Since the dawn of the 2020s, Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny has captured the attention of the global queer world by donning drag in a music video, honouring a murdered trans woman on “The Tonight Show,” locking lips with his male backup dancer at MTV's Video Music Awards, and, most recently, kissing Gael García Bernal in the new movie “Cassandro.”

No less than Ricky Martin has called Bad Bunny, Puerto Rico’s latest hijo favorito, “an icon for the Latin queer community.” But the trap musician—who has described his views on sexuality as fluid but has previously self-identified as heterosexual—is just the latest in a long line of queer icons to hail from Puerto Rico, a pantheon including activists, an athlete, an astrologer, the highest-seated judge in the land—and, of course, Martin himself.

Before Bad Bunny even took his first breath, Ricky Martin was well on his way to becoming Puerto Rico’s biggest musical export of all time. Born Enrique Martín Morales in 1971 in San Juan, Martin rose to fame as a member of the rotating-member boy band Menudo from 1984 to 1989. As Martin’s fame as a solo artist grew during the 1990s, rumours about his sexuality swirled, prompting Barbara Walters to attempt to out him during an interview in 2000 (she later apologised for her insensitivity).

Ten years later, in 2010, just weeks after fellow former Menudo member Angelo Garcia came out himself, Martin announced on his website that he was “proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man.” His LGBTQ activism in the years since has earned him numerous global accolades, including GLAAD’s Vito Russo Award and the Human Rights Campaign’s National Visibility Award. Now the father of four children, Martin and family still live part-time in Puerto Rico, where he’s so adored by proud Boricuas that many flock to his favourite sites, including a waterfall in El Yunque National Rainforest.

Known as the godmother of Puerto Rico’s LGBTQ community, activist Rosalina “Talín” Ramos, born in 1938, was at the forefront of the island’s queer revolution in the 1980s and ’90s. In 2003, she founded Orgullo Boquerón (Boquerón Pride), which, with its Parada Gay del Oeste (Gay Parade of the West), grew to become the largest LGBTQ celebration in Puerto Rico and one of the largest in the entire Caribbean. An anesthesiologist by trade, Ramos died in September 2021 and was survived by her wife, Ivonne. Just two weeks later, a monument to her work and to diversity in Puerto Rico was dedicated at Plaza Mirador in Boquerón.

Beloved throughout the Latin world and beyond for his captivating and flamboyant TV astrology reports, Walter Mercado was born in 1932 in Puerto Rico’s second-largest city, Ponce. Originally forging a career as a dancer and an actor, Mercado became more widely known in the 1970s for his horoscope segments on the small screen, first televised locally in Puerto Rico and expanding across Latin America and to the U.S. mainland in the 1980s. Mercado’s unapologetically binary-bucking presence gave courage to Puerto Rico’s nascent queer community and led to predictable curiosity from the mainstream about his own sexuality.