I am deeply honored to be asked to address the Conference on Latin American History, especially on the topic of gay/lesbian studies. As a way of discussing gay studies in Latin America, let me reflect on my ethnographic research on gender and sexuality in Nicaragua. Because I am an anthropologist, I will focus on problems of ethnographic representation. But ultimately and, I think, logically, these problems open to historical questions as well. First, then, a brief reprise of my arguments about male same-sex relations, as developed in Life is Hard and elsewhere.