Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Diego Galdo - The Ball of La Laguna
Diego Galdo - The Ball of La Laguna
GLQ 29:3
DOI 10.1215/10642684-10437236
© 2023 by Duke University Press
354 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
swam to the shore to avoid capture, even though Peru’s civil code did not pro-
hibit homosexuality. Neighbors ganged up on the swimmers, punched them, and
threw them back into the water while police officers looked on. The press noted
down their names. Officers prosecuted lower-class hembritas (feminine maricones)
nationally and internationally, arrested them, subjected them to anal examinations,
fined them, and outed them in mainstream media outlets throughout the two weeks
ing in sensitivity’ ” (228). Certain Latin America queers were aware of Rio’s ris-
ing reputation as the cross-dressing capital of the region and wanted to replicate
these experiences at home — albeit, often within elite circles. The organizers of
La Laguna referenced the Carioca celebrations, too, when the press questioned
them about their motives for organizing the ball. Rio de Janeiro owes part of its
New York, Chicago, and London (Chauncey 1994; D’Emilio 1983; Weeks 1977).
Chauncey and many of the Anglo-American and northern European cultural his-
torians who followed in his footsteps addressed the gendered structure of same-sex
sexual relationships in urban enclaves throughout the twentieth century. Neverthe-
less, their reliance on data from industrialized, urban Western societies limited
rant La Laguna on January 31, 1959, at 10 p.m. Club Vive Como Quieras (Club
Live as You Want) signed the invitations, turning them into the first-known writ-
ten records penned by a maricon collective in Peru (fig. 2). Nothing in the invita-
tion distinguished the ball from the city-wide carnival parties held throughout the
month. One of the attendees would later claim that, “just like other girlfriends, I
received special invitations to go to the party, I thought everything was ready and
with permission, I never imagined that this would happen and that I would be
treated like a vulgar delinquent” (Última Hora 1959h).
Fernando Galindo Rojas, the leader of the organizing committee, reserved
the restaurant for 1.500 soles (local currency) with the explicit purpose of hosting
a carnival party. Organizers of the ball modeled it after the cross-dressing parties
at Rio de Janeiro that filled the pages of the magazine O’Cruzeiro (Última Hora
1959h). Club Vive Como Quieras was able to pull together a guest list of more than
a hundred maricones and deliver the invitations, suggesting that a well-established
maricón network existed in Lima. Following their arrest, Galindo Rojas declared
that a cross-dressing carnival ball akin to La Laguna had already been orches-
trated the previous year at Club Kontiki, a members-only, upper-class beach club
in Lima.
La Laguna survives in the public imaginary because of the rumored pres-
ence of high-status, upper-class, white guests who suspiciously avoided the list
of detainees. “White,” “Indigenous,” and “mestizo” need to be understood as
more than epidermic descriptions in Peru, where race is inextricably tied to class.
Whiteness in Lima stands as an indicator of economic privilege, while Indigene-
ity stands as an indicator of economic marginalization. Linguists Virginia Zavala
and Michele Back (2017: 13) confirm that “color” in Latin America “is usually
perceived differently if the person has money, speaks in a certain way or wears
THE BALL OF LA LAGUNA 361
Figure 2. “The V.C.Q
(Live as You Want)
Club is pleased to
invite you to the
great Fantasy Ball
that will offer in the
restaurant La Laguna
not brown, were unquestionably white vis-à-vis their Indigenous serfs. The Ball
of La Laguna needs to be placed in the context of this racial configuration — and
in the context of the rapid changes that this racial framework underwent in the
twentieth century.
Lima remained a city structured by class and racial inequalities through-
had traditionally served as a holiday that gave underprivileged Limeños free rein
to throw dirty water, talcum powder, and bitumen at pedestrians and dance “licen-
tiously.” Afro-Peruvians and mestizos could temporarily reverse racial and class
hierarchies and throw water at the white pedestrians that they had to respect all
year long — echoing linguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) famous accounts of the car-
The Ball of La Laguna began on February 2nd at 10 p.m. as couples started stroll-
ing down the bridge to the venue. Security personnel positioned at the Confrater-
nidad Park let in only the holders of invitation letters, although organizer Galindo
Rojas would later point a finger at the “malicious” maricones who entered the
party without one. News reporters told a different story: “The ticket was worth 100
364 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
soles and any person willing to pay that amount could enter freely” (Última Hora
1959b). Orquesta Villanueva received them with the latest mambos and boleros
from La Sonora Matansera, prompting them to dance amidst paper ribbons, bal-
loons, and camera shutters. Some of the guests participated in a beauty pageant
and walked the runway dressed as odalisques, tigresses, and princesses, wear-
Hembritas and Machos: Performing Gender and Sex Roles at the Ball
Machos were expected to top the hembritas or, at least, to give the appear-
ance of doing so. This is not to say that all machos were unequivocally masculine
or that, behind closed doors, the hembritas could not top them. These ideal typical
categories could be negotiated and even subverted outside the public gaze. Some
machos’ gender performances even seem to have had a touch of flamboyance — a
attendees commanded more respect than hembritas not only because of their
masculine demeanor but also, as the next section demonstrates, because of the
privileged intersection of their class, race, and gender identities: the press and the
authorities perceived them as masculine homosexuals but opted not to prosecute
them.
estis and a small group who must have been the organizers, who protested against
the police.” Organizer Galindo Rojas could be counted among the latter group
of organizers — a small group in comparison to the sizeable number of detained
hembritas. Class and racial oppression shaped authorities’, media outlets’, and
scandalized crowds’ reactions to the ball. “None of us were taken [by the police],
itself seems to have come into broad circulation in Peru only in the 1970s, two
decades after the party. Other terms, such as hembrita and peluquera (female hair-
dresser), predominated at the time of the ball. Claudio could have swapped travesti
for them, yet he did not. For Claudio, travesti seems to have retrospectively desig-
nated working-class hembritas. Travesti does multidimensional work in Claudio’s
One of the arenas in which the classist, racist, and maricophobic discourses
around the Ball of La Laguna appeared with the greatest force was the press.
Newspapers displayed detainees’ full names, occupations, photos, home and work
addresses, and even their license plates, which made them vulnerable to retali-
ation. Five newspapers and two magazines alone published forty articles, some
of which spread over several pages, in the span of two weeks. Their sensational
headlines channeled the feelings of the population: “Unprecedented Scandal,”
“The Police Will Imprison the Abnormals,” and “More Immorals Fall” (fig. 5).
Newspapers outed the attendees by disseminating their personal information and
headshots. They “propagated a culture of accusation and suspicion, of humilia-
tion and shame, stalling any potential reaction for the legal and human rights of
those who that same media would later term ‘the vulnerable’ ” (Buntinx, Contreras,
and Durand 2008). Many young maricones first encountered homosexuality in the
public sphere through the media-sponsored panic and public scorn that followed
the ball. One of my interviewees found out about the ball through the newspapers
during high school.14 His innocence blinded him: he could not understand why the
police would raid La Laguna. After all, he saw but a harmless carnival party. He
did not dare ask his mother about the ball — he already knew that he “liked the
affair.” Would the same fate await him?
Only five out of twenty addresses published by the newspapers pointed to
372 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
attendees of La Laguna. . . . This has resulted in a series of youth who are not
responsible for their disease to suffer prison or persecution, mostly corrupted peo-
ple and not corruptors.” Caretas unequivocally described the upper-class attend-
ees as “corrupted people,” while rendering the working-class maricones their
“corruptors.” The tabloid Última Hora (1959f) justified its coverage of the ball
by arguing that silence “would have tarnished the name of many innocent people
Figure 6. “The
Cartoon of the Day.”
Cartoon in La Tribuna,
February 1959.
of guests outed in the press, it seems that many more bargained for their freedom
prior to the trial. Peru’s civil code lifted the ban on homosexuality in 1924, but
police officers retained “the power to detain alleged homosexuals for exercising
acts against decorum and public order” (Tirado Ratto 2019: 75). Order, in the
law enforcers’ view, required “following the majority’s behavioral patterns,” while
“ ‘disorder’ [entailed] all alternative expression[s], therefore sanctioned by eradica-
Conclusions
The Ball of La Laguna reveals that the class, race, and gender inequalities that
had structured Peruvian society since colonial times also structured maricón
social worlds and the policing of their communities. Maricones experienced homo-
phobic treatment in the aftermath of the ball, but Indigeneity, femininity, and
lower-class status compounded these inequalities. Newspapers’ unequal represen-
tations of white, upper-class guests and nonwhite, working-class hembritas evi-
dence the extent of their classist and racist biases, as this article has documented.
One’s intersectional position along these axes could determine whether one would
spend the night at home after the raid, albeit scarred, or a week in prison while
newspapers disclosed one’s personal information. These disadvantaging categories
THE BALL OF LA LAGUNA 377
The Ball of La Laguna is a window into the social worlds that maricones
constructed across Lima in the 1950s. Attendees attached feelings of comfort
and belonging to their visits to the ambiente, which became “part of a process of
searching for collective references,” that is, of role models, “by people who have
opted for alternative lifestyles” (Montalvo 1997: 44). Raids, alongside other attacks
to spaces on ambiente, constituted attacks against the community at large. Recov-
tion [it].” Nobody levied the same defense of the unrespectable maricones whom
authorities detained, newspapers outed, and the public ostracized. Nobody pon-
dered that respecting the attendees’ memory may entail recognizing their central
place in the maricón history of Peru. Memory and history work constitute an effort
to honor the memories of this generation of maricones. Our embrace of maricón
Notes
10. Oral history interview with Person 1, which was conducted in April 2018. Person 1
heard this information from a friend who attended the party. Person 1’s knowledge of
Coco’s triumph, right down to her costume, even though he did not attend the party
himself, attests to its enduring significance in maricón culture.
11. Oral history interview with Person 3, which was conducted in October 2020.
12. Oral history interview with Person 2, which was conducted in June 2018. The infor-
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THE BALL OF LA LAGUNA 381
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