Hotel Luso

• Hotel Luso

Hotel Luso, a photographic document by Daniel Jack Lyons

• Anti-discrimination laws are often seen as catalysts in normalizing the taboo. But they’ll always be limited by the words and concepts in the broader culture that literally speak into existence a society’s acceptable range of experiences.
• In Mozambique, the national legislature passed some of the continent’s most progressive anti-discrimination laws. And the larger conversation that centered around those laws led to the elaboration of a terminology that now allows LGBTQ people to come out, to express their sexual orientation and gender fluidity.
• But those terms remain static. They haven’t been activated within the larger culture to expand the boundaries of its foundational concepts like family.
• So same sex and queer relationships remain the other. And to be the other is to face a constant threat, one that ranges in degree from the shame of 'embarrassing' one's family to the physical violence meted out for engaging in what colonial-era Mozambique termed ‘vices against nature.’
• As a result, members of the LGBTQ community often continue living in silence, in an undefined space beyond.
• To document the Mozambican LGBTQ community, then, required an interstitial space, one where the normal inhibitions necessary for daily survival in a (c)overtly hostile society could melt away.
• Hotel Luso is a physical manifestation of that space, an old, art deco Portuguese hotel, now an hourly motel.
• A place set aside to express those needs and desires society would rather ignore.
• For the fifteen self-identified queers who participated in this series, Hotel Luso allowed for a degree of self-expression often denied to them, even in their most intimate spaces.
• This underscores the fundamental challenge faced by not just the Mozambican LGBTQ community, but any marginalized group fighting for recognition.
• The act of resistance does not end just because the law is on your side.