queer masculinities

184 Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800
civil archives, not to mention the huge audiencia court archives in
other areas like Guatemala and Peru, may in time bear fruit.
In addition to civil courts, ecclesiastical courts were empowered to
prosecute various sexual crimes, usually bigamy, adultery, and cohabitation,
as well as adjudicate divorce hearings. Again, no thorough
search has been made of these archives, which form a vast archipelago
across Latin America, to look for sodomy cases. In sum, case law has
been largely unexamined to my knowledge and for this reason could
turn up a wealth of data for a history of homosexuality in Latin
America.
Visitation records
An enterprising historian could look to records at the parish level and
may also turn up intriguing clues. After the Council of Trent in 1563,
an institutionalized duty of the Tridentine bishop was the visitation, in
which he or his coterie went to each parish in a bishopric. 77 The result
of these visits was extensive documentation on the spiritual and cultural
life in individual parishes. Such records have been used by a
variety of scholars to discuss popular religion and the sociology of religion.
I suspect that a careful examination of this kind of documentation
may turn up discussions of community mores or sexual habits.
While such data may be scarce, without examining such records it is
difficult to know what they contain. This kind of documentation is
currently notoriously underutilized in the overall, general historiography
of colonial Latin America. These archives have been left more or
less to die on the vine for hundreds of years, partly as a result of poor
preservation and partly as a result of complicated organization. In
either case, diocesan archives exist broadly across Latin America and
could be mined for data on sexual mores.
Imprints
While archival material is the meat and potatoes of historical research,
printed material may also shed important light on the question of
homosexuality for Latin America. Again, the problem here is that it is
virtually impossible to glean first-hand discussion about homosexuality
by men who profess male–male friendship or sexual behavior. Rather,
we must look to sources like confession manuals and moral theology
that discuss sodomy as a social and moral ‘problem.’ Nevertheless, the
presence of discussions of homosexuality provides clues as to the
orthodox views on the matter. Works of moral theology constituted
one of the most popular genres of printed material in colonial Latin