El condón
Armando Cristeto
The Condom
Since the mid-seventies, the concept of gay identity—which first emerged in the United States in 1969 following a raid on the Stonewall bar, New York—spread to Mexico with the creation of the first militant associations promoting civil rights for gays and lesbians through the Homosexual Liberation Front in 1974, and the organization of the first Gay Pride March in 1978 at the Monument to the Revolution.
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The movie The Place Without Limits (1977) by Arturo Ripstein—in which the actor Roberto Cobo plays “La Lola,” an unforgettable transvestite who supports his prostitute colleagues against macho men—and the publication of the novel The Vampire of the Roma Neighborhood (1979) by Luis Zapata, which became an overnight best seller, broke the wall of silence around alternative sexualities.
This process of leaving the closet and participating in public militancy culminated in the struggles surrounding the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s. In this chronology, the photographic series The Condom by Armando Cristeto is an authentic precursor, since it precedes the modern sanitization around the body in its relationship with HIV. The homoeroticism of a certain technical artifice reveals the type of operation that would continue throughout this decade around the need to connect the sexual other with the cultural other.
Armando Cristeto
El condón
[The Condom]
1978-1979
Plata sobre gelatina
20.5 × 11 cm