Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Richard Rodriguez

234 Richard Rodriguez Idon’t sit still on the page,” Richard Rodriguez tells me. We are sitting at a café in the Lower Pacific Heights section of San Francisco. The author of a trilogy of powerful memoirs that focus on class, ethnicity, and race, Rodriguez is explaining to me why he bristles at the notion of being considered a niche writer. He pauses just long enough to take a sip of coffee. For instance, he continues, on a recent trip to Egypt, surrounded by beautiful men, he found himself thinking instead about the Arabic occupation of Spain. “And then I’m wondering whether there are aspects of my being that are Arabic. That’s what I’m thinking on a day in Cairo. I don’t think about whether I’m the Latino here.” Nor, he asserts, is he interested in writing about being gay. “I’d much rather write about camels or monks in the desert. Did you see my piece about Jerusalem in Harper’s? I’m interested in the feminization of desert religions. When I think about male beauty—I don’t mean Calvin Klein or naked men in their underwear—I think about how it is unmistakably a violation of the male orthodoxy.” During our conversation, the range of topics Rodriguez brings up will include Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, the Catholic Church, his impatience with today’s gay movement, the latest novel 235 Richard Rodr iguez by André Aciman, affirmative action, the personal affronts and slights he has suffered, Medici Florence. And, of course, his books. We talk for almost three hours, which is ironic since, a few months earlier, in response to my request for an hour and a half of his time, Rodriguez had replied, “I don’t think we’ll need ninety minutes , since I am not a ‘gay’ writer. I am a morose Hispanic-shelved ‘Latino’ in most bookstores, far from the muscled and naked fiesta that takes place on the Gay and Lesbian shelves in another part of the store.” And yet—he takes another sip of coffee—“I like being gay in the world. I like the complication of it. I like that I’m walking down a street in Cairo and some kid who has a T-shirt that says ‘Hollywood’ in spangles pinches my ass. I like the difficulty of that. I like the tension in sexually repressed societies. I like the way touch occurs in conversation, or proximity of face, or intimacy of voice. When I go back to Europe after the Middle East, everything is blatant: ‘I’m gay!’ It’s not sensual. It’s not erotic. It’s nothing. It’s just a political billboard.” Rodriguez flashed onto the literary scene with the 1982 publication of Hunger of Memory, the story of his intellectual odyssey from Mexican American scholarship boy to Yale-courted scholar of Renaissance literature. Educated away from the culture of his parents, he gained a “public identity,” assimilation into the larger world, which, he maintained, was to be valued and nurtured, even as he suffered “a diminished sense of private individuality.” In the book, Rodriguez recounted how, keenly convinced of the injustice of affirmative action, he withdrew his name from consideration for prestigious university professorships. It was a courageous insistence on freedom—“the freedom,” he writes, “so crucial to adulthood , to become a person very different in public from the person I am at home.” Since that 1975 exodus from the academy, Rodriguez has gone on to the life of a freelance writer, lecturer, and teacher. His views on affirmative action and bilingual education have made him, as he has written, “notorious among certain leaders of America’s Ethnic Left.” He’s been called a “brown Uncle Tom.” He hasn’t fared much better with the gay establishment. In “Late Victorians,” an essay in his second book, Days of Obligation, Rodriguez meditated on San Francisco’s gay community and the death from AIDS of his friend César. He wrote about his own skepticism toward the gay pursuit of an earthly paradise. It was, in many respects , his coming-out essay. In response, he tells me, he received “a lot of letters saying how dare I write such an essay, that it was a regression to the guilt-ridden fifties. I knew at that point that I would never be a ‘gay writer.’” Rodriguez was born in 1944 in San...