“Brother, I’m Gay”. The Double Pact of Silence of Hitmen Who Love Other Men

Bogart was a young gay hitman who learned that the glass ceiling is also unbreakable in the narco. Between cartels and thugs, there’s no surrender possible. Double sin.

The third time Bogart killed a man, he realized he was gay. When he looked down—which he did when he wanted to concentrate—he brought that afternoon back to the present. His victim was accompanied by his son, who was waiting patiently in the passenger seat outside a bank in Naucalpan: his brown hair held back by a sports cap, his big, tender eyes looking out the window, and his athletic chest under a blue sweater.

Bogart fired two shots with his 9mm Glock at the father. Before fleeing on his motorcycle, he recalls, he heard the scream of the young man in his 20s who saw his world crumble. In the following days, the hitman dreamed not of the dead man, as everyone in the cartel told him would happen, but of the son’s face, his hair, eyes, and chest. Until he understood the origin of his obsession: that boy had become his platonic love that day.

I met Bogart at a Christian church in the Portales neighborhood. Earlier, I learned about his older brother, Erick, through an organization that works with “child hitmen” exiled from crime. “What do you like most in a man?” I ask Bogart, and he lowers his gaze again. “Physically? I like them like that guy, skinny, handsome, and cool. And on another note, I like them to be protective, tender, affectionate… everything I don’t like.”

He describes himself as violent, a bastard, and a crook. These are the after-effects of working, between the ages of 12 and 22, for a criminal organization in the State of Mexico that split from the Beltrán Leyva clan and recruits teenagers like him, who were hanged as children due to poverty. Other words that describe him are: a homosexual raised in the heart of Mexican organized crime. A former hitman and gay.

“I ‘wasn’t’ a hitman, I still am,” he interrupts me every time I talk about his ‘trade’ in the past tense, because once you’re a hitman, he says, you’ll always be that, much like an alcoholic. You’re just on pause and resisting one day at a time the urge to get turned on by blood again. At 28, his life is divided into two big moments: the day he decided to stop his homicidal streak and the day he came out to his older brother and told him he loved men.

The first openly homosexual drug lord

The relationship between organized crime and sexual diversity has gradually come out of the closet. The new millennium began, and in 2000, the film Traffic—which addresses the failure of the drug war between Mexico and the United States—cast as one of its main characters police officer Javier Rodríguez (played by Benicio del Toro). To catch a top Tijuana Cartel gunman, he must seduce him in a gay bar. That same year, La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Hitmen) was released, a film adaptation of the book of the same name by Colombian Fernando Vallejo. It tells the story of a gay writer who falls in love with several teenage killers in Medellín.

In that Colombian city, drug lord Pablo Escobar learned to evade assassination attempts by his rival Hélmer Francisco Herrera, who once became third-in-command in the Cali Cartel. In addition to being known for his sadism and fortune, “Pancho Herrera” has become a fixture in popular culture for being the only openly gay drug lord of his time. After years of being ignored as a central figure in drug trafficking, his life is now featured in series such as Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mal (Pablo Escobar: The Boss of Evil), El Cártel de los Sapos (The Snitch Cartel), and Narcos: México (Narcos: Mexico), among others, where he is respected “despite” his sexual orientation.

In Mexico, there are no famous drug lords who came out, I tell Bogart, and he shrugs. “It’s not that there aren’t any gays in the business, it’s that no one talks about it. If you burn yourself out, you can’t grow,” he tells me, and it’s inevitable to think that this glass ceiling is also unbreakable in illegal businesses. Perhaps the most famous case is a rumor: the story of Antonio Olalde, alias Broly Banderas, who between 2013 and 2014 was called “the most famous hitman on social media” for his Facebook broadcasts and posts about his life as a gunman for the Knights Templar.

Servando Gómez’s subordinate, La Tuta, posted photos on his profile of himself with weapons, luxury cars, his love of the Dragon Ball cartoon, and affectionate poses with both women and men. Rumors about his sexual orientation escalated when he avoided answering questions about his alleged bisexuality in live chats. His rivals, Los Zetas, launched a smear campaign with a list of his alleged boyfriends within the organization, while his followers defended him by arguing that he was simply vain and liked attention from anyone who came his way. Their love affairs went from mystery to myth after her disappearance in March 2014.

“Homophobia and misogyny are essential ideological components of the sex-gender structure that constitutes this form of organized crime called drug trafficking. These ideologies are present throughout society: the State, the Church, the family, and the armed forces that combat criminal groups,” researchers Guillermo Núñez and Claudia Esthela Espinoza wrote for El Colegio de México in 2016. And when I read that paragraph to Bogart, he now makes a face of disgust.

“It’s just that… I don’t give a damn… I can’t be gay in the army, the police, soccer, or church, so where do I go?” he replies with annoyance.

Child hitmen or “adolescents in conflict with the law”

Bogart and Erick were recruited by organized crime, which, 19 years into the “war on drugs,” follows a playbook that has become predictable: their father had abandoned them as children, and their mother worked two jobs—a supermarket cashier and a secondhand clothing seller—to cover the household expenses. They grew up on the streets and were adopted by a plaza boss who sought out teenagers to transport drugs in their backpacks. It’s the same old story: they went from mules to stalkers, then to drug dealers, and ended up as hitmen.

As gunmen, they had more money than all their friends’ parents combined, but also bouts of anxiety that plunged them into alcohol addiction. One day, they were shot together near the Mundo E shopping center and only survived because the rival hitman’s gun jammed at the precise moment. Both took it as a divine sign to halt their murder count: Erick had six homicides on his list; Bogart, five.

After drowning their fear with vodka and Coca-Cola, they fled that night to Mexico City.

First, I was introduced to Erick at the civil organization Reinserta, which works with a group of people known as “child hitmen” and pompously referred to by the bureaucracy as “adolescents in conflict with the law.” I had gotten there on the recommendation of a pastor from the Interdenominational Christian Church. Then Erick introduced me to Bogart, but it was obvious he didn’t want to talk to anyone. Sitting in a corner of the church, headphones on and looking down, he was immersed in a world of his own that extended no invitations.

“I got used to not talking to anyone since I realized I was gay. I was afraid of saying something and being found out. Or of moving a certain way and being noticed. Since I was a kid, people called me ‘faggot,’ ‘joto,’ things like that, and I tried harder to do bad things to show them I wasn’t. And, well, that day at church, it was worse… it’s a lot like ‘the company’ (the cartel) because in both places they expel you if you’re gay,” he says.

Two years after our meeting, Bogart sought me out. His older brother told him about a documentary on contract killings he’d been invited to, and it slipped into the conversation that I’m also gay, in addition to being a soccer fan and interested in organized crime. “I sought you out because I didn’t have anyone to talk to,” he recalls of that secret message he sent me. “I’m the only gay person in my social circle.”

The day we met again, Bogart purged his fears. It wasn’t an interview, but a confession: since he was a child, he sensed he liked boys, but he hid it behind a veil of false admiration from his friends. Later, he learned that the only time he could show affection to another man was when he was drunk, so he began drinking vodka with the thirst of a castaway. And he also began repeating the same homophobic jokes and comments the other cartel members told, even though they felt like a bullet in the chest.

He kept secret the platonic love he felt for the son of his third murder victim—a lawyer who broke his promise to release the prison boss’s brother—and when he quietly accepted his homosexuality, he began hanging around porn theaters to have sex with other men in the dark. His rules were simple: no touching, no kissing, and no exchanging any personal information.

“Just fucking,” he summarizes. “At first, it was cool. It gave me an adrenaline rush like killing, but then it got really lonely. I came out of those places feeling like crap. And I started watching Netflix series about kids who fell in love at 12, who had their boyfriends, who went on trips together, who lived together, and I thought I wanted that for my life… and the only way out was to come out.”

So one day in 2022, Bogart went to the supermarket, bought vodka, Coca-Cola, some cigarettes, and waited for until six in the evening. Erick showed up punctually in the living room of the apartment they share, at a location I can’t reveal. And before the conversation could wander to the weather or traffic, Bogart took a huge gulp from his glass and spilled his secret to the most important person in his life.

“Dude, I’m gay.”

Never fall in love with a hitman.

One of the most famous episodes about homosexuality in narco-culture is also, surely, half true and half false. A moment now impossible to corroborate, but one that appears in some books and several television series: an alleged meeting in 2007 between Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Heriberto Lazcano, “El Lazca,” who sought to settle a deadly feud and transform it into an unlikely alliance.

Upon meeting, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel allegedly stood up to the head of Los Zetas to intimidate him. “If I were a faggot, I would have fucked you already,” El Chapo supposedly told him, and Lazcano, instead of being offended, burst out laughing. The anecdote portrays two truths: the admiration the Sinaloan felt for the athletic bodies of elite soldiers and the fact that, in hyper-masculinized contexts, sexual relations between men are only valid if they are carried out to exert dominance. Or, as Oscar Wilde said, everything in life is about sex, except sex. Sex is power.

That phrase makes sense to Bogart. I can see it in his gaze. When something interests him, he lowers his head slightly and gets lost in a labyrinth of thoughts. He’s rummaging through how many times other members of his criminal organization found out someone in the neighborhood was gay, laughed at them, but secretly met at some motel and then threatened to kill that guy if he told anyone about the encounter.

Now, at almost 30, he’s clear about his fleeting encounters in porn theaters: he liked them because he felt he was emerging victorious from those rooms. He was excited by taming hard-eyed men and neighborhood boys who probably had girlfriends. He hurt them on purpose, despising them afterward. He was imitating what he learned in organized crime: gay sex only serves to crush, just like in prisons or military academies.

“The gang likes to say they fucked a hitman,” Bogart says. “But not falling in love with one.”

In the Netflix series El Chapo, the ambitious Secretary of the Interior, Conrado Sol (Humberto Busto), a kind of Genaro García Luna who rises politically by making deals with the Sinaloa Cartel, murders his boyfriend to ensure that the secret of his homosexuality doesn’t come out and prevent him from becoming president of Mexico.

The scene recalls that homosexuals in drug trafficking are imposed a double pact of silence: they must remain silent about their lovers and about the criminal organization’s operations. Talking too much can always lead to your death; it’s especially risky to question a partner’s heterosexuality or to out them, as it’s tantamount to questioning their authority and socially killing them. And in the mafia, death is paid for with death.

“I learned to keep quiet all the time. In this business, you have to learn to keep your mouth shut, and being me, even more so. Once, a trans girl blurted out at a party that she kissed a guy, and the guy had her killed. I don’t know if she managed to escape or if she was killed, but they told me that the aesthetics remain closed with all the stuff inside.”

“In my world, being gay is corrected, not accepted.”

“I already had my suitcase packed and the address of a hotel where I could stay for a while. I was sure my brother was going to kick me out of the house, because the guy is a real Christian now,” Bogart says. “And he stands up, hugs me, and says, ‘I knew it.’”

Those two words changed Bogart forever. As soon as he heard them, he cried like a child, like he hadn’t in years. So did Erick. The night was long and unforgettable: they went from crying to laughing, reminiscing about childhood and confessing their platonic loves.

“I thought he was going to send me to church with the priest, to a rehab center, or kick me out of the house. In my world, being gay is corrected, not accepted. They beat it out of you. Lesbians, for example, are raped by men ‘to see if they can get rid of it’ and that’s normal, it looks good, it’s like a favor,” she says about those aggressions that specialists call “corrective rapes,” a hate crime to “cure” women of their sexual orientation.

With his coming out, he says, life became easier. Or at least, as much as it can be for someone with five murders under his belt. That’s why Bogart doesn’t use dating apps. He’s terrified someone might recognize him and call the police. Sometimes, he dreams he runs into his crush, the boy he orphaned, and he recognizes him, and they take him to prison, where he’ll have to hide his homosexuality again.

So he prefers to wander around gay bars with a made-up name and find someone there to spend the afternoon and evening with. It’s not difficult for him to pick up a guy: his slim, bar-stretched body attracts attention, especially when he’s wearing tight T-shirts. When he has a guy’s attention, he smiles with seemingly expert flirtatiousness and talks about all the things he couldn’t talk about as a teenager: from pop music to romantic movies where the night turns into a wedding and a happily ever after.

Now, he says, he kisses his dates. He’s even called some of them “love.” It’s his way of reconciling with himself, after years of hiding. A way of asserting that, beneath all that teenage hitman fury, there was a tender boy who just needed the right conditions to blossom. “I feel like when I caress them, I don’t know, it kind of erases all the bad stuff in me,” he tells me, and laughs “at their cheesy nature.”

If you’re gay in organized crime, there’s no surrender.

On March 24, 1962, welterweight boxer Emile Griffith won one of the worst fights of his life: in his third match against Cuban boxer Benny Paret, he landed 29 consecutive punches on his opponent during the twelfth round. In response to the onslaught, the referee stopped the fight and declared Griffith the winner by technical knockout. Doctors were examining a fainting Paret, who would die ten days later in a New York hospital from a cerebral hemorrhage.

When the media inquired about the North American’s fury, they found that, minutes before stepping into the ring, Paret had called him a “faggot”. Years later, Griffith came out of the closet with a phrase that became a reference to show the breakdown of society’s moral compass: “I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me. However, I love a man and those same people consider it an unforgivable sin”.

A similar reflection appears in the documentary “Imperdonable,” produced by the Salvadoran media outlet El Faro, which chronicles the prison life of Geovany, a brutal hitman for the Barrio 18 gang. While killing men, he was admired and respected by his friends. But when he fell in love with another gang member, he had to be isolated with his partner so that other gang members and inmates wouldn’t murder them because of their sexual orientation.

“I think killing a person, yes, is bad, but it’s not that difficult. But loving another man is something unnatural,” Giovanny says in the film, and I ask Bogart if he believes his sexual orientation is “natural” or if he perceives it as a congenital defect, as his criminal organization has led him to believe.

“The truth? I don’t know anymore. Ever since I was a kid, they’ve told me: that it’s wrong, that it’s not natural, that it’ll go away if I become more of a bastard. And I’ve done a lot of shit, including killing people, and it still won’t go away. What else do I do? Do I drop a bomb? What angers me the most is when they say it’s a sin, this coming from people who pretend to be saints are telling me that,” he blurts out.

Media representation matters little, he asserts. If you’re gay and involved in organized crime, the world tells you there’s no surrender possible. A double sin. No stairway to heaven; all snakes lead to hell.

For example, in the film El Infierno, directed by Luis Estrada, the only gay character is the son of the cartel boss, who ends up murdered during an orgy. And in the controversial film Emilia Pérez, by Jacques Audiard, the protagonist is Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), a trans woman whose identity before gender-affirming surgery was that of Juan Manitas del Monte, a bloodthirsty drug cartel leader. Despite her conversion to activism, Emilia Pérez dies in a vehicle that explodes on a cliff.

Similar stories can be found in series or films with organized crime themes that include characters of diverse sexuality. In the HBO drama series The Wire, one of the most beloved characters, Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), is murdered by a child, despite having already retired from organized crime to live with his boyfriend, Renaldo, in Puerto Rico. And in Netflix’s Ozark, the tough guy Russ Langmore lives with shame over his love for an FBI agent and even becomes his informant to straighten out his life… only to be murdered by a person he trusted completely. And so it has been, ever since. From the tragic ending of “Manuela” in Arturo Ripstein’s The Place Without Limits to the new series, there’s no escaping it.

“People must think that if I’m a thug, then I’m always a thug, but I think I’d like to have a boyfriend, a family, a house, things like that. I know that I myself chose to be a thug, and that’s why happiness shouldn’t be for me,” says Bogart. “But I want to try. It would be so nice to fall in love and kill my past.”

Then, he looks down at his shoes. Hidden beneath the socks is a rainbow-colored bracelet. A promise to himself that one day he will win his present love over the darkness of his past life as a hitman.

Source: Milenio