Amorales, patoteros, chongos y pitucos. La homosexualidad masculina durante el primer peronismo [Buenos Aires, 1943-1955]

Abstract

This paper studies the emergence of a male homosexual identity as "amorales" during the Peronist era. At the beginning of the twentieth century, queer men where part of a general environment of vice and crime and their identity was not formed as an independent one. On the contrary, towards the 1950s, homosexuals became a dangerous deviation in contrast with the ideal of family and normal heterosexuality that was reinforced at the time. This process implied the increasing masculinization of the working class that took place under Peronism and the contemporary emergence of youth as a threatening social group. We study the development of an increasing intolerance that began in the early 1940s and ended up towards 1954 with a widespread police persecution of homosexuals in the streets, bars and parks of Buenos Aires. In contrast with other scholars who identified this persecution with a tension between Peronism and Catholicism, we argue that the repressive attitude of the state towards homosexuals was imbedded in a deeper structural conflict within the socio-sexual symbolic order of postwar Argentina.