La noche del Banquete: masculinidades apolíneas y dionisíacas en el Ateneo de la Juventud Mexicana.

The Ateneo de la Juventud Mexicana and its members have been studied and mythicized constantly. However, some of their aspects have not been explored yet, especially those that could contribute to our understanding of the definitions and practices of gender and sexuality in the imagination of the Mexican intelligentsia, both prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary, and about the homosociality that runs throughout intellectual history. In this article, I analyze Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Alfonso Reyes, two of the Ateneo's founders, in that youth in which they could experiment with and negotiate their masculinities, and where there also existed a homoerotic component. Centered on the night of December 25, 1908, when they held a meeting to celebrate the birth of Dionysus and read Plato's Symposium , I argue that the Athenaeists had to decide if they would allow themselves an explicit homoerotism, whether they would be Dionysian or Apollonian intellectuals and, therefore, whether they would write poetry or essays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]