Live to Tell

Every now and then a book will appear to which I feel strongly connected. I’ll keep it nearby (securely tucked in my backpack or atop a stack of books on my desk), reaching for it when I require scholarly motivation, personal inspiration, or both. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé’s Queer Latino “Testimonio,” Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails has recently become this book for two reasons: first, for the stunning range of critical methods adopted by Cruz-Malavé to illustrate the myriad ways to assess Latino queer representation and, second, for the honest and moving testimonio of Juan Rivera, or Juanito Xtravaganza, whose very being demands documentation.

While the claim that behind every great gay white man is a great gay man of color holds sway in the case of Keith Haring and Juan Rivera, Cruz-Malavé’s intent does not rest on proving Rivera’s comparable greatness. Indeed, his recognition as the former lover of Haring—the late artist whose meteoric rise to fame converged with the emergent hip-hop scene of the 1980s—stands as one of many flashpoints for casting light on a historical moment in which Latino (especially Puerto Rican) gay men such as Rivera simultaneously grappled with poverty and the threat of HIV/AIDS in New York City. Caught between a proliferating subculture spilling into the American mainstream entertainment industry and the increase in coercive gentrification practices, Rivera makes clear in his testimonio—a set of interviews cobbled together to constitute the chapter “The Life and Times of JUANITO XTRAVAGANZA: As Told by Juan Rivera and Retold by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé”—that while he and other Puerto Rican men often held cachet as artistic muses or sexual fetishes for the likes of Haring and Madonna, this hardly guaranteed their escape from destitute street existence and the attendant reliance on hustling to survive.

Although “A Radiated Radiant Baby: KEITH HARING and an Aesthetics of Identification” charts Haring’s media-propelled international celebrity, the chapter offers a kaleidoscopic view with Haring as but one actor among many on the historical stage Cruz-Malavé establishes. Indeed, in conveying Haring’s story, Cruz-Malavé ensures Rivera’s standing as a figure of prime significance, thus contesting the latter’s marginalized status in previous accounts of the social world in which the two were intimately bound. Cruz-Malavé furthermore provides an extraordinary overview of the dynamic cultural milieu forged by Latino and black youths and its deep influence on Haring. So while Haring’s formal education at the School of Visual Arts would introduce him to the fundamentals of performance and visual arts, avant-garde film, and semiotics, for example, Cruz-Malavé maintains that “it was on the streets, as he traveled to museums and galleries, or in the subways, as he fantasized over the dark boys around him . . . that he would complete his education by studying the graffiti art he encountered. And it was this other education that would excite him and incite him, inducing him to participate, to engage, to commune, and to communicate” (64).

Confessing its ten-year gestation period as the result of consistent provocation by friends and colleagues to either complete the book or abandon it, Cruz-Malavé clarifies his ambivalence in seeing the book to publication through an elegant exposition on the discourse of shame. Before moving into a necessarily critical reading of Douglas Crimp’s deployment of legendary 1960s underground Puerto Rican film star Mario Montez as the figure through which to articulate a politics of gay shame, Cruz-Malavé takes to task the representations of Puerto Ricans in the anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (1965) and the film version of West Side Story (1961) directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. The conceit of these texts to command authority vis-à-vis Puerto Rican subjects is what I believe endows Cruz-Malavé with the necessary impetus for bringing out Rivera’s testimonio despite a pervasive...