Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of New York Estados Unidos
Aponte-Parés, Luis; Arroyo, Jossianna; Crespo-Kebler, Elizabeth; La Fountain-Stokes, Lawrence; Negrón-Muntaner, Frances Introduction Centro Journal, vol. XIX, núm. 1, 2007, pp. 4-24 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos
Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37719101
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CENTRO Journal
Volume7 xix Number 1 spring 2007
Puerto Rican Queer Sexualities: INTRODUCTION
LUIS APONTE-PARÉS, JOSSIANNA ARROYO, ELIZABETH CRESPO-KEBLER, LAWRENCE LA FOUNTAIN-STOKES, FRANCES NEGRÓN-MUNTANER Guest Editors
Elizabeth Marrero and Arthur Avilés. Photographer Johan Ebbers. Reprinted, by permission, from Arthur Avilés.
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In the making since 2002, the current volume of CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies on queer Puerto Rican sexualities represents the culmination of diverse efforts by Centro and many academics, researchers, artists, and community activists to support and disseminate scholarship that focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual (LGBTT), and queer lives.1 This special issue can also be seen as a testament to the vitality of the relatively new field of “queer Puerto Rican studies,” which is to say, the crystallization of diverse forms of scholarship in the humanities and social and natural sciences focusing on the production of sexualized identities, divergent gender expression, and how sexualized identities and practices form a part of and challenge dominant notions of Puerto Rican culture and society. Although it was not until the 1990s that there was a true explosion of Puerto Rican queer discourses, the foundation of the current interest begins in the post- WWII period. With the increase in urbanization, consumption, and migration following World War II, Puerto Ricans in general, including queers, became more visible in urban spaces. This visibility began to catch the attention of researchers, particularly in the U.S., who began to produce new “scientific” discourses about Puerto Rican sexuality. Among the most emblematic of these early studies is Oscar Lewis’s well-known ethnography La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (1966). Consistent with much social science of the period, studies such as this one tended towards the pathologization of non- heterosexual practices that were also not aimed at procreation. The pathologization of queer Puerto Rican sexual practices of course had a contradictory effect: while partly aiming to dismiss and stigmatize Puerto Rican queers, it also produced a public position from which to challenge those very same assumptions. Overt challenges to dominant social science and generalized (and acceptable) homophobic public discourse were not slow in coming. In the U.S., not only were many Puerto Ricans part of New York’s vibrant gay and lesbian and trans communities, they were also part of the 1969 Stonewall riot, the queer, sex- and gender-radical uprising that symbolized the arrival of Gay Liberation in the U.S., as well as part of the most radical leadership of the newly formed LGBTT organizations. On the island, Comunidad de Orgullo Gay was founded in 1974, and the women’s group within this organization, Alianza de Mujeres de la Comunidad de Orgullo Gay,2 along with other lesbian-feminist and gay activists, in different ways and with different strategies, sought to challenge the symbolic, legal, and everyday discrimination and exclusion suffered by women, lesbians, and gay men. At the same time, it is important to note that while Puerto Ricans organized against homophobia in our historic homelands, that is, Puerto Rico and New York (symbolic capital of DiaspoRico), fundamental differences between the two geographies generated different responses, reflecting the material, social, and cultural conditions of each. Many island gay and lesbian activists focused on the eradication of discriminatory legal statutes, the homophobia and lesbophobia of the press, police harassment, and gay youth suicide and homelessness. In New York, queer Puerto Rican activism tended to focus on additional targets, including the racism of the mainstream gay and lesbian movement, transvestite and transgender discrimination, and the end of violence against queers. In both contexts, however, organizing was sporadic and unequal. This was the case due to homophobia and sexism within other movements in Puerto Rico, as well as the racism and elitism of U.S. mainstream gay and lesbian organizations, and homo- phobia and sexism in the racial and ethnic movements in the U.S. Puerto Ricans in New
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York also had the need to battle other fronts such as racial and ethnic bigotry, class and cultural biases, and economic barriers. In addition, since the 1970s, the relative invisibility of lesbian sexuality, the greater influence of feminism on lesbians, and the conflicts between lesbians and gay men within gay organizations, led many women to concentrate their efforts on the production of alternative discourses on lesbian sexuality as part of a more general critique of not only homophobia but sexism, racism, and other forms of social subordination. This tendency is evident in both Puerto Rico and the U.S. and can be appreciated in works such as Hilda Hidalgo’s pioneering studies on Puerto Rican lesbians in the U.S. as well as in Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (1987), an anthology edited by Juanita Ramos, the pseudonym of the sociologist and activist Juanita Díaz-Cotto. An influential work, Compañeras brings together essays and oral histories of seventeen Puerto Rican women, most of them residing in the U.S. As other lesbian works of this period, this book was also intimately informed by the sharing of experiences, stories, and work among small groups of women. In Compañeras’ case, these groups were the Colectiva Lesbiana Latinoamericana formed in 1980, the Latina Lesbian History Project, and Las Buenas Amigas, both founded in 1986. Individual Third World, Jewish, and white women were also closely involved with the project. Undoubtedly, the 1980s was a particularly productive time for lesbian cultural production. Poets Nemir Matos-Cintrón and Luz María Umpierre published much of their most important work during this time and the voices of Puerto Rican women were also part of pan-Latina efforts such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s groundbreaking This Bridge Called My Back. Yet the AIDS epidemic made it a difficult time for queer communities in Puerto Rico and in the U.S. In many ways, the AIDS epidemic significantly transformed the political and discursive terrain of queer activism, particularly for gay men. For gay men, initially targeted as the “cause” of AIDS by Christian fundamentalists and other conservatives, AIDS imposed the need to “come out” as intrinsically linked to survival. As captured in the ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) slogan “silence equals death,” many Puerto Rican gay men began to speak about their lives as never before, participated in national movements to take care of their own in the face of government negligence, and insisted on their inclusion within the nation to claim essential services and treatment. Despite of, or perhaps because of, the devastation that AIDS brought to many Puerto Rican communities, coping with AIDS facilitated the formulation of more inclusive discourses on community and family, integrated many gay men into state structures such as health care facilities, and transformed them into part of a specific political constituency. The epidemi- ological research on HIV/AIDS (especially on the behavior of Men who have Sex with Men/MSM) by Alex Carballo-Diéguez and José Toro-Alfonso and their colleagues also dramatically transformed our understanding of Puerto Rican sexualities as it produced empirical knowledge that would have been nearly impossible to obtain in the pre-AIDS era. Moreover, the AIDS epidemic produced important cultural practices that sought to disrupt victimization, offer a critique on homophobia, and formulate alternative ways of telling queer Puerto Rican stories. AIDS was, for instance, an important subtext to the work of major writers like Manuel Ramos Otero, who died of AIDS complications in 1990, and a key theme in the hybrid essays by critic and writer Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez, which combined personal narratives with poignant cultural analysis. AIDS was also at the heart of the early work of co-editor Frances Negrón-Muntaner,
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whose documentary AIDS in the Barrio (1989) was the first Puerto Rican film to address the cultural and economic context of the epidemic; she also promoted dialogue on the epidemic’s impact through interviews with gay and AIDS activists Luis “Popo” Santiago (1991) and Robert Vázquez-Pacheco and Juan David Acosta (1994), published in Radical America and CENTRO Journal’s special AIDS issue. Although the 1980s produced a great diversity of work by and about queer Puerto Ricans, during the 1990s and 2000s, queer discourse found a new home: academia. This was the result of political struggles of LGBTT scholars (including graduate and undergraduate students) to be out on their campuses, address sexuality as a topic of inquiry in their classrooms, and gain recognition of queer scholarship as a legitimate area of academic inquiry. Although the 1980s produced a great Even if acceptance is still a struggle in many academic diversity of work by and around queer contexts as it meets with “ differing degrees of resistance Puerto Ricans, during the 1990s and depending on the discipline, 2000s, queer discourse found a new the conservatism of the faculty home: academia. and campus environment as well as the gender, sexuality, class, and race of those who attempt to engage in this” scholarship, the academization of queer discourse had important consequences. The heterogeneity of writing characteristic of the earlier period—which often included diary entries, testimonials, journalism, and other forms—was replaced by a recognized scholarly field, queer Puerto Rican studies, with specific parameters, methodologies, and content. The establishment of a field that also included venues of publication, peer communities, and even rewards produced an explosion of professional work. While mentioning all the important works of the last twenty years is impossible in such a short overview, it is useful to highlight these works’ tendencies and some of the key figures. Documenting LGBTT histories became a constant concern for the new writers. Characteristic of this moment was Negrón-Muntaner’s 1992 two-part essay, “Echoing Stonewall and Other Dilemmas,” one of the earliest attempts to historicize the development of lesbian and gay activism in Puerto Rico using academic research standards. This historiographic impulse continues in more recent scholarship, including in co-editor Luis Aponte-Pares’s critical essay on U.S. Puerto Rican queer activism “Páginas Omitidas: The Gay and Lesbian Presence” (1998), Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’ 1999 essay “1898 and the History of a Queer Puerto Rican Century: Imperialism, Diaspora, and Social Transformation” on the imbricated nature of U.S. and Puerto Rican homosexualities, the ambitious work on Puerto Rican feminism by Ana Irma Rivera Lassén and Elizabeth Crespo Kebler titled Documentos del feminismo en Puerto Rico: Facsímiles de la historia (2001), Aixa Ardín Pauneto’s film and BA senior thesis Elyíbiti (2002), and Manolo Guzmán’s Gay Hegemony/Latino Homosexualities (2006), all of which offer key critical insights, historical summaries, and personal perspectives to the development of the feminist and LGBTT movements. A second central concern of the new scholarship has been the mechanics of gender production and its disruption. Influenced by feminism, some of these works have focused on the toxic—if productive and at times pleasurable—effects of gender ideologies, including on male subjectivity, a largely ignored subject matter in earlier waves of writing. In these works, such as Rafael L. Ramírez’s Dime capitán: Reflexiones
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sobre la masculinidad (1993), Félix Jiménez’s Las prácticas de la carne: construcción y representación de las masculinidades puertorriqueñas (2004), and José Toro-Alfonso and Sheilla Rodríguez-Madera’s edited volume Al margen del género: la violencia doméstica en parejas del mismo sexo (2005), women are no longer the only “gendered” subjects. Even further, groundbreaking research on the history of intersexuality, such as that of María del Carmen Baerga Santini (2002), and on transgender experience (Sheilla Rodríguez- Madera 2003; Sebastián Colón-Otero 2006) is helping to break down and reconcept- ualize long-held beliefs about the intersections of biology, sexuality, and gender. Equally important, much of recent queer production has focused on challenging of the heterosexist and heteronormative underpinnings of nationalist discourses, which remain dominant among Puerto Rican cultural and political organizations. One could say that queer Puerto Rican scholarship has been at the forefront of critically assessing the notions of nation and sovereignty as concepts that guarantee liberation for Puerto Ricans. This tendency is evident in Juan G. Gelpí’s Literatura y paternalismo en Puerto Rico (1993), in which he critiques the centrality of paternalist tropes to the narration of Puerto Rican nationalism and Rubén Ríos- Ávila’s La raza cómica: del sujeto en Puerto Rico (2002), an ironic critique of the intersection of nationalist and gender tropes. The second wave of Negrón- Muntaner’s work, the film Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), the introduction to Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism (1997), and Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (2004) also constitute a decade-long effort to think of alternatives to nationalist ideologies as modes of community building. s many LGBTTs experience significant violence in culture and many queer scholars are working in the humanities, it is not surprising that many of this A period’s studies focus on cultural production and the ways that it produces queer identities, not only for LGBTTs but also for Puerto Rico as a (trans) national space. Within cultural production, two areas have received the most attention: literature and the performing arts, particularly theater and film. Within literature, the essays and books of Jossianna Arroyo, Efraín Barradas, Luis Felipe Díaz, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, and José Quiroga have made significant contributions to the production of a sophisticated and comparative theoretical apparatus to examine the production of the gendered subject in Puerto Rican, pan-Caribbean, and Latin American cultural contexts. Sandoval-Sánchez’s work on the theater, including José, Can You See? Latinos On and Off Broadway (1999) and Stages of Life (coauthored with Nancy Saporta Sternbach, 2001), remains unsurpassed in its scope and breadth. Another important tendency is the exploration of transvestite identities and tropes as ways of speaking about Puerto Rican culture and politics, a phenomenon that is linked but not coextensive to the actual documentation of transgender and transsexual lives and experiences. This is evident in co-editor Jossianna Arroyo’s essay “Sirena canta boleros: travestismo y sujetos transcaribeños en Sirena Selena vestida de pena” (2003a), an essay that forms part of Arroyo’s much broader intellectual project on understanding what she calls “cultural transvestism” (Travestismos culturales, 2003b) as a hegemonic strategy of cooptation and domination and “cultural drag” (2002b) as a subaltern strategy of resistance. Arroyo’s “Sirena canta boleros” formed part of the Fall 2003 special dossier edited by Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez on Mayra Santos- Febres’s bestselling novel Sirena Selena vestida de pena, a literary text that imaginatively recounts the exploits of several Puerto Rican drag queens in Santurce
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and Santo Domingo; this CENTRO Journal dossier included seven dramatically heterogeneous scholarly articles on the topic, in addition to an interview with the novelist.3 Many of these works highlight the intersections of spatial mobility, changing geographies, and the construction and transformations of self engaged in by trans subjects, a topic La Fountain-Stokes has explored more recently in his scholarship on what he identifies as “translocas” and “transmachas” (2005b), that is to say, island and diasporic Puerto Rican performers, actors, and activists who engage in cross-dressing as part of a project to redefine national and personal identities. Given this nearly four-decade trajectory, the objectives of the current issue are manyfold. In addition to articulating a vision for queer Puerto Rican studies and honoring our pioneers, the issues’ goals are to demonstrate that in fact there is a substantial amount of research on LGBTT/queer Puerto Rican topics; to show that there has been a development of the field, so that people who do this research nowadays actually have a significant amount of scholarship to build on; and to showcase some of the new directions and perspectives of this new field. The current issue consists of twelve scholarly essays, and six creative and/or activist interventions organized into various themes that have a strong connection with each other. As it is clear for all meditations on queerness and queer Puerto Rican sexualities, many of them are written between disciplines; they are connected to political and social activism; and they reflect clearly the translocal (or transnational) condition of queer cultures on the island and in the diaspora. Queerness as a global phenomenon is central to these interventions, a fact that does not leave out the specificities and dialogical connections with Puerto Rican national imaginaries. The issue opens with an essay by Isabel Córdova-Súarez, “Setting Them Straight,” where the writer explores a series of social reforms that took place on the island in the context of mass migration to the U.S. during the 1950s, specifically those that institutionalized social work as a regulatory practice to manage discordant childhood sexualities. Although experiments with the health and hygiene of Puerto Ricans is not particular to this period, all Puerto Ricans were affected by these health reforms, which were intended as part of the reeducation of the masses or “unruly bodies” of Puerto Ricans. In concrete terms, to prepare Puerto Ricans, a largely rural people until this point, for “modernity,” required that the state test contraceptive methods, hormonal treatments, and other non-approved prescriptions on Puerto Rican women and children, and that social workers mediate whenever families were unable to control the sexual activities of their children. These strategies promoted by the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments in health, eugenics, psychology, and social work had the ultimate objective of “setting them straight,” that is, of regulating any sexually creative or transgressive act (i.e., masturbation, bestiality, intergenerational relationships, incest, and male effeminacy) which was classified as “deviant” from the heterosexual reproductive norm. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé in “The Oxymoron of Sexual Sovereignty” raises the larger questions of sovereignty in relation to sexualized identities. In this essay, Cruz- Malavé argues that Puerto Rican and Caribbean constructions of sexuality are deeply connected to the legacies of slavery and colonialism and its violence against subaltern bodies. In the specific case of Puerto Rico, this violence appears as a form of affirmation or negotiation vis-à-vis the United States, an important element that “queers” the island’s legal status. Since Puerto Rico has a double status as an unincorporated territory, both foreign in the U.S. Constitution and also domestic as international rights are concerned, Cruz-Malavé affirms that the philosopher Giorgio
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Agamben’s now popular sovereignty model is insufficient to address the complexities of coloniality in Puerto Rico, and proposes instead a provocative rereading of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s ideas on political contingency and negotiation. In the next two essays, scholars Radost Rangelova and María deGuzmán investigate marginal subjectivities in Puerto Rican literary narratives, and their relationship to broader discourses. As Cruz-Malavé, Rangelova engages with Agamben’s definition of state of exception and the Law in her essay entitled “Nationalism, States of Exception and Caribbean Identities,” but this time in the context of disciplinary institutions, including the prison in Manuel Ramos Otero’s short story “Loca la de la locura” and marginal city spaces such as the transvestite bars and cabarets in Santurce and in the Dominican Republic where “Loca” and “Sirena Selena” (the protagonist of Santos-Febres’s novel of the same name) dwell. For Rangelova, these marginal characters live a form of “bare life,” but continue to negotiate complex spaces, to escape total repression and cooptation. These negotiations are also part of what María deGuzmán defines as “tactics of abjection” in her essay on Mariana Romo-Carmona’s novel Living at Night. For deGuzmán, it is night—as creative or transgressive—that defines these tactics of resistance. Transgression may well be the most appropriate term to describe the lives and work of early LGBTT activists. This becomes quite apparent in the transcription of Puerto Rican-Venezuelan activist Sylvia Rivera’s talk at a meeting of the community group Latino Gay Men of New York, where she discusses her involvement in many struggles for social justice. As trans activist and scholar Jessi Gan makes clear in her essay, “‘Still at the Back of the Bus’: Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle,” “the Gay Movement” as constituted after the Stonewall riot, is in itself a problematic term as it erased the role of transgender individuals, transsexuals and drag queens of color, such as Rivera and of other people of color involved in the riots at the Stonewall Inn. Rivera’s longing for space and freedom becomes then, not an utopian space of liberation, but rather, a form of disidentification (to follow José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization) where these racial, class, ethnic and class differences are still dividing and creating conflicting spaces and agendas in the LGBTT movements in the United States. Similarly, Tim Retzloff’s essay “Eliding Trans/ Latino/a Queer Experience in U.S. LGBT History,” argues that the cleavages of the movement created distinct political agendas in the U.S./Latino/a LGBTT community, as the stories of Sylvia Rivera and José Sarria show us. Here, the comparison between the middle-class, assimilated, West Coast-based, Colombian- American “female impersonator” José Sarria (the first openly-gay person to run for public office in the United States) and the radical East Coast street drag queen Sylvia Rivera sheds light on different queer immigrant experiences and political values. The multiple ways in which race, class, gender, and other categories of experience intersect queer lives, produces a double consciousness and duplicity that may acquire, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued in Specters of Marx, a “spectral-haunting quality” in which not only culture, but national histories follow immigrants who become haunted by the question of identity. In this sense, one could argue with Betsy A. Sandlin in her essay entitled “Poetry Always Demands All My Ghosts” on the work of Ohio-based Puerto Rican poet Rane Arroyo, that queer Puerto Rican literature is inescapably haunted. Through her reading of Arroyo’s work, Sandlin describes all the complexities of these “hauntings” as the poet tries to escape mainstream constructions of Puerto Rican identity and create his own. Self-images, the Narcissus myth, Buddhism, and the lives of exiled or diasporic Puerto Rican poets such as William Carlos Williams become resources for Arroyo’s transcultural self-fashioning.
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The pervasive ideology of nationalism can also be understood as both a haunting quest for identity and a form of cancellation of homosexual desire. In Alfredo Villanueva-Collado’s “René Marqués, Ángel Lozada, and the Constitution of a (Queer) Puerto Rican National Subject,” the poet and critic examines the connection between homophobia and homosexual desire in two novels by offering a “queer-engagé” reading of René Marqués’s La mirada and Ángel Lozada’s La patografía to conclude that there is an internalized homophobia in these narratives, which represents the ambiguous relationship between homosexuality and national discourse. Violence, religion, the stereotypical representation of the gay character as “Loca,” the closet, and the destruction of the gay character at the hands of the community are some of the themes that highlight this clear “symptom” of Puerto Rican national culture. As co-editor Jossianna Arroyo (2002a) has argued elsewhere in her analysis of these two authors (Marqués and Lozada), it is clear that homosexuality as a form of pathology reflects not only what remains on the outside of Puerto Rican ideologies but an inherent symptom (following the philosopher Slavoj Ziˇzek’s theorization) in the definition of “the great Puerto Rican family.” Not so much as the Other, but as the Other who is too similar, el “pato” o la “pata” are part of these national ideologies. The importance of the “pato” trope in Puerto Rican, American, and Jewish-American narratives of nation and ethnicity is precisely the subject of Lawrence La Fountain- Stokes’s essay “Queer Ducks, Puerto Rican Patos and Jewish-American Feigelekh.” In this essay, the “pato” or bird metaphor appears as a central representation of Puerto Rican, Caribbean, U.S., and Jewish-American constructions of homosexuality, and one that stands for a contested and marginal identity. In a similar vein, in “Boricua Lesbians,” Lourdes Torres delves into these games of visibility and invisibility connected to what she defines as “the politics of passing” in Puerto Rican lesbian culture and the ways “passing” intersects with race, gender, and sexuality. By offering close readings of community leader Antonia Pantoja’s life and of select film, performance, literary, and activist/community works such as Janis Astor del Valle’s Transplantations, Juanita Ramos’s Compañeras: Latina Lesbians, Negrón-Muntaner’s Brincando el charco, and Erika Lopez’s Flaming Iguanas, Torres contributes to our understanding of the complexity and richness of Puerto Rican lesbian experience in the United States. he two concluding essays, Gilberto Blasini’s essay “¡Bien gorgeous!” and Horacio N. Roque-Ramírez’s “‘Mira, yo soy boricua y estoy aquí’” examine the ways T performance artists and musicians such as the translocal Eduardo Alegría and club owners such as the CaliRican (California Rican) Rafa Negrón promote and “represent” cultural identities across borders, through performance (in San Juan and New York) and queer Latino nightclubs such as “Pan Dulce” in the mid to late 1990s. Bodily performance with multimedia, videos and music was central to Alegría’s work, while for Negrón Pan Dulce constructed Pan-Caribbean and Pan-Latino solidarity from below, as it recreated urban space in the San Francisco Bay Area through music, performance and dance. The volume closes with a series of interviews and creative essays that reflect and enrich the multiple angles discussed by the articles, in themes such as performance and dance in New York (La Fountain-Stokes’s interview with Arthur Avilés) and the oral history of transvestism as a social-performance of politics (Javier Laureano’s oral history of the Puerto Rican drag performer Antonio Pantojas). Negrón-Muntaner’s previously unpublished short story “The Ugly Dyckling,” a reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic tale, exemplifies La Fountain-Stokes’s argument on the centrality of “duck” tropes in Puerto Rican literature, while the images of Luis Carle’s
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lens and Mari de Pedro’s artwork produce a visual statement of the richness of Puerto Rican and U.S. Latino/a GLBTT-queer cultures. Lastly, despite the very rich offerings of this issue, many topics remain unaddressed. For instance, this issue relied heavily on the submissions of those who received our call for articles and on the co-editors’ efforts to get individuals to participate. It also included several articles that were submitted to CENTRO Journal before our call appeared. The graduate students’ and professors’ articles and interviews that were selected underwent rigorous blind peer-review before being accepted; we also did not receive papers in many fields outlined in the call for submissions, such as natural sciences, epidemiology, and psychology, which can be interpreted as one of the limitations or difficulties of interdisciplinarity, particularly given the boundaries enforced by universities and other scholarly bodies when it comes to valorizing diverse publications as valid sites for the dissemination of knowledge. The fact that any issue on queer studies cannot be exhaustive represents an opportunity to call attention to trends in the field that require further study and critique. Thematically, studies of queer Latina sexualities and subjectivities, for example, are still fewer in comparison to queer Latino sexualities and symbolic practices. More attention to issues of race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality and their intersections, as well as greater interdisciplinarity, both from scholars and interested readers, will likely contribute to more complex understandings than are available and in circulation. Queer Puerto Rican studies are, in effect, an amalgam of competing and at times contradictory discourses; patience and generosity will help to facilitate more nuanced, holistic views, as well as bring into clearer focus the important differences of opinion and disagreements that actually exist. From methodological and political points of views, much queer Puerto Rican scholarship is primarily invested in the inscription of gays and lesbians into various national, racial, and ethnic narratives rather than questioning the very terms of engagement. In this regard, one could argue that the addition of gay and lesbian subjects to standard accounts of the national or the ethnic is not enough; entirely new ways of accounting for queer lives in excess of regulatory categories are urgently needed. At another level, despite the importance of the mass media, the Internet, advertisement, music, and other non-literary sites of subject production that are evident in efforts like Orgulloboricua.net, Pedro Julio Serrano’s Internet sites Puerto Rico para tod@s and El blog del PJ, Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion’s Chicago-based award-winning podcast Feast of Fools, Sebastian Colón’s blog Metamorphosis Boricua, and Manuel Clavell Carrasquillo’s blog Estruendomudo, a significant part of the field remains focused on the literary as the master site of gay and lesbian subject production, although as the essays in this issue demonstrate, this is slowly changing. The limitations of current scholarship are, then, the necessary precondition for change, and point to the need to continue to raise questions. For instance, how do pan-ethnic and global categories of analysis such as Latino/a or Latino/a American complicate but also re-discipline national ones? To what extent do queer theory and queer studies contribute to the male bias of intellectual production as lesbians literally disappear from view? How does queer Puerto Rican studies differ from Puerto Rican queer studies, and to what effects? In sum, we leave you with one special issue, and many questions.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The co-editors would like to thank CENTRO Journal general editor Xavier F. Totti for his extraordinary leadership and for all of the work involved in coordinating this issue. We would also like to thank all of the staff at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, particularly José de Jesús, whose compromiso with the LGBTT Puerto Rican community runs far and deep. We also gratefully acknowledge the work of all anonymous peer reviewers who evaluated these articles and ensured that the journal maintained strict norms of academic rigor and excellence. Finally, we would like to thank all of the volume contributors for participating in this historic enterprise.
NOTES 1 The names of the co-editors for this special number of CENTRO Journal are organized in alphabetical order. 2 See the interview to Carmen Torres in Rivera Lassén and Crespo Kebler, Documentos del feminismo (2001). A typographic error in the title identifies la Alianza de Mujeres de la Comunidad de Orgullo Gay as Alianza de Mujeres del Colectivo de Concientización Gay. Colectivo de Concientización Gay was an organization formed in the 1980s. 3 See, for example, J. Arroyo (2003), Barradas (2003), Díaz (2003), Peña-Jordán (2003), Sandoval-Sánchez (2003), D. Torres (2003).
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______. 2001. Exilio y tránsitos entre la Norzagaray y Christopher Street: Acercamientos a una poética del deseo homosexual en Manuel Ramos Otero. Revista Iberoamericana 67(194–195): 31–54. ______. 2002a. Historias de familia: Migraciones y escritura homosexual en la literatura puertorriqueña. Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 26(3): 361–78. ______. 2002b. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Performing Racial and Gender Identities in Javier Cardona’s “You Don’t Look Like.” In The State of Latino Theater in the United States, ed. Luis A. Ramos-García, 152–71. New York: Routledge. ______. 2003a. Sirena canta boleros: Travestismo y sujetos transcaribeños en Sirena Selena vestida de pena. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 15(2): 38–51. ______. 2003b. Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. ______. 2005. Itinerarios de viaje: Las otras islas de Manuel Ramos Otero. Revista Iberoamericana 71(212): 865–85. Arroyo, Rane. 1993. Columbus’s Orphan. Arcadia, FL: JVC Books. ______. 1996. The Singing Shark. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe. ______. 1998. Pale Ramón. Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books. ______. 2002. Home Movies of Narcissus. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ______. 2005a. How to Name a Hurricane. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ______. 2005b. The Portable Famine. Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press/University of Missouri. Baerga Santini, María del Carmen. 2002. Cuerpo subversivo, norma seductora: un capítulo de la historia de la heterosexualidad en Puerto Rico. OP. CIT. 14: 49–95. Barradas, Efraín. 1974. Fragoso, Víctor, El reino de la espiga: Canto al coraje de Walt y Federico. Ventana 12: 35–40. ______. 1977. El machismo existencialista de René Marqués: relecturas y nuevas lecturas. Sin nombre 8(3): 69–81. ______. 1979. Fragoso, Víctor, Ser Islands/Being Islands. Sin nombre 9(4): 91–3. ______. 1982. “Todo lo que dijo es cierto...”: En memoria de Víctor Fernández Fragoso. Revista Chicano-Riqueña 10(3): 43–6. ______. 1993a. Arenas movedizas. Piso 13 (Edición Gay) 2(3): 13. ______. 1993b. “Epitafios”: El canon y la canonización de Manuel Ramos Otero. La Torre 7(27–28): 319–38. ______. 2003. Sirena Selena vestida de pena o el Caribe como travesti. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 15(2): 52–65. Bécquer, Marcos, and Alisa Lebow. 1996. Docudrag, or “Realness” as a Documentary Strategy: Félix Rodríguez’s One Moment in Time (1992). In The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, eds. Chon Noriega and Ana López, 143–70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bleys, Rudi C. 2000. Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art 1810-Today. London: Continuum. Braulio, Mildred. 1998. Challenging the Sodomy Law in Puerto Rico. NACLA Report on the Americas 31(4): 33–4. ______. 2002. Matrimonio sin género. Revista Jurídica de la Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico 36 (3): 517–31.
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______. 1997. Sobre el tráfico simbólico de mujeres: Homosocialidad, identidad nacional y modernidad literaria en Puerto Rico (Apuntes para una relectura de El puertorriqueño dócil de René Marqués). Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 23(45): 261–78. ______. 1998. Nationalism, Male Anxiety, and the Lesbian Body in Puerto Rican Narrative. In Hispanisms and Homosexualities, ed. Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin, 76–100. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Marqués, René. 1976. La mirada. Río Piedras: Editorial Antillana. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2003. Caribe Two Ways: Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico. San Juan: Ediciones Callejón. ______. 2006. Beyond Homonormativity: Queer Intimacies as Alternative Narratives in the Hispanic Caribbean. Paper presented at the 31st Caribbean Studies Association Conference, Port of Spain, Trinidad, 29 May-2 June. Martorell, Antonio. 1993. Nominación, dominación y desafío. Piso 13 (Edición Gay) 2(3): 10. Matos-Cintrón, Nemir. 1981. A través del aire y del fuego pero no del cristal. Río Piedras: Atabex. ______, and Yolanda V. Fundora. 1981. Las mujeres no hablan así. Río Piedras: Atabex. Merced, Jorge B. 1994. Teatro y SIDA. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 6(1–2): 174–6. Mock, Carlos T. 2003. Borrowing Time: A Latino Sexual Odyssey. Mountain View, CA: Floricanto Press. Mock, Gloria, and Maricarmen Ramírez. 1990. SIDA: ¿Crisis o reto transformador? 2nd. ed. San Juan: Editorial Cultural. ______, and Wilfred Martínez. 1995. Sexualidad: Sus conceptos básicos. San Juan: Editorial Cultural. Mujer Intégrate Ahora. 1977. ¡Anita Bryant, Salte de Nuestro Camino! In Documentos del feminismo en Puerto Rico: Facsímiles de la historia, Vol. I 1970–1979, ed. Ana Irma Rivera Lassén and Elizabeth Crespo Kebler, 345–48. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Muñiz Couto, Doris. 1988. Análisis de las experiencias y dificultades de mujeres lesbianas en Puerto Rico en un grupo de discusión: Hacia una visión liberadora del lesbianismo. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz-Laboy, Miguel A. 2004. Beyond “MSM”: Sexual Desire Among Bisexually-Active Latino Men in New York City. Sexualities 7(1): 55–80. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. 1990–91. Insider/Outsider: Making Films in the Puerto Rican Community. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 3(1): 81–5. ______. 1991. Twenty Years of Puerto Rican Activism: An Interview with Luis “Popo” Santiago. Radical America 25(1): 39–51. [Published September 1993.] ______. 1992. Echoing Stonewall and Other Dilemmas: The Organizational Beginnings of a Gay and Lesbian Agenda in Puerto Rico, 1972–1977. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 4(1): 77–95; 4(2): 98–115. ______. 1993. La familia de todos nosotros y algunos que somos huérfanos: Una entrevista con Magali García-Ramis. Alba de América 11(21): 437–54. Also published as “Magali García Ramis” in Hispamérica 22(64–65): 89–104.
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______. 1994. Surviving Cultures: A Dialogue on AIDS and Gay Latino Politics. CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 6(1–2): 115–27. ______. 1995. Watching Tongues Untie(d) While Reading Zami: Mapping Boundaries in Black Gay and Lesbian Narratives. In Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities, ed. Angharad N. Valdivia, 245–76. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. ______. 1996. Drama Queens: Latino Gay and Lesbian Independent Media. In The Ethnic Eye: Latino Media Arts, eds. Chon Noriega and Ana López, 59–78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ______. 1999. When I Was a Puerto Rican Lesbian. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies 5(4): 511–26. ______. 2004. Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York: New York University Press. ______, dir. 1994. Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican. Film. New York: Women Make Movies. ______, and Peter Biella, dir. 1989. AIDS in the Barrio: Eso no me pasa a mí. Video. New York: Cinema Guild. ______, and Rita González. 2004. Boricua Gazing: An Interview with Frances Negrón- Muntaner. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30(1): 1345–60. Nieves-Rosa, Luis, and José Toro-Alfonso. 1996. Cuestionario sobre violencia doméstica en parejas de hombres gay puertorriqueños. San Juan: Fundación SIDA de Puerto Rico. Oliver, Jorge. 1999. Pride in Puerto Rico. Film. San Francisco: Frameline. Orgullo Boricua.net. Portal de la comunidad gay en Puerto Rico. Electronic resource.
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