Alongside all the other functions of movie theaters over the past century, in Mexico City men have used them as sexual spaces. A few cinemas like the Cine Teresa became notorious as sites in which men could find male sex partners. Yet even there, behaviors of and narratives by men who had sex with men mirrored those by men who had sex with women. This article focuses on the history of masculine sexuality in Mexico City movie houses from 1920 to 2010. The presence of women in these houses, either as workers, on the screen, or in men’s memories, along with the presence of men who went there to watch heterosexual sex on the movie screen, suggests that moviegoing in Mexico City can be analyzed through the lens of gender history as much as through that of the history of sexuality. Despite major social, cultural and technological changes over the twentieth century, examining movie audiences in terms of the histories of sexuality and gender reveals a startling amount of continuity in movie theaters as spaces of male sexuality.

This article examines how some Catholic women, through their participation in an Acción Católica campaign, protested what they believed was the immoral nature of an expanding consumer culture: the movies, magazines, fashions, and comic books that inundated Mexico—particularly Mexico City—in the 1950s. Through this campaign, these women sought to construct an ideal form of Catholic womanhood that was both modern and moral—one that embraced modesty and sexual purity as a way for Mexico to modernize and progress. While the campaign had its roots in papal directives and was part of transnational discourses about morality, the Mexican women who participated saw their actions, nevertheless, in nationalistic terms. A modern Mexico, they argued, needed to have a strong moral base in order to be economically and politically successful; thus the morality they espoused centered on constraining women’s sexual expression.