A lot of new subscribers came in this week. Welcome, friend.
If you’re receiving this, you recently attended a Hubba Hubba screening at Nitehawk or signed up via suggestion or discovery. I’m glad you’re here.
I release weekly posts on Thursdays centered around the world of masculinities, media, and much more. I’ll also have updates about events, projects, and screenings every week.
Thanks for reading.
Earlier this month, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of my film series (and project in development), Hubba Hubba, with a screening of 2004’s Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. The thirst trap under the spotlight was Diego Luna.
The Hubba Hubba series uses hunk-ism to talk about cultural changes in desire. In many ways film crushes reflect the fight against or towards assimilation. As audience members, we pay attention to what I call our “port of calls for desirability”. While film offers us unmitigated voyeurism, when someone is deemed attractive on-screen, we are also offered comparison points to our own levels of attraction — in the case of “thirst trap cinema”, whether we think the hunk in question would date us OR if the screen/audience deems our looks “hunky” enough. In the case of my coming-of-age movie-going diet, I paid a lot of attention to the Latin Lover trope.
This week, I begin a series on the fascinating history of this trope, it’s affects on culture, and the unique ways the United States responded to “exotic attraction” throughout the century.
The Latin Lover label was introduced to me at some point during adolescence, when I first showed up at a school dance with my peach fuzzed upper lip and under-buttoned rayon shirt, kids announced my arrival with calls of “oooooh, look at the Latin Lover”. It could’ve been an affectionate jest or something more insipid, but I have to admit I liked being considered in any category of appeal. If you have asked 14-year-old me what should be on my adult résumé, I would’ve been fine if Latin Lover was listed somewhere on there (“Smooth Operator” would’ve been fine, too.)
The funny thing is that by the time I was a teenager, the term Latin Lover was as antiquated as a 78rpm record, yet, the moniker did manage to come back at the end of the century. For some Latino screen actors, the trope offered one entry point to marquee status. For mixed culture boys like me, it offered visibility. The moniker goes back 100 years — a product on the roaring twenties, fueled by the growing popularity of the seventh art.
The Latin Lover is a few things — a dancer with dark smoky looks, worldly demeanor. A lover. A gigolo. Un cabrón that “has sex with you with his eyes” energy. The title offered “safe” exoticism — it was a suggestion of Otherness with limits. In other words, to be a “Latin Lover” meant you had proximity to whiteness.
Along with the influx of immigrants entering ports like New York at the turn of the century, the 1910’s offered an explosion of entertainment options — phonograph records, the expansion of film, and dance halls. As the decade spilled into the 1920’s, these spaces in entertainment gave some immigrants opportunities to be pillars of desire.
Let’s not forget, the 1920’s was a horny time in the United States — at least showing its lascivious in the cultural entertainment of the day.
One of those entertainment options for urban immigrants of a certain look and style was being a “tango pirate” (also known as “taxi dancers”). These were ostensibly male escorts — men who spent time on dance floors of cities, courting wealthy women who were willing to pay for the company of these exotic young men. With these spaces offering a co-mingling of women and, often, “foreign” men, the “tango pirate” service presented a scandal against the more puritanical and xenophobic norms of the time.
One of those Tango Pirates was Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla aka Rudolph Valentino. And when the term Latin Lover is indexed, it’s often attributed to Valentino.
Rudolph Valentino came to New York City via Italy in 1913. He worked a series of odd jobs, eventually landing in entertainment as a dancer which led to acting jobs and a move to Hollywood at the end of the decade. His big break came with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), a giant success, which was followed by The Sheik (1921), an equally popular smash. With his smoldering, ambiguously foreign looks and demeanor, he soon became dubbed "the Latin Lover”.
While the moniker is usually attached to Rudolph Valentino, he had his contemporaries. The title was also attributed to Antonio Moreno, the lead in 1923’s The Spanish Dancer, and Ramón Novarro, star of Scaramouche (1923). Both Moreno and Valentino were Europeans, Novarro was Mexican — and became not just one of our first Latino Latin Lovers but one of our first Latino screen icons (Novarro also lived his life in the closet and had an incredibly dark, tragic Hollywood ending).
The Latin Lover moniker is said to have ended with Valentino’s sudden death in 1926 and the introduction of sound in film. That’s not true for a few reasons. While some leading men found awkward footing when their speaking voice was revealed to be accented (ie, the great final line in The Artist (2011)), some silent screen stars, like Ramón Novarro, continued acting in talkies. The Latin Lover archetype didn’t vanish, but the look associated with it became a target as the Hays Code restricted sexuality on-screen while war efforts intensified around the world.
Next to Hollywood stars and US politicians, the most photographed faces included the iconography of Adolph Hitler, Francisco Franco, Josef Stalin, and Japanese Emperor Hirohito. Along with their placement as foreign threats and their link as authoritarian leaders, all men shared one distinct physical trait — the mustache.
Meanwhile, antagonism was building towards the sexualized dance hall culture of immigrant, Black, and Latino populations, culminating in the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. The zoot suit was flamboyant apparel — wide jackets and pants to accentuate dance moves. It was also seen as a uniform worn by delinquents (ie, non-whites).
The zoot suit also was a victim of its own making, seen as a costume using “too much fabric” by Blacks and “non-Americans” in a time when citizens were asked to show patriotism by rationing every material.
In summer 1943, following an altercation amongst Mexican-American youth and servicemen, 50 white sailors attacked Latino residents in Los Angeles seen wearing zoot suits (Black and Filipino residents were also targeted). A riot started, which continued for days.
Hollywood leaned into antagonism towards the exotic, using the medium of film to offer newsreels proselytizing the country’s efforts to vanquish fascism and updated Hollywood’s star system to both double down on a new American masculine ideal, while using studio talent to villainize the exotic.
The markers of the Latin Lover — dark skin, accents, foreign-ness, and, importantly, facial hair were now devalued as threatening traits. Outside of Clark Gable, the mustache and exotic look was traded for smooth, anglo-saxon faces.
But the Latin Lover trope wasn’t dead. It was just dormant.
NEXT WEEK: The changes that slowly happen when men start taking off their t-shirts.
🏅 this week’s staff picks 🏅
🚻 The newest Andrew Tate? Oooooof.
💃🏽🕺🏽 Oh, how I miss Aaliyah. Thank you Molly Cameron for the reminder.
🎧 I’m FINALLY listening to the latest season of Las Raras. It is a narrative and sonic delight.
👔👗 I want to age with this level of swag.
🎥 I caught Arthur Jafa’s Redacted, which recreates the final shoot-out of Taxi Driver, replacing a number of white cast members with Black actors to illustrate the way the 1976 film toned down Travis Bickle’s racism. It’s now hard to unsee where Scorsese’s film misses the mark.
(Pssst, want more film recommendations? Follow me on Letterboxd)
I’ve been asked to participate in the latest iteration of Audio Flux — where artists create three minute audio pieces based on a prompt. We will be debuting our work at this year’s Tribeca Film festival.
June 11 @ 8:30pm | SVA Theater, NYC | 🎟️ TICKETS 🎟️
New Yorkers, join us every Saturday (weather permitting) from 2-4pm for FREE bomba workshops, sponsored by El Grito starting again this Saturday atop THE majestic Sunset Park — boricua-led but open to all🪘
Adios, ciao ciao, byeeeeeeeee,
Mark ✌🏼
Liked what you read? Click Share and/or the ❤️ button! It helps more people find Other Men and is a swell way to show your support.
Follow me on Instagram. I also have a lot of fun there, too.
Thanks for the shoutout, Mark! And thanks for this Hollywood history giving me so many open tabs to explore later.