Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities (review)

Iam glad I did not cheat by reading the end of this book before the rest to find out what it is supposed to be all about, but I am also glad Manolo Guzmán makes it explicit in his last paragraph: “Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities was motivated, all along, by a deep suspicion of racial metaphors in the elaboration of gayness in the US. Its focus lay on the organization of same-sex desires in Puerto Rican society, especially its New York diaspora” (102). We do quite a lot of very close, careful reading before we get to that magic pithy summary moment from Guzmán. Indeed, although this is a “little” book at just over a hundred pages, the author packs a punch in many places, some better placed than others. This brief review cannot do justice to a book that should have been at least twice as many pages in length. But I will try.

Guzmán is honestly ambivalent about the direction of his work—that it “is and is not about gay Puerto Rican men or about the organization of same-sex eroticism in Puerto Rican society” (1). We know by the end that it’s the former, but he first takes us into quite a long ride of theory (unnecessarily so, I would argue) and some original ethnographic material and readings of cultural texts to understand, for one, the positioning of the Latin (Puerto Rican) lover in mainstream (white) US culture historically but especially in what he aptly refers to as “the gay epoch,” and second and primarily, the relationship between Latino homosexualities and what he refers to as “gay hegemony.”

Contrary to its publisher’s claim that Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities “weaves ethnographic interviewing with the analysis of texts and material culture,” the book’s first chapter, “Queer Theory and Race,” is by far the longest of the five at twenty-four pages and is the most challenging to get through. Here the author first takes the theoretical stand to which he returns in later chapters. His main goal is to recenter, through queer theory, the intersection of race, sex, and class in the United States. For Guzmán the starting point is found in the classic This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, first published in 1981.¹ Just as Guzmán reifies this canonical text, he strikes it down: “The strength of Bridge resides in its championing of difference. Its limitation, however, lies in its commitment to the opposite of difference, identity” (6). These forms of both/and and neither/nor arguments are common in Gay Hegemony, so much so that they leave the reader confused, at the very least. He then engages Michel Foucault, Ann Stoler, Sigmund Freud, and Judith Butler, among others, to work his way toward linking the erotic, the sexual, and the racial, declaring “queer theory’s unwitting complicity in that conservative project seeking to reduce the realm of the erotic to the realm of the sexual . . . . Racial formations must be understood as other than the displacement of our fears and fantasies onto the other” (28–29).

Chapter 2, one of the most subtly argued, is where Guzmán’s focus on homosexuality in Puerto Rican society takes off, noting the centrality of “syncretism” to understand the island in general but gayness or homosexuality specifically. “Is there a Puerto Rican gayness” (my emphasis), he asks, especially in relation to US cultural imperialism? His main analytical text is Rafael Ramírez’s What It Means to Be a Man (1999), one of the first to study homosexuality in Puerto Rico, and Guzmán argues that, like other writers (native and foreign) on Latin American homosexualities, Ramírez falls into a simplified top/bottom binary paradigm, arguing that homosexuality need not have a homosexual identification.² Also engaging the work of other scholars such as Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Guzmán notes that...