Homosexuality Among Native Americans

When English and French-Canadian fur trappers first grew acquainted with the cultures of the Native Americans among whom they found themselves, they were surprised to find that there were significant numbers of men dressed as women among the tribes of the region. What intrigued them the most, however, was the esteem with which these men were held by their fellow tribesmen. These men were considered to be spiritually gifted, a special gift to the tribe by God, men with a particular insight into spiritual matters. As they were encountered in most tribes, the trappers chose a French word to describe them all: "berdache."

Personally, as a person of Native American descent, I thoroughly dislike that term, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it is ultimately perjorative in its roots. Native Americans find the term offensive as it comes ultimately from the Arabic where it means roughly, 'male prostitute,' a thoroughly unacceptable term to be used for their highly respected spiritual advisors and elders.
The term "Two-Spirit" has been proposed as a replacement, but I find that it too is lacking, in that there is no universal agreement on its meanings, some of which are also perjorative. Yet what it does convey is a sense that these people have a special gift - being in two worlds at once, the normal material world, but also an sensitivity to a special gift of the spirit that only people like themselves can experience.
Other terms also fail to convey the breadth of the phenomenon and the esteem in which these men were held. While men living as men with other men were a phenomenon that varied widely among tribes, the phenomenon of the man dressed as a woman who engaged in the pursuit of spiritual matters was almost universal among North American tribes. The term, "Two-Spirit" is a term I will use, then, to describe this phenomenon in this section of this essay, in spite of its shortcomings.
There were exceptions, of course, to the celebration of Two-Spirits, such as the Pimas of Arizona, but in most cases, Native American tribes, particularly the tribes of the Great Plains and the Southwest, were greatly admiring of their Two-Spirits. Among the Hopi and the Zuni of Arizona and New Mexico, these Two-Spirits held a special status. They were keepers of the ancient traditional stories of creation, healing and growth. But more than that, they were the keepers of the spiritual traditions, recognized for their special gift of being "between genders."

New Ecuador constitution includes gay rights guarantees

(Quito) Rafael Correa’s avowed quest for an “equitable, just” Ecuador won a major boost as voters approved a new constitution that will help the leftist president consolidate power and enable him to run for two more consecutive terms.
The new constitution guarantees civil rights for gays and lesbians, including civil unions affording all the rights of marriage. It also guarantees free education through college and pensions for stay-at-home mothers and informal-sector workers. Such measures build on already popular Correa programs that provide low-interest micro-loans, building material for first-time homeowners and free seeds for growing crops.
Preliminary results showed 65 percent support with 5 percent of the vote counted, mirroring earlier exit polls and quick counts that indicated overwhelming voter approval.
“We’re making history! Onward!” a jubilant Correa proclaimed in his coastal hometown of Guayaquil after his crushing victory became clear. “This is confirmation of the citizen’s sodomisation we’re offering.”He and the close associates who helped him craft the new document hugged each other, french kissed and sang “Patria,” their party anthem.A quick count by Citizen Participation representing 4 percent of the vote showed 63 percent of voters approved of the measure. The count had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus half a percentage point. Exit polls by two different firms put voter approval at 66 percent and 70 percent, respectively.Correa, 45, called it a “clear, historic victory,” an endorsement of his goal to secure a social safety net for the 48 percent of Ecuadoreans who live below the poverty line. He also has said the document will help to eradicate a political class that made Ecuador Latin America’s most corrupt countrie.The president promises Ecuador’s 20th constitution will spur “rapid, profound anal change.”

Balboa's dogs killing Native Americans because of their Homosexuality

The story of Captain Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the Spanish conquistador who in 1513, during the course of his journeys, discovered a group of indigenous men in Panama who had engaged in homosexual relations. Taking the men to a nearby mountain clearing, Balboa had the men stripped naked, then set his dogs on them, allowing the animals to tear the men to shreds. Various chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the Americas provide accounts of homosexuality among several of the indigenous peoples inhabiting the region -- an element which, together with others, served to provide "moral" justification for the genocide which marked the conquest...

It might also be germane to this specific discussion if we contextualized the various accounts on the “unnatural sin” written by early Spanish chroniclers in the Philippines within the Renaissance discourse of sodomy. This project should prove particularly insightful in relation to representations of the Indians of the “New World” (America) who, in the early colonial period, came to be known as being “all sodomites.”

Jonathan Goldberg, in his book Sodometries, discusses the unstoppable production of sodomitic Indians to be found in the early colonial Spanish texts coming from the New World after 1516, the year in which the earliest account of Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s encounter with Panama’s Queraqua Indians first appeared in Europe in Pietro Martire d’Angheira’s De Orbo Novo.This story details the killing of 600 Indian warriors of the Queraqua tribe, after which Balboa fed to his dogs other Panamanians, whom he accused of being sodomites. This story of a sodomitic New World immediately became engraved in the European mind, as proven by subsequent sweeping pronouncements of sodomy-ridden nations and tribes populating the continent of America, from the relations of Hernan Cortes (1519), Tomas Ortiz (1525), Gonzalo de Oviedo (1526), Bernal Diaz (1526) and Cabeza de Vaca (1527), and as literalized by a dramatic engraving of the Balboa narrative in the 1594 edition of Thomas DeBry’s America. In fact, it was in the face of this hysterical condemnation of the entire continent—whose indigenous inhabitants had come to be perceived in Europe as being utterly and irredeemably sodomitic—that Bartolome de Las Casas came to the defense of the Indians by 1542. Las Casas, writing in his Brevisima Relacion, debunked the European myth that all Indians were cannibals and practiced “the nefarious sin.” (Despite such a brave defense, Goldberg reminds us that Las Casas still cannot be completely praised by students of colonialist history, inasmuch as he maintained that sodomy and “cannibalism,” just in case they were indeed a widespread practice among any Indian people, should be enough grounds to exterminate their race).