GLR May-June 2025

ESSAY Buenos Aires’ Men in Uniform J OSEPH S HAIKEWITZ

T HERE WAS SOMETHING in the air, perhaps, around 1939, as Jorge Larco painted his portrait of a dutiful seafarer (Figure 1). Pictured in his sailor uniform, the willowy youth stands beside one of the many dockyards scattered about Buenos Aires (the port city in which Larco lived) and its surrounding harbors. Though the subject is decorously dressed, we appear to have caught him unawares, his lascivious gaze fixed somewhere beyond the frame. For Larco, a queer Ar gentine artist working in the early-to-mid 20th century, the sea man—or rather, the idea of him—might have elicited a sense of sexual intrigue. After all, the lissome curves of his silhouette and his unmissable bulge make a display of the figure’s spirited man

lvé Piñero’s apartment, they did not stumble straight into a scene of wanton abandon. Rather, what confirmed the suspicions of the local police was a stash of a few hundred homoerotic pho tographs taken by Ballvé Piñero and featuring the pleasure seek ers who had crossed the threshold of his home. Among these snapshots the most troubling of all was a group of 121 portraits of uniformed, seminude, and nude cadets from Buenos Aires’ Colegio Militar (Military College). The discovery of these por traits attested to the much-feared existence—and, by extension, the queer leanings—of the nation’s military trainees. At this point, dear reader, you might find your eyes drifting to the margins of the text or your finger thumbing pages ahead, curious to catch a glimpse of these salacious images. But as fate

hood. It’s as if the mariner is so liciting one to slip away with him into the dark recess of the wood-paneled shed, its door cracked ever so slightly ajar. Larco wasn’t alone in his fancy for uniformed men. In Buenos Aires not two years after this watercolor was com pleted, an amateur photographer by the name of Jorge Horacio Ballvé Piñero began inviting a number of military recruits into his Recoleta apartment. Then in his early twenties, Ballvé Piñero was known to cruise with friends along Avenida Santa Fe, one of the capital’s main thor oughfares in search of strapping servicemen. As aspiring actress by the name of Sonia (the sobri quet of Blanca Nieve Abratte) would often tag along, helping to entice the off-duty enlistees for a night of folly in Ballvé Piñero’s home. What unfolded for close to a year—and what astonished the police officers

Fig. 1: Jorge Larco. Marinero , 1939. Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes Franklin Rawson, San Juan.

Fig. 2: Claudio Larrea. Los cuerpos del delito , 2019. Recreation of an early 1940s photo. Courtesy of the artist.

who carried out a sweep of that same apartment in August 1942—were nights of drunken revelry and queer coupling that threw into question the militant nation’s virile self-image. The investigators following the case were acting on mere rumors of these illicit soirées. However, when they entered Bal Joseph Shaikewitz is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU whose dissertation theorizes the (in)capacity of the visual field as a site of trans femme emergence in early 20th-century Latin America.

would have it, the photographs of military conscripts would eventually go up in flames, burned at the order of the courts. The remaining portraits of civilians are part of a sealed case file that is today wholly inaccessible to the public. While we’re un able to lay eyes on these photographs ourselves, a close in spection of them was of paramount importance in the immediate wake of their seizure in 1942. At that time, the images were readily enlisted into prosecutorial work, serving as the basis not only for Ballvé Piñero’s conviction (he would be charged with

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