Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Preface

ix Preface   The two young men at the back of the library had been there early, and they dawdled after everyone else at my reading and talk had left. They’d been silent and attentive throughout, almost extra-alert, but now that they were standing before me they relaxed and they gushed. Among the things they said in their enthusiasm was this: “We’re so proud to have someone of Latino extraction as an openly out gay writer.” I looked at them more closely. This close up, I could see that both appeared to be Latino. Clearly, they thought that I, with my vowel- filled name and my large brown eyes, was also Latino. And, in a way, I am. My father was born in the town of Itria in an area of Central Italy about forty miles east of Rome, the area known as Latium, from which the Latin tongue took its name. So, in fact, he, and I through him, was an original Latino. Only I’m not Latino the way those young men thought: they felt proud of having a Latino gay man so out, so prominent, to represent them. A few generations ago, I might have been one of those young men, attending a rare reading of an Italian American author. Those certainly were rare in the past, and people of Italian heritage were mostly unassimilated into the American mainstream until the middle of the last century, in a way similar to how many younger Latinos feel to not be part of our wider culture today. As the result of discovering an unsolved murder in my family—through being a writer—I’ve been delving into my own family history. In New England in the 1920s and early 1930s, anti-Italian sentiment reached an all-time high, especially after the farce of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. Elderly people in Rhode Island told me in interviews that as teens they would have to go to church and school in groups no smaller than ten because they were so often physically attacked. While still a youth, I personally remember experiencing antiItalian prejudice, including at an Ivy League school. During an interview for a Woodrow Wilson graduate scholarship at Princeton in 1964, as I x was discussing Henry James’s middle-period fiction with one professor, another interrupted to ask if I was sure I wouldn’t rather be a barber. So, clearly, correcting those young men who thought I was Latino made no sense at all at the time, and I immediately changed the subject to a more general one. But in the months and years after that encounter, more readers, other writers, and several interviewers have all made the same assumption or outright asked if I was Latino. Why they did so has become increasingly clear. There was, there is, an exploding gay population with Iberian heritage, and they’re on the lookout for role models, seeking people to identify with, to help build a queer Latino community and culture. That’s one very important reason why this anthology exists: to provide those two young men and other readers, writers, and interviewers with queer writers of quality who will provide significant writings about the U.S. Latino queer experience. Writers like Achy Obejas, Elías Miguel Muñoz, Susana Chávez-Silverman, and Emanuel Xavier, writers whose work—whether in stories, novels, poetry, memoirs, or plays— are, in effect, leading the way, writers who are represented here by an intriguing and wide-ranging variety of shorter fiction each representing a fresh Latino voice, looking from a queer Latino perspective into a slice of our life. Ah, but the knowledgeable and the academic (not always the same thing) will instantly reply that we already have Latino gay literature. Look at Jaime Manrique, whose wonderful novel about Colombian emigrants living in Queens, Latin Moon in Manhattan, was published in 1992. And before him, there was the Argentinean novelist Manuel Puig, whose Kiss of the Spider Woman and Who Betrayed Rita Hayworth? were a unique collusion between his Argentine culture and Hollywood. And what of the more dour Cubano novelist, Reinaldo Arenas? And, how many people are aware that even before them we had John Rechy? John is a Tejano, originally from El Paso/Ciudad Juárez. Rereading his now-classic gay novels City of Night and Numbers, it’s clear how the elements of the Latino culture that he inescapably grew up with are reflected in and...