For two weeks, jokes, sensational articles, satirical poems, humorous short articles, engravings and love letters were published about the Forty-One. Their punishment was to be sent to [join] the army, illustrated with Mexico’s broad, very rich and varied vocabulary of homosexual terminology and phrases (more than any other country). The facts are that on that Sunday in 1901, there was a scandalous raid on a clandestine dance where forty-two men were detained, many of them dressed as women. This is a good case for demonstrating that what is tacitly accepted bears no relationship to what is public, and may even contradict it. What is more: public silence is a kind of social mask, a mask that is understood to hide the deepest roots of our collective sadism. From that night on, in Mexican culture, to say “forty-one” has been both a reference to homosexuality and an indicator of intolerance.With this article, it becomes clear that El Popular, one of the newspapers most inclined to treat the matter from a perspective of sensationalism and mockery, had used up all its resources and was concluding its series with a joke that was not funny. In his engravings, José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) also ridiculed the event.