“No somos enfermos ni criminales”: Early Mobilizations around Gender and Sexualities in Colombia and Mexico 1 César Sánchez Avella 2 One of the most powerful and meaningful slogans that made presence during the first public demonstrations of the Colombian and Mexican mobilizations around gender and sexualities was “no somos enfermos ni criminales” [we are neither sick nor criminals] (See Fig. 1), which pointed directly to the discourses of pathologization and criminalization of homosexuality, that sustained abuses and persecution suffered by those with non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations. This message arises too as reaction to what has been described by Mario Pecheny and Rafael de la Dehesa as “the heteronormative model of social organization consolidated by the new secular-liberal regimes of the latter part of the nineteenth century in Latin America” (as cited in Díez, 2015b, p. 34). The consolidation of that model relied on medical and legal discourses of regulation of homosexuality. In the legal sphere, as asserted by Díez (2015b), the strong influence of French politics in Latin American Liberal leaders -who were pursuing the secularization of their states- led them to adopt Napoleonic codes in most of continental Latin America. Given that the French civil code of 1804 did not criminalize same sex relations, this resulted in the decriminalization of homosexual relations in many Latin American countries 3 . Nevertheless, ‘indecency’ and ‘scandal’ in public remained as vague criminal offenses included in penal codes, and even when homosexuality itself was not a crime, any ‘scandalous’ homosexual behaviour was punishable. On the medical dimension, during the late nineteenth century a deep influence of the European ideas of positivism and modernity in a period of “order and progress” in Latin America, led to a proliferation of medical and psychological explanations for homosexuality, which began to be considered “a disease, a physiological defect and a social threat” (p. 35). This criminalization and pathologization of homosexuality in Latin 1 This text is a partial result of the doctoral research entitled “De un mundo raro: Four Cases of Cultural Activism around Gender and Sexualities in Colombia and Mexico”. 2 PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies of The University of Sydney (Australia). 3 In the case of Colombia, the criminalization of homosexual relations disappeared in this process, but reappeared with the penal code of 1936. That criminal offense was removed again in the Colombian penal code of 1980 (Bustamante, 2008).