Germán Pasos, Mérida’s chronicler of the LGBT community, dies

Merida Yucatan (October 21, 2020) .- Germán Pasos Tzec, anthropologist, writer, journalist and activist in favor of LGBTTT rights, died in the city of Mérida, Yucatán, due to a kidney disease.

A graduate of the Faculty of Anthropological Sciences of the Autonomous University of Yucatán UADY, he was the author of the first university thesis in Yucatán on homosexuality in 1992.

He dedicated his life to fighting discrimination, being the first to write a university thesis on homosexuality, and having documented these social facts, the Network of People Affected with HIV (REPAVIH), named him a lifetime chronicler of the LGBT community since 2019.

Pasos Tzec documented all the violence faced by the LGBT community in Mérida, even from his perspective as a journalist. He was part of the work of the first groups of activists who fought to defend their rights and also lived through the police raids, as denounced in his book Transvestites, transgenders and transsexuals of Mérida, a work in which the chronicler has a chapter of his own story.

In 2013 he was the recipient of the “Oswaldo Baqueiro López” Medal for Pink Journalism. The award was received from the hands of Governor Rolando Zapata Bello, and in his speech, Pasos Tzec stressed that entertainment journalism is much more than stories of the private lives of artists as it should be a space for the dissemination of different artistic expressions of society.

At that time, he highlighted the need for this variant of journalism to become professional, so that reporters are able to project to society the personal vision of the creators, in addition to forming a knowledgeable public of the different cultural expressions.

Pasos Tzec started at Diario del Sureste as a journalist more than 30 years ago. He worked directly with characters such as Baqueiro López, whom he always defined as the teacher of several generations of communication professionals, as well as a “simple, transparent and cultured” person.

His book “Mérida Gay. Chronicle of LGBT movements in the city of Mérida 1960-2014 ”was selected for its edition in 2014 by the National Council for Culture and the Arts, and the City Council of Mérida through the Directorate of Culture.