Honor 41: Tragic Story That Became Hope

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

When Alberto Mendoza, founder of Honor 41 - a non-profit organization dedicated to giving voice to the stories of the Latino LGBTQ community - heard his childhood friends call him "41", he did not know what they were referring to and just thought that He was a loving nickname for the group of friends he treasured.

It wasn't until his father discovered what his son was called, who ended Mendoza's ignorance by asking why they called him "Are you a fagot?" He snapped. Faced with such a question and the apparent indignation of his father, Mendoza did not hesitate to answer "no", although the reality was different.

From then on, those who acted as his friends, already exposed, decided to make life impossible for Mendoza, who managed to leave everything behind when he graduated and entered the university, but number 41 continued to haunt him.

“They gave me the change, it was 41 cents. If I asked the time it was 2:41”, remembers Mendoza.

Life continued like this until the fateful year in which he would turn 41 years approached. Which meant a whole year of living with the two damn digits.

During a dinner with a friend, Mendoza learned the reason why this number is used in Mexico to refer to gays.

"It happened 115 years ago," Mendoza began recounting. “In Mexico in 1901 there was a group of men from high society who organized events. They were known to be gay. On the night of the event they had a dance and there were 41 men: half dressed as men and the other half as women. At one point in the night the police broke into the premises, beat them up and took them to prison. But one of them was the son-in-law of the then President of Mexico Porfirio Díaz. They released him and the rest practically disappeared: the families had to pay to get them out of prison and out of the city or those who had no money were sent to the Yucatan to work camps and they were never heard from.”

After learning of the story, Mendoza was strangely relieved and found the motivation to start a new stage for number 41 with a positive and hopeful connotation. This is how Honor 41 started, where each year 41 members of the Latino LGBTQ community are highlighted and their history is made known.

My goal is that if a guy in Iowa suddenly thinks, 'I think I'm gay, what can I do?' that I can type 'Latino gay' and then have access to these videos,”Mendoza explains.

By the end of 2016, the Honor 41 page has more than 160 videos of people telling their personal experience, for whom it may interest.