🏳️🌈🏺🇵🇪Moche-Inca ceramics
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🇵🇪
Nearly two thousand years ago, on the desert coast of northern Peru, the Moche built mud-brick pyramids, irrigated the desert, & made some of the finest pottery the world has ever seen.
They also apparently bent gender rules & celebrated homosexual sex.
They never wrote anything down, only their distinctive ceramics survive. Hundreds of their vessels show sex, & most of it not procreative—oral, anal, hands, every arrangement except the one the Spanish could accept. These weren't jokes or party pieces. They were buried noble funerary items.
The Moche faded twelve hundred years ago, but the culture seems to have lived on along that coast with the Chimu & the Inca, at least outside the capital at Cuzco.
When the Spanish soldier Cieza de León traveled there, he found it in the temples. In each, he wrote, lived a man or two who had dressed in drag, spoke like women, & some lived as women. But they were the priests. At the great festivals the lords publicly slept with them, as an act of worship. In the northern provinces, he said, sex between men was sacred, & gay brothels were the norm.
Up in the mountains, Quechua had a word: 'quariwarmi,' man-woman. They were servants of the jaguar god Chuqui Chinchay & stood in the space between masculine & feminine that the whole Andean world turned on. Queer people were considered sacred because they crossed boundaries.
But no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
While crossing South, Vasco Núñez de Balboa entered a village & found the royals & their courtiers engaged in queer sex & dressed in women’s attire. He had forty of them torn apart by his dogs, then went about his day ‘discovering’ the Pacific Ocean. A Spanish priest praised the massacre as the act of an honorable Catholic.
Across the continent the chroniclers labeled these people 'sodomite' & used the word as a license for conquest. In 1570 the Inquisition opened its doors in Lima, very little of South America’s queer past survived it.
Only the “sex pots” survived in hidden tombs: Unique & stunning pieces that hint at a vibrant & excepting queer Andes.
Peru has recently been backsliding on LGBTQ rights
