According to León Guillermo Gutiérrez, it shed light on:[4] The hypocrisy of Mexican society, in which a lot of effort had been taken to hide in the corner of the closet: the practical, everyday life of homosexuality in all social spheres.
Zapata does not settle for coming out of the closet, he takes it and travels by foot, car, bus, or motorcycle through the streets, avenues, parks, restaurants, and movie theaters of the big city and other latitudes of the country’s geography.Its publication provoked a national, and even international, scandal over its homosexual content.
The scandal in Mexico, according to José Joaquín Blanco, responded "to the sanctimoniousness that thrives in the government, in the press, in some businesses, in the academy, and luckily it did not find its echo.
[6] Today, El vampire de la colonia Roma is considered a classic work in gay Mexican and Latin American literature.
[7][8] In the United States, a translation was published under the title Adonis García, A Picaresque Novel in 1981[9] and it received favorable critiques given that—as noted by the author, Luis Zapata, himself—the U.S. did not have the same prejudices nor Mexico's macho tradition.