GLR May-June 2025

ual needs, thus making them the most sought after by the inverts.” This kind of gay fascination with uniformed men is not unique to Ballvé Piñero’s circle or to Larco, the painter of the mariner with whom we began. A long list of artists working in the early 20th century—Abraham Ángel and Agustín Lazo in Mexico; Paul Cadmus, Charles Demuth, and Marsden Hartley in the U.S.—inscribed queer attachments onto the bodies of soldiers, cadets, and policemen. In contrast to the eventual adoption of these authoritative roles in S/M subcultures, these earlier fancies saw in the uniformed man a normatively masculine and putatively heterosexual archetype whose disciplined nature was but a fickle front. A photograph of Larco from 1933–34 shows how he gleefully dressed in sailor attire at a costume party, trespassing, if for a night, upon the rough-and-tumble world of maritime brotherhood (Figure 3). He stands at the

There’s a useful distinction to draw between the popular image of the sailor and that of the military and police per sonnel tasked with administering na tional order, of which the gender and sexual norms of the period were an im portant part. Larco would introduce this difference in his portrait of a policeman in repose, thoughts adrift as he drinks— a bottle of liquor sits beside his sifón (soda siphon)—at a dusky bar (Figure 4). With his wide-legged posture and at tentive bearing, his sidelong gaze (in contrast to the mariner’s wandering eyes) appears far more suspect than it does amorous. If, on the surface, sailors and police officers were sartorially linked, the latter served as a particularly vexed object of attraction given their ac tive role in the persecution of queer bod ies and desires. Perhaps the sharpest historical study of queer politics and the uniform fetish comes in Jeffrey Schneider’s 2023 book,

Fig. 3: Jorge Larco, Federico García Lorca, Manuel Fontanals, and José González Caballero, 1933–34.

upper left beside Federico García Lorca, who wrote of and sketched this same character in a variety of works. García Lorca’s visit to Buenos Aires came not two years before his ar rest and assassination by Spain’s nationalist militia at the onset of the Spanish Civil War.

Uniform Fantasies . In it, he considers how gay erotic attach ments toward military men in Imperial Germany orbited around two flights of fancy: that of “turning” a soldier (as the epitome of heterosexual masculinity) and that of one’s own romantic de sires mirroring the “innocent” bonds that active duty allows among men. In the case of Argentina, the infatuation with men in uniform conforms to this first impulse, animated by the allure of the forbidden and the thrill of the could-be. Stories abound in late 19th- and early 20th-century South America of the chal lenges of maintaining chaste relations among young men in the homosocial environments of the barracks, training academy, or seafaring vessel. And so, to depict a uniformed man (or to invite one into one’s home) revealed the already existing cracks in the heterosexual façade of national honor and belonging. So, too, there was something alluringly subversive about these encoun ters or the imagining of them—moments that might perturb the not-to-be-questioned confines of state control, virile masculin ity, and law enforcement. Modern art history is no stranger to the innumerable artistic traces of gay attraction toward a good man in uniform. But what other ways of interpreting such images might we put into prac tice, particularly considering how these works coincide with pe riods of mounting crackdowns against homosexuality by the state? More than defiant longings for the forbidden, paintings like Larco’s or photographs like Ballvé Piñero’s speak power fully to the enduring fissures between gay and abolitionist pol itics, and to the ways that desire and lust can interfere with the conditions of one’s own flourishing. It would be shortsighted to separate images like the ones dis cussed here from the history of police and military violence against queer and gender-variant Argentines. Between 1930 and 1943, during the period of conservative restoration known as the Infamous Decade, the state adopted a number of explicitly anti homosexual edicts that sought to put an end to the once close lipped matter of gay sexualities. The Chilean-born author and

Fig. 4: Jorge Larco. En el club , 1950. Private collection.

TheG & LR

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