Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

This Desire for Queer Survival

96 This Desire for Queer Survival  .   These high-power street lamps can’t burn out the ganginfested walls. Black spray paint letters fuse into unlit alleys. Parked cars are tombstones. The air is sewer-scented. I’ve been here before, time after time, told my mother where our old house would be buried, near the call box, under the fast lane. She knows when I ramble it’s the virus. She questions me about what my doctor has said, ignores my response when I say, I’m just lonely. Gil Cuadros “My Aztlan: White Place” Monday, 10:46 p.m. The taste of loneliness is the taste of toothpaste as I brush before bed on another Monday night. One more week has passed and my bed remains empty. Surely some colossal failure of connection has occurred that I should be so lonely. Loneliness is a motherfucker and, as Seal noted, a killer. We all know this and will endure much to keep it on the other side of the door. We will bide in our work and manias, bury our faces in the chests of inadequate lovers, or pretend our children need us more than we need them. Most anything is preferable to the crisp reflection in that mirror of loneliness. Jaime Cortez “Sun to Sun” 97 Almost Back in the Family Nest: Spring 2001 I am one of those lucky gay men with a family most open to his life. My parents were probably ready to receive the official news about my gay self years before I came out to them, only months before completing my doctoral dissertation in 2001. I was thirty-one years old. They were more ready than I was, for sure. Apprehensive me, who had organized and written for years about gay Latino life and history, more public about my erotic life to hundreds of strangers than to them. Culture was too heavyweight an animal for me then, whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not. Then again, maybe I was just chicken shit about it all, good ol’ male son privilege at work, not to show weakness, difference, outsideness. Or maybe it was the fact that I was soon to return to the nest in Los Angeles with a very queer PhD in hand, that academic privilege bestowed upon the family clan too obvious for its details and my desires to remain unknown to them. The unemotional conversation we had that morning when I finally confided almost in passing was reassuring, uneventful really, facts formalized about what they already knew for so long. But it was finally out, and that silly secret died in those moments of loving support and reassurances around the dining room table. There were no regrets about the disclosure, our lives that much closer after the telling. It took me ten years to finally have the courage to spell out for them in Spanish what I had been trying to make sense of openly in several cities, away from the family unit. It was time to begin returning home. My parents began to tell me that morning that in El Salvador, lesbians, gays, and male-to-female transgenders—vestidas—were all around them. Years before I was born in 1969, and independent of one another, my mother and my father dissuaded folks in their town from harassing their queer kin. My parents were against what we now call homophobia long before any homosexual or gay movement, in this country or anywhere else. So for me, it’s never been a question whether my family will accept me or not, their one and only son, the last child, the professional intellectual, the gay one. It’s been more about the ability for any one of us in this interdependent family unit to survive without one another. Our economic, immigrant, and emotional histories are all intertwined in this thing we call familia. And thus the need to begin to try to end my silences. This Desire for Queer Survival 98 Queer Latino Revelations: Summer 2001 In those same months when I convinced myself that it was time for me to announce my queer self to my parents, I also secured a postdoctoral fellowship. In that oh-so-exaggerated academic culture of graduate school, even short-term financial security matters, especially when wellestablished senior faculty members try to convince us not to worry about the job market. With only...