Fascinating article on homosexuality among the pre-colonial Maya. TW for sexual assault, so mute me if you need to.
The cliched active=good/passive=bad dichotomy was in place, but with an unusual twist on things: "The Maya nobles, lords, and priests at the time of the Spanish conquest used this notion of activity and passivity to assert their ability to harness the powers of the gods for 1/?
community well-being. They ritualistically raped the gods, thus asserting themselves as the active partners to the passive gods. The Maya appear to have viewed this act as a way to harness sacred power." 2/?
(An interesting article obviously awaits someone who wants to compare sexual assault in the Greek pantheon & the Maya pantheon. Zeus et al. prey on humans; Maya priests prey on the gods). 3/?
The active role in sodomy was reserved for the Maya priests & elites. The commoners were seen as passive followers of the nobles. When a priest or nobleman took the passive role, he was deemed "corrupt." Nothing too extraordinary. But when the Spanish arrived things changed. 4/?
The Spanish introduced the idea of certain acts as being inherently sinful. But the Spanish, despite the physical conquest, didn't radically alter Maya society as they had done to the Aztecs. The Spanish subverted & change trad. Maya culture into a hybridized version. 5/?
This hybridity asserted that, frex, "sodomy was both sinful & accepted as part of colonial Maya ritual, the apparent contradiction being resolved by the ritual itself. Colonialism produced a new & different culture within which the Maya could assert meanings & understand 6/?
homosexual acts and desires." 7/?
Most of the rest of the article (Gender, Male Homosexuality & Power in Colonial Yucatán by Pete Sigal, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 29, No. 2 [Mar 2002]: 24-40) talks about the ways in which the Maya used accusations of sodomy to gain power in the colonial hierarchy. But 8/?
the article does include this accusation--sent to the offices of the Inquisition--by a Maya against four Spanish priests. I'm going to end letters with "God willing that smallpox be rubbed into their penis heads" from now on. 
