ABSTRACT
This chapter critiques Eurocentric examinations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements in Latin America for their inability to capture the relationship between public space and queer subjects except in hierarchical terms of “progressiveness” vs. “backwardness.” Notably, in Latin America homosexuality and homosexual practices have been legally regulated very differently than in the United States. Even though the Dominican Republic and Brazil have regulated homosexuality through similar legal frameworks – not through sodomy laws but rather through public decency laws – queer Dominican and Brazilian histories appear to have taken very different turns in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The relationship between the Dominican State and the Catholic Church has been historically very close. With much more force than in Brazil the Dominican Catholic Church has vocally and actively condemned homosexuality. The increasing presence of global gay and lesbian culture in Dominican society through cable television, print media, and the Internet since the 1990s raises important questions about their effects.
