THERE WAS SOMETHING in the air, perhaps, around 1939, as Jorge Larco painted his portrait of a dutiful seafarer (Figure 1). Pictured in his sailor uniform, the willowy youth stands beside one of the many dockyards scattered about Buenos Aires (the port city in which Larco lived) and its surrounding harbors. Though the subject is decorously dressed, we appear to have caught him unawares, his lascivious gaze fixed somewhere beyond the frame. For Larco, a queer Argentine artist working in the early-to-mid 20th century, the seaman—or rather, the idea of him—might have elicited a sense of sexual intrigue. After all, the lissome curves of his silhouette and his unmissable bulge make a display of the figure’s spirited manhood. It’s as if the mariner is soliciting one to slip away with him into the dark recess of the wood-paneled shed, its door cracked ever so slightly ajar.
Larco wasn’t alone in his fancy for uniformed men. In Buenos Aires not two years after this watercolor was completed, an amateur photographer by the name of Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero began inviting a number of military recruits into his Recoleta apartment. Then in his early twenties, Ballvé Piñero was known to cruise with friends along Avenida Santa Fe, one of the capital’s main thoroughfares in search of strapping servicemen. As aspiring actress by the name of Sonia (the sobriquet of Blanca Nieve Abratte) would often tag along, helping to entice the off-duty enlistees for a night of folly in Ballvé Piñero’s home. What unfolded for close to a year—and what astonished the police officers who carried out a sweep of that same apartment in August 1942—were nights of drunken revelry and queer coupling that threw into question the militant nation’s virile self-image.
The investigators following the case were acting on mere rumors of these illicit soirées. However, when they entered Ballvé Piñero’s apartment, they did not stumble straight into a scene of wanton abandon. Rather, what confirmed the suspicions of the local police was a stash of a few hundred homoerotic photographs taken by Ballvé Piñero and featuring the pleasure seekers who had crossed the threshold of his home. Among these snapshots the most troubling of all was a group of 121 portraits of uniformed, seminude, and nude cadets from Buenos Aires’ Colegio Militar (Military College). The discovery of these portraits attested to the much-feared existence—and, by extension, the queer leanings—of the nation’s military trainees. At this point, dear reader, you might find your eyes drifting to the margins of the text or your finger thumbing pages ahead, curious to catch a glimpse of these salacious images. But as fate would have it, the photographs of military conscripts would eventually go up in flames, burned at the order of the courts. The remaining portraits of civilians are part of a sealed case file that is today wholly inaccessible to the public. While we’re unable to lay eyes on these photographs ourselves, a close inspection of them was of paramount importance in the immediate wake of their seizure in 1942. At that time, the images were readily enlisted into prosecutorial work, serving as the basis not only for Ballvé Piñero’s conviction (he would be charged with the corruption of minors) but also for a veritable witch hunt for those who had disrobed and appeared before his lens. What were once visual traces of queer indulgence and playful image-making transformed quite seamlessly into a body of evidence through which to track down and put on trial the behaviors and desires deemed immoral by the state. This dual function of photography—its ability to open worlds just as quickly as it could foreclose them—was well understood by the maricas (queers) who took up the camera or were captured on film. Images played a central role in the state’s early definition (read: pathologization) of “homosexuality” and “sexual inversion” after the turn of the 20th century. The production of clinical photographs and mugshots gave visual credence to a range of medical and juridical practices aimed at controlling errant genders and sexualities. At times, these appeared in books or popular periodicals alongside formerly private, confiscated portraits, making explicit the perils of photographic representation during the period. In turn, what a sexological study, police report, exposé, or satirical writeup might suggest in so few words could be made all the more potent in visual terms. But part of what makes Ballvé Piñero’s case so exceptional is the fact that, unlike the images that came before, his corpus of snapshots was neither disseminated in print nor subjected to public scrutiny. Instead, sensationalized descriptions of his parties were enough to fuel panic and paranoia around gay debauchery in the capital. Even though the photographs in question have been shut away from view, we do know a few things about them. While conducting research for his 2020 book Cacería, a groundbreaking account of this historical episode known colloquially as the “cadet scandal,” the author and playwright Gonzalo Demaría was able to get his hands on the sealed photographs that remain from the 1942 case. Barred from reproducing these images, he instead transcribed Ballvé Piñero’s handwritten notes found on their versos and jotted down textual descriptions of each scene:
(11) Sailor: Héctor G., friend of Ángel F. y Cía. Buenos Aires. Summer 1942. (Wears the traditional seafaring uniform of the period. Slicked back hair. Smiles. In profile.) (76) Buenos Aires. Winter 1942. Alfredo D. “Coco.” (Nude torso, tousled hair, as if he just came out of the shower. Seated on the sofa.) (97) Buenos Aires. Winter 1942. Antonio B.: who Ernesto had me waiting for in front of “My Fair” and who slept with me and Juan Carlos Ch. that night. (Nude. The epigraph provided the court with proof of one of the rare cases of a threesome or group sex in the apartment on calle Junín.) (262) (No epigraph. The model is outstretched on the sofa. He covers his eyes and lifts his white shirt to show his genitals. Wears a necktie.)
Details such as the specificity of a notation or the clarity of a sitter’s visage were far from inconsequential. The appearance of a pseudonym or scratched-out surname, the cropping of the body or concealment of one’s face, the pose depicted or act insinuated—each of these features incriminated the models in Ballvé Piñero’s photographs, or spared them from police attempts to identify and reprimand them. In the case of the military trainees made visible on film, it meant the difference between being punished and discharged from service or donning the uniform another day. Inspired by Demaría’s research into this erased history, in 2019 the photographer Claudio Larrea produced a series that speculatively recreated Ballvé Piñero’s homoerotic snapshots of the early 1940s (Figure 2). Los cuerpos del delito, a double entendre referring to “bodies of the crime” and “bodies of evidence,” insists on the ways that masculine subjects and a desiring gaze, here filtered through the camera’s lens, have been bound up in processes of surveillance and persecution. Larrea’s sensuous reenactments conjure the space of Ballvé Piñero’s apartment and the photographic and sexual encounters staged within it. Through the framing of suggestive nude bodies or pairs of play-fighting men, his images revive the queer fantasies that have been cast onto military bodies and (whether acknowledged by the state or not) the non-heterosexual cadences of these institutions themselves. In Demaría’s book, he demonstrates how, for Ballvé Piñero and his co-conspirators, the intrigue with a man in uniform was little shy of a fetishistic one. A pickup artist involved in the “scandal” is said to have admitted to the arousal incited in him by a decorated uniform, which led him to seduce “draftees, sailors, guards—especially traffic guards—and nowadays, cadets.” Sonia, their friend and accomplice, confirmed that the group gravitated toward uniformed men in the police force and military, as these state agents “spent much of their time in the barracks” and were “those who most needed to satisfy their sexual needs, thus making them the most sought after by the inverts.” This kind of gay fascination with uniformed men is not unique to Ballvé Piñero’s circle or to Larco, the painter of the mariner with whom we began. A long list of artists working in the early 20th century—Abraham Ángel and Agustín Lazo in Mexico; Paul Cadmus, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley in the U.S.—inscribed queer attachments onto the bodies of soldiers, cadets, and policemen. In contrast to the eventual adoption of these authoritative roles in S/M subcultures, these earlier fancies saw in the uniformed man a normatively masculine and putatively heterosexual archetype whose disciplined nature was but a fickle front. A photograph of Larco from 1933–34 shows how he gleefully dressed in sailor attire at a costume party, trespassing, if for a night, upon the rough-and-tumble world of maritime brotherhood (Figure 3). He stands at the upper left beside Federico García Lorca, who wrote of and sketched this same character in a variety of works. García Lorca’s visit to Buenos Aires came not two years before his arrest and assassination by Spain’s nationalist militia at the onset of the Spanish Civil War. There’s a useful distinction to draw between the popular image of the sailor and that of the military and police personnel tasked with administering national order, of which the gender and sexual norms of the period were an important part. Larco would introduce this difference in his portrait of a policeman in repose, thoughts adrift as he drinks—a bottle of liquor sits beside his sifón (soda siphon)—at a dusky bar (Figure 4). With his wide-legged posture and attentive bearing, his sidelong gaze (in contrast to the mariner’s wandering eyes) appears far more suspect than it does amorous. If, on the surface, sailors and police officers were sartorially linked, the latter served as a particularly vexed object of attraction given their active role in the persecution of queer bodies and desires. Perhaps the sharpest historical study of queer politics and the uniform fetish comes in Jeffrey Schneider’s 2023 book, Uniform Fantasies. In it, he considers how gay erotic attachments toward military men in Imperial Germany orbited around two flights of fancy: that of “turning” a soldier (as the epitome of heterosexual masculinity) and that of one’s own romantic desires mirroring the “innocent” bonds that active duty allows among men. In the case of Argentina, the infatuation with men in uniform conforms to this first impulse, animated by the allure of the forbidden and the thrill of the could-be. Stories abound in late 19th- and early 20th-century South America of the challenges of maintaining chaste relations among young men in the homosocial environments of the barracks, training academy, or seafaring vessel. And so, to depict a uniformed man (or to invite one into one’s home) revealed the already existing cracks in the heterosexual façade of national honor and belonging. So, too, there was something alluringly subversive about these encounters or the imagining of them—moments that might perturb the not-to-be-questioned confines of state control, virile masculinity, and law enforcement. Modern art history is no stranger to the innumerable artistic traces of gay attraction toward a good man in uniform. But what other ways of interpreting such images might we put into practice, particularly considering how these works coincide with periods of mounting crackdowns against homosexuality by the state? More than defiant longings for the forbidden, paintings like Larco’s or photographs like Ballvé Piñero’s speak powerfully to the enduring fissures between gay and abolitionist politics, and to the ways that desire and lust can interfere with the conditions of one’s own flourishing. It would be shortsighted to separate images like the ones discussed here from the history of police and military violence against queer and gender-variant Argentines. Between 1930 and 1943, during the period of conservative restoration known as the Infamous Decade, the state adopted a number of explicitly anti-homosexual edicts that sought to put an end to the once close-lipped matter of gay sexualities. The Chilean-born author and organizer Malva Solís, who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1943 in search of queer and trans femme possibility, recounts routine incidents of police harassment and arrest in her memoir Mi recordatorio. By 1948, she and her friends formed the short-lived mutual aid group Maricas Unidas Argentinas (Argentine Queers United), which distributed funds and resources to those imprisoned for their illicit sexualities and gendered embodiments. Out of these experiences of imprisonment, they invented a form of queer argot known as carrilche in an attempt to communicate without drawing the attention of undercover police. To write of the ribald excitement many found in lusting after agents of the state without opening out toward the paradoxes of these desires would be to neglect the enduring violence that these histories prefigure. Amid the early rise of Peronism around midcentury, hygienist campaigns led to large-scale arrests, including the apprehension of 100 “amorales” (“immorals”) in 1954. The coups d’état and military regimes that marked the 1960s and ’70s further compounded state violence against queer citizens. These conditions gave rise to the formation, in 1971, of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front, or flh), a largely leftist, horizontal coalition that linked the oppression of sexual and gender dissidents to larger critiques of imperialism, capitalism, the military, and the state. As articulated in a single-issue newspaper published in 1973, the collective set out to “achieve the end of our persecution, both in customs and when they take state form, as in the case of anti-homosexual police edicts.” Still today, the violent apparatuses of the carceral state continue to imperil queer life in Argentina, as in the gruesome murder of Sofía Fernández, a linguistics professor and trans woman, by a group of police officers in 2023. The preeminent scholars Santiago Joaquín Insausti and Pablo Ben have recently put forward that, in present-day Argentina, “public opinion has come to imagine hostility against LGBT people as alien to Argentine culture and circumscribed to an exceptional dictatorial period between 1976 and 1983.” They connect this pretense of sexual tolerance, which erases experiences of political violence both leading up to and in the wake of dictatorial rule, to the nation’s perpetual self-likening to European liberalism, and thus a means of reinforcing an idealized image of whiteness. But the enduring history of anti-queer oppression demands a confrontation with the institutions that carry out compulsory regimes of sexuality and gender and, to that end, gay artists’ fascination with those who deliver their blows. From there, Larco and Ballvé Piñero’s parallel histories of image-making render explicit the paradoxes of desire and fantasy, of those longings deemed ill-suited and unfit.
References Demaría, Gonzalo. Cacería. Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2020. Demaría, Gonzalo, Claudio Larrea, and Jesse Rothbard. “‘Los Cuerpos del Delito.’” Revista de Estudios y Políticas de Género 10 (April 2024): 255–71. Insausti, Santiago Joaquín and Pablo Ben. “Homonationalism, LGBT desaparecidos, and the politics of queer memory in Argentina.” Memory Studies 16, no. 1 (February 2023): 66–84. Schneider, Jeffrey. Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. Stanley, Eric A. and Nat Smith, eds. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, 2nd ed. AK Press, 2015.
Joseph Shaikewitz is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU whose dissertation theorizes the (in)capacity of the visual field as a site of trans femme emergence in early 20th-century Latin America.
