During the Porfirio Díaz administration, any press references to sexual diversity were veiled. However, it was starting in 1901, due to a scandalous raid on a clandestine dance where forty-two men were detained, many of them dressed as women, that the subject assumed importance. From that night on, in Mexican culture, to say “forty-one” was both a reference to homosexuality and an indicator of intolerance.Through portraits and caricatures, artists such as Diego Rivera (1886-1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and Antonio Ruiz (1897-1964) ridiculed and attacked the feminization of a certain sector of Mexican culture.This is the last news, in 1901, on the dance of the Forty-One. From a careful reading of the news published on this event, a list was made, alphabetized here, of the different words applied to the “Forty-One” in the press of the period: afeminados, ajembrado, anfibios, bichos, bribones, canallas, chulos, entes, frescos, jotos, maricas, maricones, mimis, mariquitos, monas, mujeres, pepitos, perjumaos, pervertidos y pollos [effeminate, feminized, amphibian, nasty characters, rascals, swine, cocky, weirdos, cheeky, gay, faggot, queer, wimps, monkeys, women, dried pumpkins seeds, perfumed, perverted, and chickens]. The imagination of editors and columnists knew no limit. They turned to commonly used terms and added others of their own varied invention for mockery and derision, but underlying all this was an intuition: society is not so unfamiliar with sexual diversity. They needed descriptive terms to live with it, assume it as part of their reality, as stated in the article of Juan Jacobo Hernández “Vocabulario” published in Nuestro cuerpo. Frente Homosexual de Acción Revolucionaria (July 1980) [Our Bodies: The Homosexual Revolutionary Action Front] and in the unpublished dissertation of Juan Carlos Cortés Lara: El lenguaje homosexual: un acercamiento léxico (1989) [Homosexual Language: A Lexical Approach].
