For a long time, in Mexico the number 41 was cursed, taboo. Hotels and hospitals never had the 41st room, so no one wanted to sleep in it, the army did not provide for the 41st battalion, and the most obsessed did not celebrate their 41st birthdays for fear of becoming homosexuals. Story this superstition dates back to 1901 and now Netflix talks about it in the movie: Ball 41, withcrypto by Monica Revilla and directed by David Pablo which traces Pride’s origins to Mexico City.

This is the story of a scandal that is not easy to reconstruct due to the lack of reliable sources. November 21, 1901 newspaper El Popular reported that a gendarme from Quarta Calle de la Paz noticed that in a private house “dances were being held behind closed doors”, entered to ask for a license, and he was in front of “a man in a woman’s suit, with a gathered skirt, with painted face and lips”. That night, 42 men gathered in a house in what is now Tabacalera, 19 of them dressed in women’s clothes, all homosexual or bisexual. The police arrested them all before such a spectacle of “obscenity”, but they did not name names, since they seemed to be representatives of high society. Although there are no documents to support this, it even seems that one of them was Ignacio de la Torre y Mier, son-in-law of President and dictator Porfirio Diaz. The president refused to admit that his son’s husband indulged in such entertainment: “I only read 41 names,” Diaz says in a scene from the Netflix trailer. So the scandal went down in history as “Ballo dei 41”.

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The scandal was defined by famous writer Carlos Monsivais as “the invention of homosexuality in Mexico”, given that for the first time homosexuality was openly discussed in the Mexican media. In 2001, on the occasion of the Ball’s centenary, Mexico City’s LGBT community erected a commemorative plaque as reparation, and in June 2019, Mexico City’s 41st Gay Pride was dedicated to the participants of the famous Ball. . “This incident paved the way for a more open debate about homosexuality,” he said. Diversity screenwriter Revilla: “It used to be taboo to talk about it. But the result was homophobia.” For this reason, the purpose of the film is to introduce new generations “to this story, much of which has been passed down as gossip over the years.” “We wanted to change the way the story was told,” Revilla added, “to humanize the characters, to show it from their point of view. President Porfirio Diaz represented the patriarchy of the period, led by heterosexual men and whites. …we who fought against patriarchy, this is a very important story.”