male and female homosexuality were known and disapproved of in Mexica society, there is no evidence of any suppression of homosexuality among Mexicas, with all homophobic persecutions having been introduced after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire after various forms of homosexuality acknowledged by the pre-colonial Mexica were redefined as "sodomy" and "sin" by Christian friars.
Homosexual men in Mexica society also had a religious role, with records suggesting that there was a connection between them and Titlacahuan, that is the trickster aspect of the god Tezcatlipoca. Titlacahuan himself was depicted carrying a flower signifying his eroticism and blowing on a phallic flute denoting penance and communication with the gods, and was associated with excessive sexual activity.
There were four terms in Classical Nahuatl that referred to homosexuality; they were defined by the sexual activities of their subjects, rather than by psychological characteristics:
xōchihuah, cuīlōni, chimouhqui, and patlācheh.
Additionally, the Mexica referred to effeminate men as cihuāyōlloh, meaning "one with a woman's heart," and to intersex people as cihuāoquichtli, meaning "woman-man."
xōchihuah The Classical Nahuatl term was used to refer to a group of gender-variant people who wore women's clothing and performed women's tasks. It was composed of the term xōchitl, meaning "flower," and the suffix -huah, meaning "owner of." It thus literally meant "flower-bearer" because of the association of flowers with excess and sexual desire in Mexica culture.
The xōchihuah held an institutionalised, albeit degraded, role within Mexica society whereby they were kept as dependents of high-level nobles for whom they performed household chores, cleaned temples, accompanied warriors in war, provided them with services such as sexual ones.
The verb te-xōchihuia, made by using the prefix te-, denoting a human object of a verbal action, literally meant "to use flowers on someone" and was used metaphorically in the sense "to seduce someone."
cuīlōni The term cuīlōni referred to a sub-category of xōchihuah who held the passive role during sexual intercourse. The name was derived from the term *cuīlō, itself the non-active stem of the verb te-cui, meaning "to sexually penetrate someone." Thus, cuīlōni meant "one who is sexually penetrated."
chimouhqui The term chimouhqui was derived from a verb *chimohua or *chimohui, of uncertain meaning. The word designated homosexual men.
patlācheh The term patlācheh was used to refer to homosexual women, and the verb te-patlāchhuia was used to denote female homosexual intercourse.
Other indigenous peoples In spite of the puritanism of the Mexica, the sexual customs of the people conquered by the Aztec Empire varied to a certain extent. For example, the Mixe people from Oaxaca; Bartolomo de las Casas gives the example that the Mixe cruelly set fire to the sodomites discovered in the temple. Friar Gregorio García, writing in 1607, asserted that prior to Spanish contact the indigenous people of New Spain "punished the sodomites with death, executed them with great vigor" and "strangled or drowned the women who lay with other women."
Bernal Díaz del Castillo accused the priestly class (papas) of the Totonac capital Cempoala of practicing sodomy, and made sweeping accusations against the Huastec people of Pánuco as universally sodomitical. Bernal Díaz del Castillo speaks of homosexuality among the ruling classes, prostitution of young people, and cross-dressing. However, Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta, writing of the same Totonac and Huastec priests, described them as 'most chaste and of irreproachable life among their people.' The direct contradiction between these two accounts illustrates the degree to which accusations of sodomy served as a legal and rhetorical justification for conquest rather than reliable ethnographic observation."
Colonial era
In 1511, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera published his De orbe novo decades, with the information that he was able to get about the first explorers from his friendship with Isabella I of Castile. D'Anghiera told how Vasco Núñez de Balboa, during his exploration of Quarequa, in the Isthmus of Panama, in 1513, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs. D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected". After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. [... The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. [... And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."
In an account on the indigenous people realized in 1519 for the council of the town of Veracruz to report to Charles I, attributed to Hernán Cortés, it is mentioned that they had "managed to know for certain that they are all sodomites and practice that abominable sin". In another account from an anonymous Italian conquistador, it is said that the men and women of Pánuco worship a masculine member and have erect phalluses in their temples and public plazas to worship them: "the multitude of methods used by the men to satisfy their abominable vice [is] almost too unbelievable to be sure. [...] the devil contained in their idols has possessed them. It has given them instructions to sacrifice their fellow men, to extract their hearts and to offer the hearts, as well as the blood taken from the tongue, the ears, the legs and the arms, all to the idols". Finally, he comments that "all the inhabitants of New Spain and those of other adjacent provinces ate human flesh, all commonly practiced sodomy and drank to excess" and compared some of the customs of the indigenous people with those of the ungodly Saracens.