Only Huacos Eroticos Remain

Erotic museum pieces a tale of Peru's colonial sexual repression

For decades, the "huacos eroticos," or erotic ceramics, were locked away from the public, accessible only to an elite group of Peruvian social scientists.

"You couldn't talk about them because they were considered huacos pornograficos," said Terrazos. "They were known as huacos prohibidos because of the taboo imposed by the Christian religion that men have sex only for procreation and that women do not experience sexual pleasure."

Today, exhibitions of these ceramics, running the full gamut of sexual practices, are popular tourist attractions in some of Peru's finest museums.

In Spanish colonial Peru, huacos eroticos, like most indigenous icons, were smashed to pieces, Terrazos says.

In the 1570s, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo and his clerical advisers were obsessed with eliminating sodomy, masturbation and a common social practice that the Quechua-speaking populace referred to in terms that translate roughly as "trial marriage."

Toledo and the proselytizing priests were aghast to find that not only was homosexuality widely accepted in several regions of the country, but that the indigenous population also placed no particular importance on female chastity and made no prohibition against premarital sex.

One of Peru's most famous colonial-era churchmen, Jesuit Jose de Acosta, wrote in 1590 that "virginity, which is viewed with esteem and honor by all men, is deprecated by those barbarians as something vile," according to "Family Values in Seventeenth-Century Peru," an article by Duke University anthropologist Irene Silverblatt.

"Except for the virgins consecrated to the Sun or the Inca, all other women are considered of less value when they are virgin, and thus whenever possible they give themselves to the first man they find," de Acosta complained.

To put matters right, Toledo ordered that evangelized natives caught cohabiting outside church-sanctioned wedlock receive 100 lashes of the whip "to persuade these Indians to remove themselves from this custom so detrimental and pernicious."

Toledo also issued several decrees aimed at creating near total segregation of the sexes in public. Violations were punishable by 100 lashes and two years' service in pestilential state hospitals.

Under the Inquisition, brought to Peru in 1569, homosexuals could be burned at the stake.

Rafael Larco Herrera museum