Red-Inked Retablos

The Gay Brown Beret Suite

The Gay Brown Beret Suite Note: Professor Don Gagnon, the board representative of the LGBT and popular culture caucuses, invited me to be a featured speaker at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s thirtieth anniversary conference in Boston. He had read my memoir Butterfly Boy and was particularly interested that I address in my comments the intersection between ethnicity, class, and sexuality. This was familiar territory for me, though I had always approached the nexus through my creative work, not necessarily through a speech. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how I had been articulating my existence on that plane through the Q & A sessions immediately following my literary readings. Audience members inevitably guided the discussion toward matters of ethnicity, class, and sexuality, but also language, writing process, and the connections between politics and creativity. Thus, I seized the opportunity to provide an honest and charged testimony about my personal journey as a gay Chicano writer, necessarily vocal and sentimental about my convictions as a representative of two distinct (and much-maligned) groups that cross paths within me every time I breathe. I wanted to address the tensions between these two groups (the queer and the Latino) and to affirm that they are inextricable from the fibers of my body. I cannot choose one identity over the other. If anything, writing this speech helped me understand how more alike than different these two groups are, and how much more of a victory it would be if these two communities worked together to attain the dignity, respect, and visibility they both seek. In any case, this was a healthier exercise for me than for anyone else, and all I can ask is that people of any group understand that there is no dilemma here as much as there’s a possibility. Solidarity will be the key to survive and thrive in the new millennium. Divide and conquer is an old, but effective strategy. We can succumb and surrender, or we can unite and triumph. 120 Speeches February 28, 2009 Story of my life: moving through different landscapes, speaking different languages, comfortable here, there, and everywhere, yet frequently contending with moments in which one part of my identity is singled out, isolated for the sake of derision (against my sexuality), or exoticization (in response to my ethnicity). Over the years I have learned to weather these exchanges with some level of understanding, though each encounter costs me varying degrees of frustration and offense. Like the many years I’ve had to deal with the response to my name. Once people hear it is “Rigoberto,” a few well-meaning types will inevitably ask, “Does it mean something in Spanish?” When I was younger I’d say, “No, it doesn’t mean anything.” Which of course, is false, since it means I’m Mexican, that I’ve inherited my father’s connection to his Purépecha and Spanish ancestry, and that my parents made the wise decision not to Anglicize my name even though I had been born in the United States all those many years ago. As I got older and sassier, I’d answer: “It means shit-kicker.” Which is true to a certain extent because I’ve been fighting my way through college and life, adapting and adopting, assimilating and acculturating, pressing my thumb and forefinger around the rosary bead as firmly as I press my thumb and forefinger around the stem of the martini glass. And if I’m feeling really naughty (and exasperated that I’ve been split apart once again) I answer (in an effort to bring my identity back to its wholeness): “It means cocksucker.” In any case, when I enter a room it’s my ethnic identity that comes in first, my sex and sexual orientation follow, though not very far behind. It’s like my African American colleague says: “The first thing people notice is that I’m black. The second thing they notice is that I’m a woman.” What she doesn’t say is that these two parts of her identity reveal themselves only milliseconds apart, and yet, the political movements that these two parts of her being can espouse couldn’t seem farther away from each other. Though notable efforts have been made—and usually by black women themselves—to build bridges between the groups that struggle for racial and gender equality , I can certainly relate to belonging to two groups whose philosophies and histories come across as...