Walter Mercado is known to the global as a gender-nonconforming TV character and astrologer. Was the Puerto Rican icon gay or queer?
We can't wait to dive again into our youths and be told more about Latinx icon Walter Mercado, whose voice we can still listen in our heads pronouncing the names of the astrological signs in Spanish (many of us even realized the Spanish names for the indicators due to him and his signature exaggerated "r" trill).
The flamboyant and androgynous Puerto Rican TV astrologer is the matter of Netflix's newest documentary that borrows its title from Walter's catchphrase: Mucho Mucho Amor.
The extravagant, cape-donning fortune teller was a hero to a whole generation of Latinx youths, and perhaps even more so in the Latin LGBTQ+ community, who felt an innate kinship with the gender-nonconforming personality.
At the end of his lifestyles especially, audiences wanted to know for certain whether or not Walter Mercado was gay or directly, and whether or not he had a significant other in his life. Keep studying for the whole lot we know about this non-public determine's personal lifestyles.
Was Walter Mercado gay?
Walter was in a league of his own, that much we can all believe. Walter helped many audience see beyond the constraints of the gender binary.
Comedian Gabe Gonzalez described the celebrity as "weird and beautiful and eccentric and dressed in extravagant capes I'd try to imitate using my grandmother's sheets," adding, "he defied everything I'd been taught about how I 'should' act as a Puerto Rican man."
Indeed, Walter carved a special position for himself that perceived to exist excluding each tv norms and traditional Latino machismo. On most sensible of that, he wasn't subject to many rumors or speculations about his sexuality — "You don't ask about what you can see," says an LGBTQ activist whose angle is "held by many" from Walter's technology — and got a move for his larger-than-life personality.
"It's the plausible deniability that chauvinist or homophobic audiences need in order to give Walter the pass that they needed ... to enjoy the message he was sending them," Mucho Mucho Amor producer Alex Fumero mentioned to AP, explaining why Walter made the choice by no means to publicly discuss his sexual orientation, aside from his "spiritual relationship" with Brazilian dancer Mariette Detotto.
"This is a culture that's been dominated by machismo and homophobia for a very long time," he stated, adding that Walter was "really brave" and that his silence about his orientation allowed him to be embraced through the LGBTQ+ community, with out alienating extra conservative audiences who might have rejected an out-television superstar.
Who was Walter Mercado's "soulmate"?
In 2004, when Walter was 71, he shocked the press with two candid confessions: First, he published he had discovered a "soulmate" in Brazilian persona Mariette Detotto, who he stated he planned to marry, and 2d, he informed reporters in Spanish that he'd been "sexually abstinent for years."
The two by no means did marry, though Walter declared his love for Mariette "pure and sincere," and explained that he had taken a vow of celibacy until the second "when a woman would arrive and wake up the energy of love in me, and that is Mariette."
Stream Mucho Mucho Amor to be informed extra about Walter, and the legacy he left at the back of.
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