Social Issues

New Mexico LGBTI Memory Museum holds mirror to society

Guadalajara, Mexico, Nov 13 (EFE).- The LGBTQ+ Memory Museum opened in the Mexican city of Guadalajara to send a message of tolerance and remember the way the population of sexual diversity has opened a space in the country’s society.

This museum, the first of its kind in Mexico, aims to show how society and the media promoted and censored for years the stereotypes to refer to men. homosexuals, lesbians and transgender people, museum Director Jaime Aurelio Casillas said.

“The curatorial idea is not to talk about gay militancy for human rights, many of the gay memory museums in the world are focused on telling the story of activists, this museum is there to tell how the media saw trans people, lesbians and gays,” he said.

At the initiative of Jaime Cobian, coordinator of the Codise organization, dedicated to promoting the rights of the LGBT population, Casillas analyzed more than 30,000 objects and documents gathered by the group over 30 years and classified nearly 3,000 to make a selection of what they wanted to include in the museum.

Due to the space restrictions of about 41 linear meters in the museum, the director chose 171 pieces between magazines, posters, books, brochures and newspapers that go from 1904 to 2006 divided into four rooms, Casillas said.

On a wall, the museum exhibits dozens of nicknames or derogatory words with which homosexuals and lesbians have been called by Mexican society and that, in some cases, have remained an insult even toward those who are not part of community.

One of the rooms shows magazines from the first half of the 20th century, some of them sports-oriented, which showed naked men in an attempt at gay pornography. One of the most striking was “Eva,” which was dedicated to the female audience, but those who bought it were men.

There are also tabloid magazines such as Alarma, in which they reveal the hate murders that occurred between 1970 and 1990 with crudeness of homophobic and transphobic photos and texts.

The room dedicated to HIV is perhaps the most significant in showing how this pandemic that emerged in the early 1980s was consuming part of the community and how information and prevention campaigns in Mexico were slow to arrive, largely due to the taboo they represented.

Newspaper clippings, posters and brochures from Spain, France and Germany show how the LGBTI population became aware of the seriousness of the problem and the need to take care of themselves.

The museum also touches on the issue of the incidence of this group of the population in politics and how little by little they have been acquiring rights and visibility among the population. EFE

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