!Ask a Mexican!

Illustration by Mark DancyDear Mexican,

Why do Mexicans hate the gays so much?

Dear gabacho,

There's a reason Dubya won 44 percent of the Latino electorate this year—el presidente preached the gospel of fag-bashing. He learned well from 2000, when Latinos in California voted for Proposition 22, the anti-gay-marriage initiative, by a wider margin than any other ethnic group. And Bush probably found the 2002 survey by the Tómas Rivera Policy Institute of the University of Southern California disclosing that 60 percent of Latino Catholics felt homosexuality is "always wrong," while 80 percent of Latino Protestants felt the same. In a community that's between 92 and 94 percent Christian, that's millions of votes. But although religion has much to do with Mexican joto-hating, it really goes back to two classic stereotypes that happen to be true: machismo and family. While English-speaking bros use the term "faggot" with ease, call an hombre a—take your pick—fagote, hueco, joto, maricón, mariposo or puto, and you'll likely earn a Corona bottle in the face. More important, though, man-love, in the Mexican psyche, threatens the family structure and doesn't produce babies—and without those features, you might as well be a gabacho.

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