ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with the role of film and performance in the ­denigration of Latino male sexuality in ways that impact the political prospects of Latinx peoples in the scope of the United States national project and beyond, while also examining the transformative potential of the hemisexual prospects in the popular imagination. As a Latin lover, Lito is certainly connected to this narrative of Latino sexuality, but, departing from the conventions surrounding the stereotype, the Lito story also liberates, as audience members empathize with his struggle to assess the totalizing destructiveness of homophobia in his life and career. As with the Lito character, the author's present findings reveal that the Latin lover has many valences in both film and live art performances and provocations that require him to consider his iterations as more than a mere Hollywood stereotype, but also as a symbol of hemispheric recovery from the pathologies of prescribed homophobia and oppressive masculinities.