Queer Latinos in Miami

Please join us for a lecture by Professor Julio Capó on sexual and ethnic tensions during Miami’s urban crisis.


“Latinos Deserted Gays in Large Numbers”: Sexual and Ethnic Tensions during Miami’s Urban Crisis of the 1980s.

Wednesday, January 17, 3-5 pm
Mary Graydon Center Room 200

        


Julio Capó, Jr., is Assistant Professor in the History Department and Commonwealth Honors
College at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Welcome to Fairyland:
Queer Miami before 1940 (UNC, 2017) and is writing a book on the 2016 Pulse nightclub
massacre and the history of violence on queer Latina/o/x communities. A former journalist, he
often contributes to mainstream media and has written for Time, Washington Post, Miami
Herald, and El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico).

 

 

 

 

 

Check out Professor Capó’s book:

Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today’s Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capo Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami’s transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. In chronicling Miami’s queer past from its 1896 founding through 1940, Capo shows the multifaceted ways gender and sexual renegades made the city their own.

Drawing from a multilingual archive, Capo unearths the forgotten history of “fairyland,” a marketing term crafted by boosters that held multiple meanings for different groups of people. In viewing Miami as a contested colonial space, he turns our attention to migrants and immigrants, tourism, and trade to and from the Caribbean–particularly the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti–to expand the geographic and methodological parameters of urban and queer history. Recovering the world of Miami’s old saloons, brothels, immigration checkpoints, borders, nightclubs, bars, and cruising sites, Capo makes clear how critical gender and sexual transgression is to understanding the city and the broader region in all its fullness.

 

 


This Lecture is presented by The Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, the Department of History, and the Humanities Lab.