Los Invertidos (1914) by the Argentinean playwright José González Castillo (1885–1937) is probably the first play in the Spanish-speaking world to treat ‘sexual inversion’ – code for homosexuality in turn-of-the-century European sexology – as material for the modern stage. A three-act drama realista (‘realist drama’) that sets out to present ‘sexual inversion’ in a recognizably Argentinean setting and idiom, Los Invertidos demonstrates, as Edward Said puts it, that ‘ideas and theories’ – in this case about modern drama and sexuality – ‘travel’.Footnote ¹ González Castillo launched queer visibility on the Argentinean stage with dramatic models and embodied behaviours forged from international and local sensibilities. I argue that Los Invertidos, while shaped by sociopolitical and aesthetic upheavals in the Southern Cone, invites us to place its theatricality in a queer ‘genealogy of performance’ that crosses geographic and linguistic boundaries.Footnote ² How we describe and contextualize queer theatre today might well be informed by González Castillo's innovations and confusions during modern drama's early decades.

Los Invertidos cites ‘traveling . . . ideas and theories’ by stamping the new conventions of stage realism with what Michel Foucault called a scientia sexualis (a sexuality-based ‘will to know’Footnote ³) and by incorporating medical language derived from the higienista (‘hygienist’) movement of early twentieth-century Argentina. This latter discourse, Jorge Salessi argues, originated at a time when the country's imagined ‘healthy’ national body was being ‘contaminated’ by massive immigration (both from the interior to the capital and from overseas) and a fast-growing population.Footnote ⁴ Government officials and public intellectuals responded to this new social order with ‘hygienist’ measures designed to root out symptoms of cultural decadence and morbid degeneracy. Besides an expanding urban underclass associated with lawless, criminal behavior, and a working class that identified itself with the rapidly spreading ideologies of socialism and anarchism, the ruling elites also faced an unprecedented number of women entering the paid workforce, which they viewed as an ‘inversion’ of ‘natural’ roles.Footnote ⁵ The category of ‘sexual inversion’, which around this time had found its way into medical and criminological discourse, thus introduced a salient example of ‘gender trouble’Footnote ⁶ in a context of national crisis more generally.

The development of realist playwriting in the Southern Cone, as in Europe, took place in an atmosphere of cultural anxiety about ‘sexual anarchy’.Footnote ⁷ No doubt González Castillo's own anti-bourgeois anarchism, which repeatedly brought him into conflict with the authorities (in 1910 he was temporarily sent into exile in Chile), left its mark on Los Invertidos. The play exposes an illicit affair between an upper-class family man, Doctor Florez, and his childhood friend Pérez. Seemingly respectable citizens, they lead secretive double lives involving them in a Buenos Aires demi-monde of transvestite men who pose, flaunt and dance tango (a dance sprung from the city's brothels). When Florez's wife Clara finds out about his deception, she shoots the instigator Pérez and convinces her husband to commit suicide rather than bring shame on the family. Produced by the Compañía de Teatro Libre Podestá – Ballerini, owned by the renowned Podestá theatre clan, with celebrity Blanca Podestá in the role of Clara, Los Invertidos ran for eight performances in September 1914 at the capital's Teatro Nacional before being banned from the stage (the ban was lifted in 1919). Its stormy debut provoked reactions that ranged from outcry over its distorting ‘inversion’ of ‘the mission of the theatre’Footnote ⁸ to praise for its ‘studied approach to a social problem both interesting and new to the national repertoire’.Footnote ⁹ One reviewer who deemed the play's ‘title, subject and language’ ‘simply repugnant’ questioned the artistic value of this ‘so-called realist theatre’.Footnote ¹⁰ In the midst of the controversy, González Castillo publicly defended the play's ‘scabrous’ and ‘realist’ approach: ‘It doesn't matter that its subject matter is scabrous . . . Scabrous matters are the stuff of realist literature. If I attack a vice in Los Invertidos, I am obligated by force to make this vice visible’.Footnote ¹¹ Making ‘vice visible’, González Castillo produces a positivist and naturalist kind of ‘realism’ that presents ‘sexual inversion’ in terms that prefigure – and legitimize – the play's fatal outcomes. Yet the playwright ‘queers’ this sexual exposé with his anti-bourgeois sympathies, or rather he shows the two to be inseparable.

Los Invertidos opens with Florez's sixteen-year-old son reading his father's forensic report on a criminal case involving an ‘invert’. This fictitious document, which frames the conversations taking place in Florez's home office in Acts I and III, samples various theories of degeneracy that occupied Argentina's ruling elites and sets up Florez's suicide as a ‘good evolution’ to solve the scandal of ‘sexual inversion’.Footnote ¹² And yet the tango-dancing transvestite characters, who come from the Buenos Aires streets associated with cruising zones and whose salacious behaviour in Pérez's lavish garçonnière occupies most of Act II, walk away unscathed. This bourgeois drama, González Castillo makes clear, does not concern them. Their disdain for Florez as ‘a hypocrite who goes around dissimulating in the pose of a learned man a secret that everyone already knows’Footnote ¹³ creates an ironic distance from the play's melodramatic events. Unlike Clara, who desperately seeks the ‘truth’ and a ‘just’ solution from Florez's medical report, the underclass transvestites mock not only the scientific terms that condemn degeneracy but also the anxieties of the city's ruling elites. Los Invertidos, in other words, predicts that Argentina's bourgeois elites will be destroyed by their own degeneracy and, at the same time, recuperates ‘inversion’ as a locus of communality, or at least collective scepticism, for its underclasses – even as they remain powerless. Ending with Clara's defiant moral righteousness, Los Invertidos presents a confused and disturbing picture. Like most dramatic realism, the play – even with its sensationalistic content – constrains its radical possibilities. As a kind of proleptic template for future queer activism, it launches a politics based on sexual identity – and accordingly ‘queers’ the context in which it intervenes – but offers no hope for change, nor cause for redemption.

Yet if we detach Los Invertidos from what Heather Love calls an activist attempt ‘to rescue the past’,Footnote ¹⁴ it points the way to a queer historiography grounded in some present-day scholarly discomfort with the past as a practice for imagining queer futures. For example, the play's gestural repertoire invokes a range of gendered and class-specific behaviours fraught with recognizable pleasures and perils. If Florez represents the bourgeoisie's ability to pass back and forth between public respectability and private ‘vice’, the tango queens reveal, possibly for the first time in dramatic modernism, the everyday queer theatricality of cross-dressing. ‘La Princesa de Borbón’, dressed as an elegant woman, parodies the gestures of bourgeois ladies like Clara, making her seem a vengeful simulacrum of the Princesa's idealized poses. (We will later find this queer class mockery in Jean Genet's The Maids and in drag-queen performances from Ethyl Eichelberger to Bloolips.)

Equally important, González Castillo puts queer theatricality in dialogue with the trans-lingual dimensions of modernity's internationalism. Petrona, the family maid, calls ‘inverts’ by their street names: mariquita (more or less translatable as a ‘Mary’), maricón (closer to the pejorative meaning of ‘queer’ in English) or, in the Italianate Lunfardo working-class dialect, manflora.Footnote ¹⁵ Lunfardo, born in the streets of Buenos Aires and associated in the ‘hygienist’ circles of its times with the city's underclass of undesirables and transients, adds another scandal-making contaminant to the play. Los Invertidos thus points to a repertoire of queer performance gestures that will circulate throughout the twentieth century, as well as to a politics of linguistic representation linked to sexual dissidence. González Castillo's ‘scabrous’ play sheds light not only on the early decades of modern drama but also on a queer international theatre history still largely untold, one that presents us with new directions (and queer futures) in theatre research.