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Set against the backdrop of the Mexican state of Zacatecas' stark beauty, the award-winning Quemar las naves (2007) by director Francisco Franco Alba contributes to a growing body of twenty-first-century Mexican coming-of-age movies featuring gay characters and subtexts and/or LGBTQ themes (Y tu mamá también, 2001; De la calle, 2001; Sin destino, 2002; Temporada de patos, 2004; El cielo dividido, 2006; Niñas mal, 2007; La otra familia, 2008; Todo el mundo tiene a alguien menos yo, 2012; Peyote, 2013; Cuatro lunas, 2014; Memorias de lo que no fue, 2017). With adolescent protagonists driving the plot and focalizing pressing social issues, the coming-of-age movie is a potent vehicle for cultural criticism.1 In this vein, Quemar las naves–which won the Mexican film industry's Ariel award for Best Actress (Irene Azuela) and Best Music (Alejandro Giacomán)–takes its place as a key early twenty-first-century queer and anti-homophobic film that bridges gay and straight audiences.
The film is staged as a traditional coming-of-age tale dealing with orphanhood and gender and sexual identity within the confines of normative gender roles. By employing recognizable images of female gender performativity, Quemar establishes communication with mainstream audiences in its first minutes while subtly coding its male protagonist, Sebastián (Ángel Onésimo Nevares), as queer. Relatively progressive in the history of Latin American and Mexican cinema, however, Quemar resists stereotypical portrayals of gay youths in film even as its characters resonate with three ways of representing gay men on screen: the maricón, the entendido, and the macho. Most significantly, sixteen-year-old Sebastián's coming out is staged not stereotypically as pathology or voyeuristic spectacle, but rather as a source of healing and metaphoric fledging from the familial nest. The film de-politicizes homosexuality by positioning the historically and geographically meaningful Zacatecan landscape as background for Sebastián's and his lover Juan's (Bernardo Benítez) budding relationship. This abets a positive mainstream Mexican audience reading of the pair's sexual identity and allows mainstream audience response to move from a dominant reading of hegemonic gender identity to what media theorist Stuart Hall might call a "negotiated response" ("Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse"). The result is a response that more closely aligns with the film's...