Red-Inked Retablos

Beloved Jotoranos

Beloved Jotoranos I will refer to my literary forefathers as antepasados, acknowledging the cultural connection of our shared Mexican (south of the border) and Chicano (north of the border) heritage. But I’d like to take it a step further, and recognize another important commonality: our homosexual identity. I will refer to my literary forefathers then, as jotoranos—my veteran queer godparents. These are the people who came before and who fought first, who braved the public stages and weathered the stormy audiences so that my own journey would be a little less terrifying and much more rewarding. In this era where terms such as post-racial and post-gay are erasing and disrespecting the scars and stretch marks of our ancestors’ pasts, I feel especially compelled to thank these incredible teachers, mentors, and role models through the act of love I learned from them. The seven thumbnail portraits that follow are only glimpses into the queer Chicano consciousness that has fueled my passion for the artistry and activism of language. Without them, there would be no me. Or rather, there would be a different me, less fulfilled and less skilled than the person who, through the works of these beloved jotoranos, has learned the pain of remembering, the pleasure of reading, and the responsibility of writing. 1. Arturo Islas Arturo Islas died the day after Valentine’s Day in 1991, almost a year after the release of his second novel Migrant Souls. News of his death was a particularly disappointing moment for me because I had resolved to attend Stanford University’s graduate program just to work with him. I was only a junior at the University of California, Riverside, but I already had aspirations to become a writer. I had been reading Chicano literature voraciously, and one of the books that had moved me had been his The Rain God (1984). The sequel to the Angel family saga had just been released to wide acclaim 82 Studies and I spent the next twelve months fantasizing about telling Islas all about me. You see, the other thing I knew about him was that he was gay. A gay Chicano writer. Who knew there were two of us? Miguel Chico, the college student who was hiding from his family by moving away, was someone I could relate to. I understood his bitterness over his invisibility, his dismay with the family dramas, and his heartbreak at the death of Uncle Felix, a cautionary tale of the dangers of homosexuality . And though Miguel Chico took a step back from the primary plot lines of Migrant Souls, he was still there, observing from a distance and trying to find a purpose for all of the knowledge he had acquired in school. I knew Miguel Chico’s affliction, a melancholy that comes from loneliness and isolation , from breathing the same stale air inside the closet. When I found out that Islas had died from complications related to AIDS I was devastated. This was not the narrative I wanted to follow—defeated by the very sexuality that was already making us foreigners in our communities. This was not supposed to be Miguel Chico’s fate. Certainly not mine. But I accepted it as a reality of the times. It was a possibility that even literary icons could succumb to. Suspending Miguel Chico at book two of a projected trilogy became a difficult state of incompleteness to inhabit. I wanted to find a light in his life that I could no longer see in Islas. I didn’t know his happier memories because I never got to meet him. All I could do was piece together a fragmented portrait through his novels and through the snippets of information from his obituary. His posthumous novel La Mollie and the King of Tears was published in 1996. It wasn’t exactly the third book I had been expecting, but it did offer something else: a glimpse into Islas himself. The cool cat Shakespeare Louie, the protagonist of the novel, had a nutty teacher, Mr. Angel, who had a limp and a colostomy, just like Islas had. During one of his unconventional lessons, Mr. Angel comes to class wearing a woman’s slip—his attempt at personifying a concept: a Freudian slip. Shakespeare Louie, jazz musician and lovesick vato from el barrio, actually becomes aroused watching Mr. Angel in drag. I was floored by this admission. Islas had somehow sexualized himself through his own characters by giving one of...