As Mexico Slowly Accepts Gay Pride, Violence Persists

Edgar Garcia Piscil knows that his tight miniskirts, stiletto heels and big blond curls could cost him his life.

The 21-year-old psychology student narrowly escaped being gang-raped in a Mexico City subway car. Later, he was attacked on a bus, but the passengers pulled his assailant off him.

“No one knows the laws here, nor what our rights are,” Garcia Piscil said as he walked alongside a river of sewage in his gritty hometown of Chimalhuacan, outside Mexico City.

But for the first time in this land of machismo, Mexico City police are trying to change the way they deal with gays.

Two months ago, in conjunction with Mexico’s five-year-old Citizens’ Commission Against Hate Crimes, police started distributing flyers titled “It’s not always rosy to be gay” and listing 12 ways for homosexuals to protect themselves, along with the S.O.S. Gay hotline number that connects victims with lawyers.

Until recently, gay rights activists say, police often wrote off murders of homosexuals as crimes of passion. Now they have set up a unit specializing in dealing with homophobic crimes, and are to get sensitivity training.

Father Kills Son for Being Gay

Homosexuals have made huge strides toward acceptance in the last decade, with two gay-rights campaigners taking up seats on the city council in September.

But human rights activists say that nationally anti-gay violence continues at an alarming rate.

A man in a village in central Mexico recently cut his 16-year-old son to pieces with his machete after the boy acknowledged he was gay.

A 25-year-old transvestite named Cynthia was gunned down while standing by a busy thoroughfare in Mexico City.

An average of three men are killed each month in Mexico simply for being gay, according to the Citizens’ Commission Against Hate Crimes. Most are transvestites.

Their deaths appear from time to time in Mexico City’s lurid tabloids: A tied-up corpse next to an armoire of flashy evening gowns. A stiletto heel in a pool of blood.

But for the most part, their hushed deaths resemble their lives. Not even their families speak of them. Their attackers remain at large.

In August, a U.S. court said in an unprecedented ruling that a cross-dressing gay Mexican man was entitled to asylum in the United States because he faced persecution in his homeland. Scores of other asylum seekers from across Latin America are waiting for their cases to be heard.

Since June, Amnesty International has issued these alerts for the region:

* In Argentina, police armed with shotguns threatened a transvestite after he denounced the killing of a friend who was allegedly tortured by police in February.

* In Ecuador, police jailed a dozen transvestite prostitutes and forced them to be tested for AIDS.

* In Venezuela, the leader of a transvestite group who had been harassed by police was fatally shot. Weeks later, police arrested other group members, forced them to undress in the street, and beat them.

200 Anti-Gay Murders Since ’95

Since being formed in 1995, Mexico’s hate crimes commission says it has documented more than 200 homophobia-driven murders.

“Some of these people have been cut up over and over. Others have been dismembered, their genitals cut off, or forced to get down on their knees, tied up and executed,” said Arturo Diaz, one of the gay council members, who headed the study. “That’s hatred.”

Geovanni Hernandez-Montiel of the southeastern city of Jalapa testified in U.S. courts that he was harassed and persecuted by his family, school officials and police, who he said sexually assaulted him.

He was also hospitalized for a week after being knifed by a group of men who called him insulting names.

“There are stories like this from nearly every Mexican state,” said his lawyer, Robert Gerber.

Harassment in the Streets

Speaking between dances at Espartacus, a gay disco on the blue-collar outskirts of Mexico City, Garcia Piscil described how he covers his bruises with makeup and carries on, fighting daily for his lifestyle with quiet indignation, walking the streets clad in dresses and thick jewelry.

“I’m yelled at in the street. Rocks are thrown at me,” he said. “We’re human; we’re not animals. But we’re treated that way here.”

Parents who have found their sons getting a haircut at the salon where Garcia Piscil works have yanked them from the chair in disgust. Police have arrested him and his friends for no apparent reason. He told of an officer offering to release him in exchange for sex.

Still, things are changing.

Dozens of homosexual support groups have popped up in the last five years. Gay bars have opened on main avenues. At one bar near Mexico City’s financial district, a man wearing a glittery robe and platform shoes dances in the window nightly.

When Diaz and Enoe Uranga became councilmen in the federal district, Mexico City newspapers showed Diaz waving the gay rights movement’s rainbow flag in celebration as two men behind him kissed.

In June, a gay-pride parade drew 30,000 marchers, by the organizers’ count. Just five years ago, such parades drew fewer than 1,000 people.

During this year’s presidential race, contender Vicente Fox’s socially conservative National Action Party published a newspaper ad defending itself to the gay community, the first time a major political party has done so.

The party is “not against the gay community in any way,” the ad said. “In a Fox administration, there will be freedom for people to live without masks.”

Fox won the election and takes office on Dec. 1.