How were lesbian and gay people treated in the Aztec or Incan empires?

How was homosexuality generally viewed by native Americans, pre-colonization until American revolution?

This is my general notice that “Native American” encompasses two vast continents filled with innumerable people in the various landscapes of those continents, whose thoughts, traditions, and cultures were not static, but evolved and flourished over a period of thousands of years.

Fortunately, I’m always happy to expound on my particular time, place, and culture of interest!

Several different sources from the time period immediately after Spanish contact with the Aztecs and in the early Colonial period all make references to homosexual behavior. The problem we have in sorting out the information is two-fold: 1) to what extent to these passages reflect pre-Hispanic customs rather than the intrusion of Christian mores? and 2) to what extent can we graft our modern ideas of homosexuality onto cultures 500 years in the past who had developed complex societies wholly without input from those cultures which influenced the vaguely defined idea of “Western civilization?”

Spanish Accounts

We can start with the Spanish accounts, as they give us the most terse passages — really not much more than off-hand mentions. Cortés, in his first letter back to Spain, for instance, mentions that:

we know and have been informed without room for doubt that all [the indigenous people] practice the abominable sin of sodomy

• (p. 25, trans. Morris 1969)

Meanwhile, Bernal Díaz del Castillo writes that one of the demands of Cortés to the “fat Cacique” of Cempoala was that:

young men must cease to go about in female garments, to make a livelihood by such cursed lewdness

• (p. 119, trans. Lockhart 1844)

The above quotes require a bit of nuance and context. For starters, the quote from Díaz del Castillo may not even be his. Though he makes several references to “abominations” and “unnatural” acts throughout his narrative, this is his only direct reference to what we, as modern people, might consider homosexual acts, even if the sex part is only implied by the text. This passage, however, is probably the result of meddling by a Spanish friar, Alonso Remón, who, in 1632, published an edition of Díaz del Castillo’s work with the friar’s own edits. Often these edits were to portray the Spanish conquest in a more “christianizing” light. Modern editions of Díaz del Castillo’s work draw upon an original manuscript preserved in Guatemala, which does not have this passage.

On top of this, we have another problem, in that both quotes from Cortés and Díaz del Castillo refer to people living on the Gulf coast. Díaz del Castillo was specifically referring to acts taking place at Cempoala, and at the time Cortés was writing his letter he had yet venture inland to encounter the Tlaxcalans, let alone the Aztecs. Though the people of the Gulf coast were subjects and tributaries to the Aztecs — who were a tripartite alliance of Nahua peoples — they themselves were Totonacs, a different ethnicity and culture. Although the Totonacs were well within the General cultural sphere of Mesoamerica and shared many practices and beliefs with their Nahua neighbors, we cannot say that their notions about homosexuality jibe with those of the Aztecs. Also, by dint of not being Aztecs, the Totonacs are tragically understudied to the point that it’s hard to say anything about what they actually believed about anything, let alone homosexuality.*

We do get another tantalizing hint that homosexuality may have been more accepted on the Gulf coast from an early Spanish friar, called Motolinía. He was one of the original twelve Franciscans who arrived in Mexico just a few years after the Conquest and wrote the earliest scholarly works on both the culture and languages of Mesoamerica. In a work written less than a generation after the Conquest he remarks that:

En dos ó tres provincias bien lejos de México sé que ovo sodomía cuasi permitida

In two or three provinces quite far from Mexico I know I heard that sodomy is somewhat allowed (my own translation)

This tantalizing tidbit could corroborate with Cortés and even justify Remón’s edit indicating that homosexuality behavior was more open and normal outside of the core Aztec areas. Of course, Motolinía makes it clear that, among the central Aztec cities, “sodomy” was punishable by death. He even references Nezahualpilli, a pre-Hispanic ruler of Texcoco (the second most important Aztec city), who apparently vigorously pursued and punished homosexual acts. The entrance of the Texcocan ruling dynasty onto the scene brings us to our other set of sources.

This is my general notice that “Native American” encompasses two vast continents filled with innumerable people in the various landscapes of those continents, whose thoughts, traditions, and cultures were not static, but evolved and flourished over a period of thousands of years.

Fortunately, I’m always happy to expound on my particular time, place, and culture of interest!

Several different sources from the time period immediately after Spanish contact with the Aztecs and in the early Colonial period all make references to homosexual behavior. The problem we have in sorting out the information is two-fold: 1) to what extent to these passages reflect pre-Hispanic customs rather than the intrusion of Christian mores? and 2) to what extent can we graft our modern ideas of homosexuality onto cultures 500 years in the past who had developed complex societies wholly without input from those cultures which influenced the vaguely defined idea of “Western civilization?”

Spanish Accounts

We can start with the Spanish accounts, as they give us the most terse passages — really not much more than off-hand mentions. Cortés, in his first letter back to Spain, for instance, mentions that:

we know and have been informed without room for doubt that all [the indigenous people] practice the abominable sin of sodomy

• (p. 25, trans. Morris 1969)

Meanwhile, Bernal Díaz del Castillo writes that one of the demands of Cortés to the “fat Cacique” of Cempoala was that:

young men must cease to go about in female garments, to make a livelihood by such cursed lewdness

• (p. 119, trans. Lockhart 1844)

The above quotes require a bit of nuance and context. For starters, the quote from Díaz del Castillo may not even be his. Though he makes several references to “abominations” and “unnatural” acts throughout his narrative, this is his only direct reference to what we, as modern people, might consider homosexual acts, even if the sex part is only implied by the text. This passage, however, is probably the result of meddling by a Spanish friar, Alonso Remón, who, in 1632, published an edition of Díaz del Castillo’s work with the friar’s own edits. Often these edits were to portray the Spanish conquest in a more “christianizing” light. Modern editions of Díaz del Castillo’s work draw upon an original manuscript preserved in Guatemala, which does not have this passage.

On top of this, we have another problem, in that both quotes from Cortés and Díaz del Castillo refer to people living on the Gulf coast. Díaz del Castillo was specifically referring to acts taking place at Cempoala, and at the time Cortés was writing his letter he had yet venture inland to encounter the Tlaxcalans, let alone the Aztecs. Though the people of the Gulf coast were subjects and tributaries to the Aztecs — who were a tripartite alliance of Nahua peoples — they themselves were Totonacs, a different ethnicity and culture. Although the Totonacs were well within the General cultural sphere of Mesoamerica and shared many practices and beliefs with their Nahua neighbors, we cannot say that their notions about homosexuality jibe with those of the Aztecs. Also, by dint of not being Aztecs, the Totonacs are tragically understudied to the point that it’s hard to say anything about what they actually believed about anything, let alone homosexuality.*

We do get another tantalizing hint that homosexuality may have been more accepted on the Gulf coast from an early Spanish friar, called Motolinía. He was one of the original twelve Franciscans who arrived in Mexico just a few years after the Conquest and wrote the earliest scholarly works on both the culture and languages of Mesoamerica. In a work written less than a generation after the Conquest he remarks that:

En dos ó tres provincias bien lejos de México sé que ovo sodomía cuasi permitida

In two or three provinces quite far from Mexico I know I heard that sodomy is somewhat allowed (my own translation)

This tantalizing tidbit could corroborate with Cortés and even justify Remón’s edit indicating that homosexuality behavior was more open and normal outside of the core Aztec areas. Of course, Motolinía makes it clear that, among the central Aztec cities, “sodomy” was punishable by death. He even references Nezahualpilli, a pre-Hispanic ruler of Texcoco (the second most important Aztec city), who apparently vigorously pursued and punished homosexual acts. The entrance of the Texcocan ruling dynasty onto the scene brings us to our other set of sources.

Nahua/Mestizo Accounts

There’s a wealth of writing in the 16th and on into the early 17th Centuries by Nahua elites, as well as mestizos with connections to elite Nahua dynasties. Primarily these writings focus on glorifying their own family histories, and often acted as legal documents in Spanish courts when wrangling over rights, privileges, and, above all, tributes the writer claimed were due to his family (or his branch of the family). They also preserve enormous amounts of history and culture, and their differing viewpoints give amazing insight into the ethnic rivalries among the Aztecs. The writings from Texcoco particularly illustrate not only some of the resentments towards the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, who dominated the other members of the Aztec Triple Alliance, but also show how the influence of Spanish authority, and particularly Christianity, was shaping not just indigenous political systems, but even family histories.

The people of Texcoco were Acolhua, an ethnic group that, like the Mexica, had migrated into the Valley of Mexico from the more arid northern reaches after the fall of the Toltecs. Unlike the Mexica though, they were part of an earlier migration, that of the famed Chichimec leader, Xolotl. Acolhua documents trace their lineage either directly back to Xolotl or from a companion to Xolotl who was granted the land that would form Acolhua territory. With their older lineage and longer history in the Valley, a certain amount of resentment bleeds through in the Acolhua-derived texts. In particular, the writers were interested in showing how their city, rather than Tenochtitlan, had been the cultural center of the Aztec world, with the Mexica more like younger siblings who were tamed by the sophisticated ways of the Acolhua. Thus, Texcoco should be seen as the equal of Tenochtitlan, rather than a subordinate, with all the attendant rights and tributes that would bring. (For more on this, I recommend the incredible The Allure of Nezahualcoyotl by Jongsoo Lee, which provides a thorough threshing of the accepted wisdom about Texcoco.)

One of the most important themes in writings by Texcocans was distancing themselves from the more “abominable” and “unnatural” practices of their Mexica counterparts. The Texcocans, under Ixtlilxochitl, were the only core Aztec group to turn against the Mexica, with their defection granting the Spanish and Tlaxcalans not only the eastern shores of Lake Texcoco, but a clear path to funnel troops from the Spanish beachhead on the Gulf coast all the way to the Valley of Mexico. Ixtlilxochitl himself was an early convert to Christianity and appears to have been both fervent and devout in his conversion. Yet, somehow, the Tlaxcalans get all the credit for helping the Spanish, and the Mexica still ended up being seen as the natural rulers of the land that today bears their name.

Still, part of the efforts of the Texcocan writers was to show that not only were their people the most Christian and civilized, but that they had been so even before the arrival of the Spanish. So, writing in the early 1600s, Fernando Ixtlilxochitl (a descendant of Ixtlilxochitl) portrays his famous ancestor Nezahualcoyotl as eschewing human sacrifice and worshiping an unnamed single god who is strongly implied to be the god of the Bible. He also emphasizes the judicial prowess of Texcoco, whose legal code is indicated to have influenced all the other Aztec cities. Likewise, Juan de Pomar, a mestizo descendant of Nezahualcoyotl who was born right about the time Motolinía was writing his works, also emphasizes the eighty laws of Nezahualcoyotl as the template from which all Aztec legal doctrine derived.

Among these laws were prohibitions on homosexuality, with the death penalty for such acts. Fernando Ixtlilxochitl, as fits his role as the most partisan writer and the most invested in proving the Christian devoutness of his lineage, records the most extreme act of execution. The active (i.e., penetrative) partner was bound to a stake and buried in ashes. The passive (i.e., receptive) partner, on the other hand, had his intestines pulled out through his anus, and then was buried in ashes. More frequently hanging is mentioned, and this is also mentioned by Friar Torquemada, who wrote somewhat contemporaneously with Fernando Ixtlilxochitl. This punishment is also mirrored in the writings of Fernando Tezozomoc, a descendant of the ruling Mexica dynasty of Tenochtitlan who wrote his own history in the late 1500s. Jongsoo Lee, with his skeptical eye towards Texcoco, sees this coincidence less as Spanish interference, but more as evidence that there was a generally agreed upon legal code throughout the Aztec cities even before the Spanish arrived. Included in this code was a ban on homosexual acts, with the receptive partner being the more reviled.

So we have several early writings from Nahuas themselves which indicate that, within the core Aztec cities, homosexuality was considered a crime punishable by death, with the passive partner seen as worthy of the most severe punishments. Complicating this though, is the fact of these writings happening at least a generation removed from the Conquest and all being written by Christianized Nahuas whose motives were not just to record the history of their own lineage, but also to do so in the best light possible. For more insight, we now turn to another early source.

Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain

In the 1540s, the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún led an effort to record as much about Nahua culture as possible. He utilized a team of Nahua scholars trained and educated at the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco to interview Nahua elders and learned men about their experiences and knowledge. The result is not without its biases; Sahagún’s goal, after all, was to learn enough about the Nahuas to more easily convert them and his reliance on Tlatelolcan sources introduced its own biases. Also, he’s pretty much the source of the whole “Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl” business, which is hard to explain succinctly, so just read Townsend’s “Burying the White Gods,” if you’re curious.

Regardless of those flaws, Sahagún produced an invaluable, encyclopedic series of texts covering Nahua life from the mundane to the divine. Among his writings are a series of passages describing the behavior (be it proper or improper) of various kinds of people in Nahua life. It is in these writings that we get our description of the cuiloni, or sodomite:

The sodomite is an effeminate — a defilement, a corruption, filth; a taster of filth, revolting, perverse, full of affliction. He merits laughter, ridicule, mockery; he is detestable, nauseating. Disgusting, he makes one acutely sick. Womanish, playing the part of a woman, he merits being committed to the flames, burned, consumed by fire. He burns; he is consumed by fire. He talks like a woman, he takes the part of a woman.

pp. 37-38, Book. 10, trans. Anderson and Dibble 1981

Those are very strong words condemning homosexuality, but they also contain a lot to unpack. Kimball’s (1993) “Aztec Homosexuality: The Textual Evidence,” takes issue with Anderson and Dibble’s choice to translate cuiloni as “sodomite. He instead argues that the term denotes a passive role in sex, and translates it (pulling no punches) as “one who is fucked.” Kimball also notes that the language about “burning” may have been an insertion by the editors (be it Sahagún or one of his christianized Nahuas), as it breaks up a pair of couplets in the original Nahuatl.

Here is Kimball’s translation of the passage:

line	Nahuatl	English
1a	Cuiloni	He is one who is fucked,
1b	chimouhqui	he is a homosexual man.
2a	Cuitzotl itlacuahqui	He is something corrupt;
2b	tlahyelli	he is obscene (or dirty),
2c	tlahyelchichi	he sucks obscene (or dirty) things,
2d	tlayelpol	he is an obscene (or dirty), awful thing.
3a	Tlacamicqui	He is a corrupt person,
3b	tepoliuhqui	he is a lost person.
4a	Ahhuilli	He is amusing,
4b	camanalli	he is humorous,
4c	netopehualli	he is one who is mocked.
5a	Tecualanih	He made some angry,
5b	tetlahyeltih	he disgusted some,
5c	tehuiqueuh	he was boring to some,
5d	teyacapitzlahyeltih	he disgusted some like an eared grebe(?).
6a	Cihuaciuhqui	He used to make himself as a woman,
6b	mocihuanenequini	he is one who acts the role of a woman.
7a	Tlatiloni	He is one who is burned,
7b	tlatlani	he is the one who burns,
7c	chichinoloni	he is the one who is burned up,
7d	tlatla	he burns
7e	chichinolo	he is burned up
8a or 6c	Cihcihuatlatoa	He often speaks in the manner of a woman,
8b or 6d	mocihuanenequi	he acts the part of a woman.

Kimball’s assertion is that, based on the poetic style of Nahuatl, the 7-stanza should be removed, with the 6-stanza forming a pair of couplets: Cihuaciuhqui/mocihuanenequini; Cihcihuatlatoa/mocihuanenequi. In this view the cuiloni is still far from a respected position, but instead of being burned to death, he is simply reviled and mocked for his effeminate ways, which included taking a feminine (i.e., penetrated) role in sex. The removal of the conflagratory end for the cuiloni also makes sense from a historical and cultural position, as burning someone to death was a Spanish practice. Of note, Aztec executions are also recorded by Sahagún as:

either they would stangle one with a cord, or stone him to death, or slay him under wooden staves, beaten

P. 41, Book 8, Anderson and Dibble trans. 1954

The options of strangulation, stoning, or being clubbed to death are all mentioned several times by Sahagún as execution methods; being burned to death is not mentioned. Those familiar with Aztec scholarship might note here that I am discounting the Mapa Quinatzin, which shows the punishment for adultery for a man as being burned at the stake. In response, I will note that the Mapa Quinatzin is a post-Conquest source (even if fairly early) that comes from Texcoco and was a major source for Fernando Ixtlilxochitl, and therefore has all of the same problems of enthusiastic assimilation and bias as noted above.

I will also note that burning as an execution clashes with Nahua death rituals, wherein cremation was the most common form of disposing of a body. The burning was thought to release the tonalli, one of the three parts of the soul, from the head, allowing it to transcend to the afterlife. Certainly this does not preclude fire as a form of execution. After all, being buried alive has been practiced as a form of execution by other cultures. It does, however, make it a strange choice for a state-sanctioned form of execution for criminals.