Queer Places:
Insurgentes Centro 59, Cuauhtémoc, 06470 Ciudad de México, CDMX
Pedro Alberto Maus Santander (January 24, 1925 – June 13, 2001) was the heir to a tobacco and real estate fortune.
Pedro Maus Santander was born on 24 January 1925, in Mexico City, Mexico, the son of Pedro Maus Auilar (1893-1964) and Esperanza Santander Sáenz (1898-1984). Don Pedro Maus Aguilar was the owner of several companies, including the Mexican Tobacco Factory; he was also an advisor to several capital banks and an active partner in the film industry.
Indicative of the relative freedom with which well-heeled homosexuals led their lives in Mexico City are the cases of the children of multimillionaire entrepreneurs and celebrities chronicled in society pages. Alberto Maus y Santander grew up in a progressive and cosmopolitan home. Born in the 1930s, he came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when prominent gays like Salvador Novo and Roberto Montenegro frequently visited his family. Alberto – known to everyone as Beto – dabbled in the arts and dreamed of studying abroad. In preparation, over the spring of 1960, he watched his figure and dieted, partaking only of steak and salad. Novo announced in his weekly column on 5 November 1960 that Beto planned to study interior decoration in Paris. Novo further noted ‘in fact, his family is to dine in the home of the young man who is to accompany Beto to Paris’. After his father’s death left him a substantial inheritance, Beto left the family home to install himself in a modern high-rise bachelor’s apartment on Insurgentes Avenue. Novo’s readers followed his move, his interest in interior design and learned of his talented cooking and entertaining. Beto’s elegant eighth-floor apartment was two floors above that of his close friend and classmate Enrique Álvarez Félix, sole son of famed actress María Félix. ‘Quique’ to his friends, Álvarez Félix lived in a comfortable flat. It was ‘modern’, Novo noted, ‘but without the odd furniture that young people prefer’. Green velvet coverings on the sofas and chairs matched the green carpet and contrasted with the straw-coloured wallpaper. Many antiques, on loan from his mother’s Hacienda de Catipoato, softened the modern lines of the apartment’s finishings. Álvarez Félix frequently entertained at home with the help of his mother and her trusted confidante, the gay designer Armando Valdés Peza. Newspaper columns enumerated his guests, surreptitiously recording the unspoken intimacy of homosexual couples named among married heterosexual couples, as occurred in 1959, when Novo noted in his column that television producer Ernesto Alonso arrived with Angel Fernandez Vinas. Decades later, it was revealed that Alonso and Fernandez were lifelong companions, and had adopted two children whom they raised as their own, in an effort to construct an image of normalcy that would keep viewers of his television programmes from being scandalised by his homosexuality.
Pedro Maus Santander died on 13 June 2001, in Puebla, Puebla, Mexico, at the age of 76.
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