#moche

Chavimochic: la vista de un dron de los campos de caña de azúcar muestra un acueducto de adobe prehispánico a la derecha y pequeños canales alimentadores en los campos modernos. Ari Caramanica

These little statues are ceramics made by the Moche people of first-millennium Peru. For a long time, conservative scholars weren’t willing to talk about them because so many of them show all different types of sex: anything from sex between monkeys to sex between skeletons to monkey-skeleton-sex, and a whole bunch of stuff that seems pretty queer.

This particular one shows two men embracing – it’s not as explicit as many of the other works, but for a long time scholars categorised this as a depiction of conjoined twins, despite it looking the same as a bunch of other pots identified as people embracing!

It’s difficult to be sure what the Moche had in mind when making these pots, and but it does seem that some depict male-male sex and relationships, while others show trans or non-binary people!