Decolonizing Queer Camp in Edwin Sánchez's Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod

In his recent novel, Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod (2015), Edwin Sánchez portrays the experience of gay Latino men who emulate the upwardly mobile lifestyle associated with economic success and sexual liberation in New York City. The novel, Sánchez's first, uses various forms of subversive humor, particularly queer camp, in order to expose how the heightened visibility of gays and lesbians establishes a hierarchy of taste and distinction based on conspicuous consumption, body shaming, and elitist, exclusionary social formations. These gatekeeping criteria ensure that gay Latino men from working-class families must acquire on credit the social and cultural capital associated with white, majoritarian culture in order to enjoy the personal freedom and autonomy that normalizing discourses promise. The protagonist in Sánchez's novel doesn't actually own his elite social and cultural capital, and he becomes destitute after losing the only tangible asset he had: youthful beauty. Sánchez decolonizes queer camp as a way to resituate the diasporic subject from a submissive position of dependency to a position that, while economically precarious, resists the symbolic violence that hegemonic, homonormative values impose on gay Latino men. Through an examination of how Sánchez's novel articulates the embodiment of racial and class hierarchies, as well as the social relations that constitute diasporic subjects as economic agents, this article argues that the value of Latinx transcultural capital is not solely derived from its opposition to dominant forms of capital, but also from its reinvestment in the collective well-being of the marginal communities from which it emerges.