Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture: What Have You Done to my Heart? (review)

Reviews  contreras, daniel, l. Unrequited Love and Gay Latino Culture: What Have You Done to my Heart? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. This book proposes a study of Latin American and Latino narratives of unrequited loves as a critical stance against the regulatory regimes defining heteronormative and patriarchal contemporary societies. Taking as its subtitle a line from a song interpreted by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong—‘‘What have you done to my heart?’’—Contreras proposes an intersection of Latino melodramatic culture with queer camp to investigate the representation of ‘‘racialized desire taking place in a context of unrequited love’’ (2). Interestingly enough, Contreras implicitly proposes a reverse reading of Doris Sommer’s ‘‘foundational fictions’’ to include twentieth-century narratives of affection and queer desire. However, the author does not engage in a direct dialogue with Latin American criticism to privilege a more visible exchange between Latino, ethnic, and queer American theorizations. Race, sexuality and popular culture are the most salient categories of this reading of cultural productions that includes literature , plays, film, and popular music. The author explicitly proposes this link between sexuality and race in his definition of the concept ‘‘queer’’: ‘‘It is this queer sexuality situated in the Borderlands that proves so politically and creatively productive for so many gay people of color. It is similarly potent that ‘queer’ as different, as not ‘mainstream’ or ‘normal,’ becomes intensely sexual’’ (10). For Contreras, one of the best examples of this link between ethnicity and queer desire is the queerness of those who negotiate the border, or those who migrate due to their sexual orientation—those that Manuel Guzmán has denominated as sexiles (1997). The argument of this book is developed in an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The ‘‘Introduction’’ lays out the theoretical framework, based on the study of the representation of desire and affect in the construction of utopian imaginaries, although Contreras explicitly resists the application of psychoanalytic theory to his readings. Instead, the book is based on the study of melodrama, queer camp and ethnic studies to propose a series of readings of Mart Crowley’s play, The Boys in the Band (Chapter 1), Chicano narrative (Chapter 2), the intersections of gender and ethnic identities in drag performances (Chapter 3), and the representation of impossible romance as utopia in Manuel Puig’s The Kiss of the Spider Woman (Chapter 4). The first chapter of the book develops a thought-provoking reflection on the links between the emotive and the political in queer camp discourse. After reviewing classical definitions of camp aesthetics by Michael Bronski, Susan Sontag , and Andrew Ross, Contreras traces a series of readings that explore the links 108  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008) between camp and masculinity in Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968). The chapter ends by proposing a racial reading of the play that allows the author to identify camp as a strategy to explore the dark spaces of a gay American identity just before the beginning of the sexual liberation movement sparked by the Stonewall riots (1969). Chapter two aligns Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet with the representation of race and culture in a short story by Sandra Cisneros and a novel by Arturo Islas. In the first half of the chapter, Contreras explores the narratives of migration and sexuality as they are represented in Sandra Cisneros ’s short story ‘‘Being Pretty’’ (1991). The protagonist of this story, Lupe Arredondo, moves from San Francisco to San Antonio, and redefines her Mexicannes as a result of her contact with Chicano culture from Texas and her attraction to Flavio, a working-class Mexican. As her relationship with Flavio fails, Lupe becomes absorbed with telenovelas, and in her identification with the suffering of those impossible loves, she recovers her connection with her Mexican identity through popular culture. Arturo Islas’s Migrant Souls (1990), on the other hand, takes place in El Paso sometime after 1960. The protagonist of the novel, Miguel Chico, is a closeted homosexual who establishes a powerful relationship with the other outcast of the family, his cousin Josie, a rebellious divorced woman. In this novel, the family is represented as a site...