Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Argentina, 1942: a scandal breaks. Tabloids scream about newly discovered photographs –– taken by the amateur photographer Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero –– at homosexual orgies in Ballvé's apartment, photos allegedly depicting young cadets from the national military university in compromising positions. 29 cadets are expelled, discharged, and/or punished, Ballvé thrown in jail, and the government collapsed, toppled by a right-wing coup promising moral cleanup. Pre-order our book in paperback for a free E-book! ----more---- SOURCES: Demaría, Gonzalo. Cacería. Primera edición. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2020. ———. Jugos de Amor e Guerra. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación, 2019. Encarnación, Omar Guillermo. Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Espinoza, Lucas E, and Rosalva Resendiz. “Los Secretos de La Redada de Los 41 (The Secrets of the Raid of the 41): A Sociohistorical Analysis of a Gay Signifier.” In NAACS Annual Conference Proceedings. San Jose State University, 2018. Melo, Adrian. “Cadetes de San Martín | Entrevista a Gonzalo Demaría, que investiga los expedientes judiciales del conocidísimo escándalo de los cadetes.” PAGINA12, 1560903914. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/201169-cadetes-de-san-martin. Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody, and welcome to season six, episode two of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated
0:22.0	queers in history.
0:23.4	I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:28.1	And I'm Hugh Lemmy, a writer and author.
0:31.2	Last week, we talked about Julie Dobiny, a 17th century French, bisexual, sword-fighting, gender-bending opera singer.
0:40.9	Who are we talking about this week, Hugh?
0:43.6	Well, I don't think there's any point in a guessing game today, because I'm almost certain
0:46.7	you won't have heard about today's subject.
0:48.7	So I'll just go straight into it.
0:50.8	Today's subject is an Argentinian photographer called Jorge Horacio Balbe Pinero.
0:57.0	But I want to start the story some 20 years before Balve's birth in 1920 and some 7,500
1:05.6	kilometres from his hometown of Buenos Aires.
1:08.6	It's November 1901, and in a suburb of Mexico City, a squad of
1:13.4	policemen have gathered to undertake a raid. It isn't bootleg liquor or political radicals they've
1:18.5	come to hunt for, but rather a party, a party of cross-dresses and queers. Bursing through the door,
1:24.8	they find allegedly 41 people dancing in couples. Half of them are dressed
1:29.8	in men dressed in males' clothing. The other half are either men or maybe trans women in women's
1:36.6	clothing. And the event was a dance, subsequently known as El Bale de las 41, or the Dance of the 41, a private secret ball held for queer people.
1:50.2	These events were not altogether uncommon in a city, although public display of homosexuality and gender
1:55.4	non-conforming behaviour was to be in Mexico at the time. Same-sex sexual behaviour wasn't illegal, but laws against public
2:03.1	decency and obscenity were. And the social influence of both, the Catholic church and a patriarchal
2:09.5	sort of macho culture contributed to the ostracization of homosexuals. As a result, gay life operated
	...

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