Hay que venir al sur is a column from the music journalist and Songmess podcast host Richard Villegas. Winking to the campy classic from the Italian disco diva Raffaella Carrà, the column is an invitation to explore the kaleidoscopic music scenes blossoming south of the border. In this issue, the gayety of Latin music, plus saluting LGBTQ+ trailblazers and cheeky new stars.
A colleague once said to me that Songmess—the music podcast I’ve been producing for a decade—was a “queer oasis” for artists across Latin America. I took great offense at the well-intentioned compliment since, despite my elite-faggot status, not everything I write or record is inherently gay. In fact, I cover freaky LGBTQ+ acts alongside the usual crop of normie rockers and yassified pop girlies because relegating them to the month of June would be like confining my people to a liberal ghetto. Seasonal visibility is often used to justify our absence throughout the rest of the year, and I can’t help but wonder if any other marginalized communities are so beholden to the calendar page: Is Black music any more soulful in February? Do girls only boss in March? Will White nationalists combust into a plume of sulfur after the Fourth of July? Man, do I have a dream . . .
That said, it would be foolish to squander festive budgets and an abundance of microphones, even if most Pride coverage is designed for straight consumption. Trite discovery features spotlighting artists the community has known and loved for years are old fatefuls that assuage hetero guilt and mend a little ignorance. Take it from the guy writing those fluffy content pieces, but if breeder attention leads to breeder paychecks, I’m happy to keep typing.
The same goes for the million Pride playlists stacked with pop divas like Madonna and Diana Ross, whom we love; but how suspicious that a temporary trickle of pink money should always flow back into the pockets of allies. Gays are complicit in this phenomenon—we, too, yearn to sing and dance with these figurative and literal mothers, though rarely demand to hear from the equally glamorous and objectively edgier peers who inspired anthems such as “Vogue” and “I’m Coming Out.” Hell, before Lady Gaga preached of God’s love for all of us, Black, White, beige, Chola descent, Lebanese, or Orient-made, “I was born this way” was a mantra of the gay disco pantheon, rapturously intoned by the Motown singer-turned-Protestant archbishop Carl Bean.
The story is not so different when told en español. The significance of Alaska y Dinarama’s “A quién le importa” evolved from a provocative slice of 1980s goth disco into the definitive rallying call of the LGBTQ+ liberation movement, with its poignant chorus of “This is how I am / how I’ll continue to be / I’ll never change” later appropriated as the inspirational sign-off to Drag Race España. Gloria Trevi’s “Todos me miran” is also a symphony of gay dog whistles, evoking the empowering affirmations of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and complete with a music video starring a drag queen. The pseudo-autobiographical smash arrived in 2006 following Trevi’s six-year prison stint for human trafficking, and still, despite the unsavory and widely verified charges, a downtrodden diva triumphantly stepping back into rhinestoned heels was a metaphor of universal resonance.
Of course, plenty of rainbow folk held the mic before the age of social media piped clips of Dylan Mulvaney and Heated Rivalry directly into our cerebral cortices. The Costa Rica–born, Mexico-made folk titan Chavela Vargas was a brassy butch lesbian rumored to have romanced Frida Kahlo and Ava Gardner. The gravelly-voiced Ana Gabriel poured devastating yearning into the sapphic torch songs “Simplemente amigos” and “Evidencias,” playing up tropes about long-term roommates and sneaky rendezvous. And the hip-shaking antics of Miguel Bosé and Ricky Martin confirmed the sugar in their tanks long before publicists did.
The glass closet sheltered countless more who parlayed non-normativity into irreverent star power, but few reached the stratospheric heights of Juan Gabriel. Garnering reductive comparisons to Liberace, the über-flamboyant Mexican singer, songwriter, and composer penned upwards of 1,800 tunes, flowing effortlessly between mariachi and pop balladry, and penetrating the hardened dome of Latin American Catholicism with signature wit and an enviable collection of sequined jackets. Though the famous country romp “El Noa Noa” is presumably about a gay bar in his hometown of Ciudad Juárez (the neon sign of which is tattooed on my right arm), Juan Gabriel never actually came out. In fact, during one much-cited interview where a reporter directly questioned his sexuality, he cuttingly retorted, “You don’t ask about what you can see.”
El Divo de Juárez died in 2016, and the culture subsequently anointed him a gay deity. While I don’t think that was entirely wrong—his charisma defused the most homophobic of Latino elders and softened the path for many of us who followed—the rewriting of his narrative conveniently omits the fleet of children he sired as well as tight affiliations to Mexico’s conservative PRI administrations. Do glass closets, murky politics, or an overabundance of allies negate the value of Juan Gabriel’s, or any other of these histories? Of course not. But clinging to quiet resistance and embellishing historical records cannot be the only paths to representation.
Modern LGBTQ+ discourse attributes the first brick thrown at Stonewall, interchangeably, to legendary trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, despite both repeatedly stating they arrived at the riots hours after kickoff. Certainly, a movement is more effectively disseminated when focalized through its leadership, but mythologizing these giants obscured their vital, tangible work with STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), a 1970s advocacy group and shelter for homeless queer youth, the staggering rates of which persist to this day. What made Johnson and Rivera groundbreaking was not throwing a blunt object, but furiously demanding civil rights in front of every camera and microphone at a time when our hitherto underground movement took its first steps into the light.
I am viscerally drawn to disruptors and the cocktail of courage and madness that makes people choose peril rather than live a complacent lie. In 1970s Brazil, the glam rocker Ney Matogrosso risked the wrath of the military regime by cavorting on television painted in kabuki makeup, like a limper-wristed Ziggy Stardust. A decade later, the travesti punk Cláudia Wonder incorporated a bathtub of blood into her São Paulo nightclub act, staging the death of one gender and the birth of another, shocking audiences at the paranoid height of the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Some of the finest nuggets of queer defiance have been documented by writers who also put their skin in the game. In 17th-century New Spain—long before the Mexican Revolution—poems and letters from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz contrasted her exasperation for men in the viceroy’s court with her burning passions for his wife. Fast-forward to 1986, in Chile, when Pedro Lemebel took the stage at a communist assembly to read the poem “Manifiesto,” railing against homophobia in leftist political organizing. “What will you do with us, comrade?” he asked, with a hammer and sickle painted across his face. “Will you tie us by our braids and ship us in sacks to some Cuban AIDS pavilion?”
“Manifiesto” was the kindling for a more recent barn burner of the same name, penned by the Chilean pop prince Álex Anwandter. Set to dramatic piano chords, the song’s crescendo of “Today, I am a woman!” nods to yet another Lemebel classic, Tengo miedo, torero (My tender matador), a novel exploring the romance between a jaded travesti and an idealistic freedom fighter during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal regime. Anwandter’s alchemy of danceable politics has fueled his biggest hits, whether denouncing the church and state that labeled queer people as sick on “Siempre es viernes en mi corazón,” or crafting some of the most cinematic poetry of his career with the dictatorship-dismantling “Cordillera.”
The dance floor has always been our battlefield: the pulse of house, disco, and electropop, booming like war drums under the warm glow of a mirrored sun. Anwandter’s Chilean contemporary, Javiera Mena, sang of scissoring warriors on the throbbing “Espada,” while “La Isla de Lesbos” quieted conflict with dreams of sapphic idyll. Mena, too, genuflects to the trailblazers, covering the long-rumored-yet-never-de-closeted icon Daniela Romo’s pleading synthpop ballad “Yo no te pido la luna,” as well as Mecano’s angelic paean “Mujer contra mujer,” one of the first Spanish-language songs to explore same-sex love positively.
In 2023, Anwandter and Mena teamed up for “Unx de nosotrxs,” a tale about finding safety and collective comfort in the middle of a sweaty dance floor, harmonizing on the subversive hook “My friend, we are together in the fight.” I am especially fond of the song not just for its addictive house piano keys, but for its title as a gender-inclusive form of the phrase one of us, recalling the terrifying chant from the 1932 film Freaks and underscoring the warped, lifesaving community one finds on the margins of society.
In the face of rigid hegemony, a wry smile can topple empires, and thus camp has proved our most powerful weapon. In the new millenium, the emergence of Miranda!’s bubbly electropop was a seismic break from leather-clad rock en español, and while neither of the group’s founders, Ale Sergi nor Juliana Gattas, are friends of Dorothy, they’re universally cited as the genesis of a new generation of rascally Argentine pop.
The one-two combo of Matt Montero and Ceretti—both as solo artists and label heads of zona v.i.p., where they nourish even more weirdo-queerdos—is a swirl of kitchy synthpop and electroclash, with one dressed as a MySpace avatar that’s leapt off the screen, while the other lampoons heartthrob archetypes. The trans-glam synchronicity of La Indigo and Cornuda Posting’s “Noche de mujer,” with its petulant squeals about pink cocktails and Mugler fragrances, transcended into a staple of every pop preshow playlist. And delivering a mission statement for the scene back in 2014, Electrochongo’s “Música de putos,” or “Fag music,” endures as an uproarious though considered critique of the pop assembly line. “There’s music to be a good conformist / to eat, fuck, or act like an artist,” deadpanned the keytar-wielding muscle-bear, whose scantily clad shows still incite carnal bedlam in Buenos Aires’s most wretched dives.
Across the Río de la Plata, the placid nation of Uruguay is home to Dani Umpi, the singer, performance artist, and esteemed novelist blurring the line between pop surrealism and drag chaos. After years of being obsessed with the nasal choruses of “La yuta” and “Sambayón,” I struck up an unexpected online friendship with Umpi, and in late 2024 I made it my mission to visit him in the fabled beach town of Punta del Este. During a quick stop at his home, Umpi gifted me a copy of his hilarious book, Miss Tacuarembó (2004), with a dedication paraphrasing the pinnacle of hetero poetry, Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado’s “Chica Rutera.” As we prepared to leave, I spotted the familiar outline of a poppers bottle on the table, soon realizing it was a wonky replica made of repurposed plastic and masking tape, hand painted with the classic red and yellow Rush design. Amused, I asked if it was the work of a local artisan (thinking of buying one for myself as a souvenir), to which he bitterly replied, “Worse. I was tricked.”
As I revisit the idols and friends I’ve gained not only as a spectator but as an active participant in my community, I look to the future with surprising hope. I’m certainly anguished by the zeitgeist pendulum swinging so far right that it may topple the whole damn clock. But history shows that the alphabet mafia doesn’t take antagonism lying down. Trans rights are the new frontier of the liberation movement, and rather than purchasing a protect the dolls T-shirt and calling it a day, I urge you to engage directly with trans people and ponder your own humanity being questioned and negated by the ones who tax you.
In Mexico, singer-songwriter and one-woman orchestra La Bruja de Texcoco bewitches audiences by syncretizing pre-Hispanic rituals and traditional genres like cumbia and huapango. Contrasting feminine regional embroideries with a lush beard, La Bruja is embraced by the ancient Oaxacan trans community known as muxes and derided by a folk orthodoxy miffed at being so beautifully outpaced. One of her closest collaborators, the rocker and artivist Luisa Almaguer, took an offensive strategy on the 2024 LP Weyes, dissecting her paradoxical relationships with men—they are the objects of her love and desire, but also the top cause of death for trans women worldwide. The summer before, while performing at the Pride celebrations held in Mexico City’s enormous Zócalo, she cursed the church and the state as murderous accomplices.
Brazil’s many trans crossover stars such as Liniker, Linn da Quebrada, Urias, and Jup do Bairro built careers on ferocious confessionals and cutting-edge melanges of techno, baile funk, and música popular brasileira. Far from niche, their music engages with the trials of Black, poor, overlooked people in an enormously unequal society, experiences to which most parceiros can relate. I was especially taken with Urias’s 2025 album, Carranca, which overflows with silky soul grooves while reimagining dictatorship-era radio broadcasts on the breakout hit “Voz do Brasil.” It’s a powerful reminder that trans folk, and queer people at large, have also weathered the darkest periods of history and can offer nuanced perspectives on survival and overcoming.
Memory is everything, both as a building block and as a guiding principle for the road ahead. Oppression and illness have stolen too many of our beloved, and I’m reminded of this daily, in my own office, as I look up at an illustration from my friend Valis Ortíz, acquired in exchange for once paying her internet bill during the pandemic. That picture of a pussy-out alien woman is one of my most prized possessions, much to my family’s chagrin, but I loved my friend and miss her dearly. There is no altar big enough to tribute all who’ve left the party too soon. We hold a place for them on the dance floor, nevertheless.
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
