Homosexuality in the New World

When the Spanish began exploring the New World in the years that followed Columbus’s epochal voyages, they encountered a people living in a culture quite different from their own. Throughout Central America and along the Pacific Coast of South America the explorers found a civilization of cities with large populations living around towering temples dedicated to exotic gods. Since the time of the Crusades, Europeans traveling in far off lands had brought back reports of strange lands and peoples, but what the Spanish saw in the Americas was unlike anything Westerners had known elsewhere. In fact, what the Spanish found was like a much earlier stage of their own cultural development. Though they couldn’t know it, they were encountering a civilization comparable to that of the earliest developments in Mesopotamia.

Among the strange habits that the Spanish found among these peoples was one for which they were not prepared. To their horror, they found homosexuality to be a widely practiced custom among the inhabitants of this New World. Not only were natives of every social stratum involved in what to Spanish eyes was a heinous crime against nature; homosexual acts even figured in the art objects displayed in temples and worn as jewelry.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied the conquistador Hernán Cortés on his conquest of Mexico in 1519, commented frequently on the widespread homosexual behavior they encountered. Cortés, in his first report to Emperor Charles V, wrote that the Indians of Mexico “are all sodomites and have recourse to that abominable sin.” Another writer, López de Gomara, called the Indians “sodomitic like no other generation of men.” Father Pierre de Gand found sodomy to be virtually universal among the Aztecs. Bernal Díaz described numerous male prostitutes among the Aztecs, as well as unmarried temple priests engaging in sodomy. Montezuma, the Aztec god-king, was reported to have had sexual relations with the young warriors who were about to be ritually sacrificed. There was even an Aztec god, Xochipili, who was the patron of homosexuality and male prostitution. Bartolome de las Casas reported that Mayan parents supplied their adolescent sons with young males to use as sexual partners before marriage. Other missionaries also reported widespread homosexuality among the Mayans. Pedro Cieza de León, in his “Chronicles of Peru,” described sodomy as among the worst sins of the people there.

In the high cultures of Mexico and Peru the Spanish found a rich tradition of erotic art, much of it depicting homosexual activity. Bernal Díaz, while exploring the coast of Yucatan in 1517, wrote of discovering numerous clay figurines in which “the Indians seemed to be engaged in sodomy, one with the other.” Fernandez de Oviedo, a royal chronicler, wrote of an expedition to an island off the Yucatan coast by Diego Velazquez, who reported entering a Mayan temple and being shocked to see a large wooden statute of two males engaged in intercourse. Ovieda himself saw some of the erotic art work in Panama in 1515, which he described: “In some parts of these Indies, they carry as a jewel a man mounted upon another in that diabolic and nefarious act of Sodom, made in gold relief. I saw one of these jewels of the devil, twenty pesos gold in weight…. I broke it down with a hammer and smashed it under my own hand.” Most appalling to the Spanish was that homosexuality was frequently associated with cross-dressing, and that these practices often had religious connotations. Cieza de León wrote in disgust of the customs he witnessed in temples in Peru:

"The devil has introduced this vice [sodomy] under a kind of cloak of sanctity, and in each important temple or house of worship they have a man or two, or more, depending on the idol, who go dressed in women’s attire from the time they are children…. With these, almost like a rite, and ceremony, on feast [days] and holidays they have carnal, foul intercourse, especially the chiefs and headmen…. The devil held such sway in this land that, not satisfied with making them fall into so great sin, he made them believe that this vice was a kind of holiness and religion."

The widespread homosexual practices encountered by the Spanish were an affront to everything they believed about sexuality. Citing biblical authority, the Spanish held that any sexual act other than that designed for reproduction was “against nature.” In line with centuries of European religious thought, they believed anything outside their conception of what was natural to be associated with sin and the Devil, and so used the “sinfulness” of the natives as a justification of their conquest and subjugation of the population. Setting up a branch of the Inquisition in the New World, the Spanish set about prosecuting and executing those found guilty of sodomy wherever they found them. Vasco Núñez de Balboa was praised when during his expedition across Panama, he had forty “sodomites” eaten alive by his dogs.

Almost as soon as the Spanish had established their control, their missionaries began converting the natives and imposing on them their notions of proper, Christian moral behavior. When the diseases the Europeans carried with them to America began decimating native populations, the Spanish saw that as God’s punishment for their homosexuality. Fernandez de Oviedo wrote, “It is not without cause that God permits them to be destroyed. And I have no doubt that for their sins God is going to do away with them very soon.” In 1552 the historian López De Gomora reported that sodomy in the New World was being successfully wiped out by the Spanish. But the Spanish found that homosexual practices were not limited to the inhabitants of the old Meso-American civilizations of Central America and Peru. In Florida, Spanish missionaries found widespread homosexual practices among the Timucua Indians and tried to get them to confess their sodomy and repent. When Spanish missionaries arrived in California, they found homosexuality common among the tribes there as well, and waged a campaign over several centuries to try to wipe it out.

As European explorers spread throughout the Americas, Africa and the Pacific in the next three centuries, their explorations of new lands were accompanied by similar unexpected discoveries about the sexual customs of these primitive, undeveloped peoples, who the Germans called the naturvölker, the nature people. In contrast to the rigid sexual morality focused on procreation held by the Europeans, native peoples in many areas displayed no discomfort with sexual interaction among members of the same sex, and seemed to take such behavior for granted. Early explorers were taken aback by the casual acceptance of homosexual behavior among tribal peoples and confounded by the seemingly universal presence of androgynous homosexual individuals, whom they often found playing important leadership roles in many tribes. Though in most cases the reaction of the other Europeans wasn’t as drastic as that of the Spanish conquistadors with their Inquisition, the missionaries who later accompanied the colonists nonetheless labored industriously to enforce their European sexual morality among the natives.

What is one to make of the sexual practices these early explorers encountered? Certainly to many modern Westerners the sexuality described by the Spanish would be as foreign and as perplexing as it was for the Spanish. But as recent anthropological and historical research makes clear, it is the Western cultural attitude toward sex, as being solely for the purpose of procreation, which is unique. In a vast range of societies around the world throughout human history and in some parts of the world even today, homosexual behavior has existed along- side, and complemented, heterosexual activity, making an important contribution to the health and vitality of those societies. What the Spanish conquistadors saw among the native peoples of the Americas, then, was merely glimpses of the diversity of sexual expression that has characterized many societies throughout the non–European world.

James Neill, Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies
Sciences of Religion and Myth: Homosexuality in the New World