To Cross the Sexual Borderlands: The History of Sexuality in the Americas

Abstract

In 1994, during my final year in graduate school, I decided to teach courses related to the history of sexuality. My agenda was openly political: I wanted students to become more aware of the AIDS pandemic, fight for various sexual freedoms, and oppose the ascendant religious right. I also believed that historians paid far too little attention to issues of sexuality.1 The first course I taught, “Queer Bodies/Queer Histories,” focused on the ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities had been formed historically. The course emphasized the relationship between “queer theory” (see below) and historical discourse. This course went extremely well as students (under half of whom were openly queer) engaged the material in a very exciting way: even “straight” students felt comfortable discussing their own sexual lives and theorizing about how the historical material related to their identities. Still, the course left me somewhat unsatisfied. I was trained academically as a colonial Latin American historian, but only a small section of the course related to colonial Latin America, and the material for that section was hardly inspiring (it is only recently that early Latin American historians have begun researching sodomy and similar issues). I then taught a course on gender and sexuality in early Latin America. While I believed strongly that students must understand colonialism in