GALAEI Issues Response and Apology Over Mr. SEXO Event

Mr. SEXO 2015 Marcous Marchese with last year’s winner Syfr Gavriel, Elicia Gonzales and host Cyannie Famouz. Photo by Freedom G Photography

In December, we reported on the controversy surrounding the crowning of a white male at this year’s Mr. SEXO competition, a self-proclaimed search for a “gay/queer Latino who is the epitome of sexy,” co-sponsored by GALAEI and PhillyGayCalendar. An open letter from The Gran Varones, which essentially slammed the competition, calling it “a reduction and objectification of brown bodies in a community that does not even acknowledge us as whole people,” added quite a bit of fuel to the fire as to why the contest seemed to have gone astray.

Today, the executive staff of GALAEI, lead by Elicia Gonzales, issued an apology letter on Facebook, essentially taking responsibility for the perceived outrage over the event. The letter, signed “GALAEI Executive Director, Staff and Board,” frankly addresses the concerns of the Mr. SEXO results:

“This letter is an apology, yes. More than that, we hope it serves as a demonstration of our commitment to being intentional, accountable, and transparent. Towards that end, we wanted to respond to your questions via this letter and invite you to further engage in honest dialogue with us, GALAEI’s board and staff, and with our community. We believe wholeheartedly that only through ongoing, constructive dialogue can we move collectively to advance the health and well-being of our communities.”

The letter goes on to candidly explain that the outcome of the Mr. SEXO event essentially was a poor representation of the organization’s goals:

“This year’s Mr. SEXO event did not turn out the way we envisioned, nor the way it did last year for its inauguration. Although its execution was flawed, the purpose for the event is directly connected to our mission of sexual empowerment. Mr. SEXO was born out of GALAEI’s 1992 SEXOLatex campaign, the first national and regional safer sex ad campaign targeting Latino gay men at a critical period in HIV prevention. It sought to address HIV-prevention through sex-positive imagery of Latino gay men. In 2013, at the request of a young Latino gay man who questioned the absence of sex positive images that mirrored the community he came from, GALAEI decided to create SEXO as an ongoing social movement to address community health, pleasure, and gay Latino sexuality. Mr. SEXO started that same year with the purpose of increasing the visibility of gay/queer Latinos as beautiful, proud, dynamic, confident, and yes— unapologetically sexy. Did this year’s Mr. SEXO event accomplish that? Not at all.”

You can read the entire letter here. Nowhere is the co-sponosor PhillyGayCalendar, the webpage known for its gay swimsuit parties, mentioned in the apology.