BOGOTÁ COULD BE the next big destination for GLBT travelers and transplants, along with some other cities in Colombia. In this capital city of some eight million souls, there are an estimated 500,000 that belong to the GLBT community. With these kinds of numbers, the gay population of Bogotá has not been ignored by local politicians and business people.
As is common in many large cities, the GLBT culture in Bogotá is visible largely through gay men, if only because they outnumber the other three groups in this abbreviation. In fact, there is a gay district in Bogotá, the Chapinero, which houses hundreds of establishments—bars, discos, cafés, shops, etc.—for the gay community, along with a number of bathhouses, hotels, restaurants, clubs, video shops, and so on. (Unfortunately there is no gay bookstore in Bogotá.) And the Chapinero currently has a lesbian mayor.
Since the 1980’s there have been drag shows in Bogotá similar in style to those of New York, a city that Colombian drag queens love to visit to purchase their apparel. The first venue for drag queens was La Pantera Roja (The Red Panther), which became legendary until its owner, Felix Restrepo, was killed (but that’s another article). Also in the 80’s there flourished a cult bar with shifting names—the last was “Calles de San Francisco”—and locations, the last being in the Chapinero. This bar was famous for its original shows in which young, naked men on a rotating platform waited for you to start the action. On Halloween, you could find coffins filled with lustful men; other nights you could see naked men on trapezes directly over you, doing all types of acrobatics. These performers, most of whom came from the countryside, were both naïve and desperately poor—which was part of their attraction but rendered them vulnerable to clients. Over time, people came from Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela to see the shows. Before it was closed for good, its advertising promised a giant vertical roulette wheel whose “numbers” would be muscular men surrounded by gladiators with torches. What killed this bar was that gays eventually became more interested in “normal” bars where they could drink fine cocktails, dance, show off their chic clothes, find friends, and perhaps search for Mr. Right. The public sex had come to be seen as risky and anachronistic.In the 90’s, the biggest gay disco in Colombia and probably one of the largest in Latin America was opened: Theatron, which was converted from an old movie theater, a kind of Studio 54 South. Every Saturday night, some 3,000 gay guys, along with some lesbians, transsexuals, transvestites, and heterosexuals, would gather to dance, drink, and have fun. This bar had watchmen in the restrooms to prevent a return to old habits. Theatron became a trendy place, and local stars used to present shows for the very motley crowd. Today, Theatron is part of an empire of five different bars, with five different kinds of ambience and a symbol of tolerance and coexistence (its owner is a recognized figure in the Colombian jet set and he supports gay causes). If you’re just looking for entertainment but not a party, you can choose between two radio stations. (However, there is no GLBT magazine or newspaper in Colombia.)
In 2007, the first GLBT center in Latin America opened in Bogotá (funded partly by Theatron). The place has been so successful that the Alcaldía de Bogotá, a district capital, is planning to open three more centers. Moreover, Bogotá boasts several political and advocacy organizations that have won very important rights for the gay community. These include, among others: civil unions for same-sex partners (including the right to inherit property); the right to have the social security (pension, health care) transferred from one’s partner, even in the armed forces; the right to be free of discrimination in the workplace regardless of one’s sexual orientation or HIV status; and the right to receive suitable medical attention. Right now there’s a push to secure the right to adopt children—this in a country where thousands of kids are in need of a home.
For all this progress, gay life in Bogotá is still a little provincial, or at any rate some elements of gay culture that one finds in Europe and North America, such as a bear community, an S/M community, and exotic sexual practices, have not yet penetrated here. One thing to keep in mind is that personal income in Bogotá is such that $1,000 (US) per month is considered a good salary. Also, there’s a lingering dark side to gay life in Colombia. In a two-year stretch between 2006 and ’07, 67 gay people were killed while protesting for equal rights. Even demanding the right to hold hands in public can put you at risk. Behind this violence we find the extreme Right, which has formed paramilitary organizations that physically attack their political opponents. (These groups succeeded in destroying the independent party known as the Patriotic Union or UP.)
One culprit for this violence is the lack of education about GLBT issues in Colombian universities and schools. This comes as no surprise, considering that the Catholic Church has a strong influence on education; most private schools and universities are under its control. In a job interview for a teaching position at a Colombian university, I was told that I would have to respect the principles of the Church and that, as a professor, I could not contradict its stand on abortion. (Also, they were intrigued by the fact that I worked in an HIV prevention campaign.) Meanwhile, for their part, the mass media don’t help the situation, typically portraying gay characters as effeminate to the point of becoming comical. Rarely are gays represented as intelligent, talented, or fully realized human beings.
Sex in general is a matter not widely discussed in Colombian society, as it is still a taboo topic. The country remains isolated from wide international contact in the context of its ongoing civil war. With things always hopping in Colombia, the rest of the world can seem unproblematical and boring, and so it is ignored. To make the situation worse, the educational level of Colombians is generally low. Few speak good English and not many read books regularly (the national average is one book per year). With this level of functional literacy, it’s hard to find literature about the GLBT community, whether fiction or nonfiction, popular magazines or scholarly journals. (In all of Latin America, there is only one gay bookstore, which is in Buenos Aires.) Consequently, the level of discussion and understanding about gay rights tends to be very rudimentary.
But how can two such different worlds coexist in Bogotá, a vibrant gay social scene, on the one hand, and a low level of consciousness about gay issues along with a high rate of homophobia and hate crimes against gay people, on the other?
The explanation lies in the extreme segregation of Colombian society. There are “guerrilla zones,” “paramilitary zones,” and “no man’s lands”; there are “black towns” and “Indians towns”; there are very rich and extremely poor neighborhoods. In short, Colombia is a country of ghettos. In Bogotá, the large gay ghetto has reached a critical mass, and for this reason the gay scene is vibrant, pervasive, and overt—but not very sophisticated. At the same time, the gay community is getting incrementally stronger with each victory in the Chapinero zone of the city. For example, a play opened not long ago called El Beso de Dick (The Kiss of Dick), a piece about the love between two young men in high school that featured full male nudity and almost explicit gay sex. The piece, which also had runs in Medellín (the second city of Colombia) and others cities of Latin America, is a success in Bogotá.
Chapinero is a major geographical conquest, but not the first. For some three decades now, next to the historic center of Bogotá and Chapinero itself, there has flourished a zone called “Santa Fe” inhabited by many transsexuals and transvestites, along with female prostitutes. Here you can find big old houses full of transvestites and transsexuals, like some rare kind of Melrose Place. (The Red Panther was located in this zone.) Next to Santa Fe, at Bogotá city center, you can find a more “traditional” kind of prostitution: young men, gay or not, who are looking for male clients. What’s unusual about these boys is that they’ve taken visual control of the entrances to a shopping mall: you cannot enter the mall without passing them. At first this seemed weird, but today there’s no shame in being seen as a potential client for a lustful boy who catches your eye. It’s a strange case of co-existence not available to female prostitutes (who are not present at the mall, at least not openly), which traces its origins to the fact that just opposite the mall is an old porn cinema, a survivor from the time when gay men used to meet one another in such places—“visiting Aunt Fannie,” it was called—and when the city center was the only place to find gay “activity.”
There are still some bars and videos in this area, but the younger generations have moved on to Chapinero. However, you can find gay sites (bars, videos, discos)—and gay people—all over the city, so the ghetto is becoming both more pervasive and more diffuse. This situation is very hopeful, I think, because it means that GLBT people are becoming just a normal characteristic of the city, as in cities like Buenos Aires or Montreal. The coming out of some members of the political establishment could be very helpful. The son of the ex-president Virgilio Barco is openly gay and a powerful ally of the GLBT community. In contrast, an ex-president and the son of another president have not made public their suspected homosexuality. And the extreme Right is still out there, waiting for an opportunity to strike back against gay equality. Still, as the world becomes more interconnected, my hope is that Colombia will continue to swim with the general tide of acceptance toward GLBT people that has risen in many parts of the world, notably in Latin America from Mexico to Argentina.
Jairo Ordóñez, PhD, is a professor of social psychology in Colombia.
