happy pride moth

bottle depicting a ceremonial complex | c. 500-699 CE | moche (modern day peru)

Happy Fiestas Patrias! It’s Peru’s national day, and a great day to learn some Peruvian queer history!

This ceramic pot, made in 1st-millennium Peru by the Moche people, shows a man and a skeleton having anal sex - just one of many examples of how the Moche people explored life, death, sexuality and gender in their work.

For a long time, scholars weren’t willing to talk about these pots because they openly showed so many different types of sex - some were even destroyed. But recently, academics have started to explore what they can tell us about sex, gender, and Moche culture! I would really recommend Mary Weismantel’s work as a refreshingly candid and queer look at Moche ceramics. You can check out our review of her book Playing with Things: Engaging with the Moche Sex Pots here. It's a great read!

I'd also recommend the work of Peruvian artist Kukuli Velarde, whose artwork Plunder Me, Baby puts her own face onto Moche-style pots. As Velarde explains, “They all have my face for I had to become each of them to reclaim ownership…”

Stirrup-spout bottle: spotted feline. Moche. 350-550 CE.

A Moche ceramic stirrup bottle in the form of an ocelot.

From Peru, 100-800 CE,

Skin-piercing blood-sucking moths V: Attacks on man by 5 Calyptra spp. (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae) in S and SE Asia

In a chronology of 11 cases, male adults of scarce C. bicolor, C. fasciata, C. ophideroides, C. parva and C. pseudobicolor are proved for the first time to attack man (the author) and pierce the skin to suck blood under natural conditions in the field. […]