as of 1542, Bartolomé de las Casas, along with other indigenous and missionary writers, launched a literary counteroffensive. De las Casas considered the "beastly vice of sodomy as the worst, the most detestable of any human wickedness". He denied with passion the reports passed on by the conquistadors and explorers, who had "defamed the Indians, having accused them of being infected with sodomy, a great and wicked falsehood" and thought that they observed "abstinence towards the sensual, vile and dirty affections", although he admitted that in a country so big there could be isolated cases of particular people in particular cases, attributed to "a natural corruption, depravity, a kind of innate sickness or fear of witchcraft and other magic spells", but in no case among the converts to Christianity. De las Cases gives for example the mixe who cruelly set fire to the sodomites discovered in the temple. According to the statements of Friar Augustín de Vetancurt, those men who dressed as women (and vice versa) were hanged if they committed unspeakable sin and the priests were burned, a report that Friar Gerónimo de Mendieta confirms. Friar Gregorio García, in his Origin of the Indians of the new world (sic, 1607), assured that before the arrival of the Spanish "the men of New Spain committed huge sins, especially those against nature, although repeatedly they burned for those and were consumed in the fire sent from the heavens [... the indigenous people] punished the sodomites with death, executed them with great vigor. [...] They strangled or drowned the women who lay with other women since those also considered it against nature". Garcia attributed the cases of sodomy to the fact that the "miserable Indians act like that because the Devil has tricked them, making them believe that the gods they worship also practice sodomy and therefore they consider it a good and lawful custom". Nevertheless, De las Casas could not stop giving news about homosexual acts in contemporary Indian societies, as the custom of the fathers buying young boys for their children "to be used for the pleasure of sodomy", the existence of "infamous public places known as efebías where lewd and shameless young men practiced the abominable sin with all those who came into the house" or the two-spirits, "impotent, effeminate men dressed as women and carrying out their work". Also Friar Gregoria García gave news of that kind, such