Recently, two-hit wonder and famed hip shaker Ricky Martin announced the least surprising celebrity news since we found out about Charlie Sheen and all those hookers. The man confirmed, of course, that he is gay.
Martin’s announcement, as anticlimactic as it was, still upset those Americans who believe that even whispering the word “homosexual” will cause their marriages to implode and their children to start cross-dressing. But most people accepted it with a shrug.
Even the Hispanic community, more or less, refrained from calling for Martin’s head. However, it seems to me that this has less to do with increased tolerance for gay Latinos than it does with the fact that Martin’s star has dimmed and, as I stated, we all kind of knew the guy’s status in the first place.
Just about every culture has a powerful strain of homophobia. Well, maybe the British don’t – in fact, I think a minimal amount of homosexual experimentation is actually required there. But just about everybody else has issues with gays.
Still, Latino culture, as I’ve written before, has a particularly virulent strain of hatred for homosexuality. It’s the double whammy of fervent Catholicism and traditional images of machismo.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, “maricon” was never said lightly. It meant somebody, either the taunter or the object of the accusation, was going to get his ass kicked.
You might say, “Hey Fanatic, that was a long time ago. Younger Latinos have dropped the homophobia that plagued you aging Gen Xers and sad Baby Boomers.”
It’s a valid point, and I agree that the older generation is more to blame for spewing hatred. As if to verify this, mere days before Martin publically waved the rainbow flag, the rancheras singer Paquita la del Barrio let us know that older Hispanics may never join the twenty-first century.
The singer, a Mexican woman in her sixties, said, “I’d rather see a kid die” than allow him to be adopted by gay parents. For emphasis, she added that it was better for a child to die alone in the streets than to be “adopted by them.”
Now, I admit that I had never heard of this woman. I’ll add that I believe ranchera music – along with polka and Celine Dion’s greatest hits – will be the tunes that blare over Satan’s Army as it materializes for Armageddon.
Regardless, it’s telling that Paquita la del Barrio (who has a large American fan base, by the way) felt not the slightest shame in making her statements. She doesn’t see her viewpoint as remotely unreasonable, and she knows that plenty of her fans will agree with her. It’s a sad commentary on older Latinos.
Perhaps Paquita la del Barrio will get her comeuppance via a public backlash or a karmic twist of fate. Or maybe there will be no fallout over her unrepentant homophobia. At the very least, however, the woman has completely blown her chance to sing a duet with Ricky Martin.
