Men in Skirts

Monday during the annual Fiesta of Games in the Maya community of Chenalhó, Chiapas, sees a sudden explosion of men dressed as women.  Characters central to the drama, actors like the Mother of Mother, the Abductress, and the Jungle Woman parade along in the procession of saints brought from the church, provide parody blessings or “cleansings” for the town’s religious officials.  For a decade early in this century poet Ámbar Past took writer Carter Wilson along to get to know her friends among the holy clowns in drag.  The actors prompted them to photograph a variety of events and eventually assigned them small parts in a bawdy little play about reciprocity in sex which comes toward the end of the day.  “Men in Skirts” offers a prose and picture version of Wilson and Past’s experience and what the extraordinary events of Monday might mean.

As a young man Carter Wilson lived in Mayan communities in southern Mexico, learned enough Tsotsil Maya to get by, and wrote and produced a documentary film called "Appeals to Santiago" about an eight-day Mayan religious festival (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKG94SRJtg4). Later he studied Quechua people's use of leaf coca in Peru on a grant from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. He has published ethnographic fiction and non-fiction, including two books about Mayan Mexico, a children's novel about Netsilik Inuit of Canada, and a fictional account of the discovery of Machu Picchu in Peru through the eyes of a photographer who at the same time discovers he is gay. Wilson’s first novel, CRAZY FEBRUARY, widely adopted in college anthropology courses, has been 60 years in print and now is available in Spanish as FEBRERO LOCO. A gay activist, Wilson wrote the narration for two Oscar-winning documentaries, "The Times of Harvey Milk" (with Judith Coburn) and "Common Threads." He received the Ruth Benedict Prize from the gay section of the American Anthropology Association for his "Hidden in the Blood.” He taught at Harvard, Stanford, Tufts University, and for 34 years at the University of California at Santa Cruz.