… and Narco Gays?

Abstract

For a while I used to think that whatever was to be said about homosexuality in narco cinema could be scrawled overtop a glory hole packing a shotgun. There are no Pride bumper stickers on El Chrysler 300. No Omarcitos whistling through the blighted alleys of Monterey. Mario Almada once boasted that he’d played every kind of character except a homosexual—“If I played that, it wouldn’t even be believable”¹—and when actor Sebastián Ligarde came out last year, it’d been a decade since his last appearance in a narco film, and this chapter was still only a footnote about the curious alliance of machismo and melodrama, requiring no more than 20 seconds of your critical attention.