THE CONSTITUTION OF THE GAY  SUBJECT IN LATIN AMERICAN NARRATIVE; A BRIEF SURVEY.

I am going to attempt a brief survey of the constitution of the  gay masculine subject as it appears in Latin American narratives, following David Bergman’s idea that “fiction is not merely reportage.  No matter how a realistic a work of fiction pretends to be, it is fundamentally linked to myth and calls on its readers to emulate the protagonist’s actions, to avoid his mistakes or to accept his predestined fate” (208).  The masculine subject in Latin American narrative is part of a cultural gender myth including both heterosexual and homosexual males.  My own research moved from the latter to the former as I realized that in order to understand the depiction of deviancy I needed the depiction of the normative.  Given the brevity of the presentation, I will not go into the problems I have encountered pursuing my line of study but will try to provide an overview of my findings.

Latin American culture fetichizes masculinity, equating maleness with national identity through the concept of “cultural purity,’ which holds that any deviation from the norm comes to the culture from the outside. Silvia Molloy, writing on “homosexual panic’ in Martí and Darío, points out that in turn-of-the-century Argentina, homosexuality was attributed to Italian migration, just as Donna Guy points out prostitution was blamed on the Jewish migration. 

Richard Parker, in his study of Brazilian sexual mores, has found out that homosexual practices among Brazilian Indians were attributed historically to the nefarious influence of the Portuguese.  Spanish and Portuguese chroniclers, on the other hand, blamed native Americans for (homo)sexual  corruption among the European settlers.  Thus the culture covers its ass with an “outsider” explanation for the existence of homosexuality among Latin American native and Creole populations.  Sometimes anthropological evidence is ignored in favor  a more politically correct version of reality.  Once I was traveling with the Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón, who indignantly rejected the theory proposed by Clark Taylor as to the Aztecs’ intolerance of homosexuality (as he also rejected their alleged ritual cannibalism).

A second stereotype routinely equates homosexuality with femaleness or effeminacy. Thus, it was paramount for me to examine the parameters of normative masculinity, and in particular its most virulent manifestation, the “macho man.”  I also wanted, following Eve Sedgewick’s lead, to inquire into those configurations she has labeled “homosocial,” that is, libidinal relationships between men mediated through the body of a woman or through social hierarchies.  Freud provided a starting point in his intriguing but ultimately incomplete analysis of the libidinal components present as the cohesive element in male groups and societies.  

Upon examining David Viñas’ Jauría, I found there is on the part of macho men an obsessive fear of the feminine, starting at the level of their own bodies.  Parts of the male body are perceived as female in nature, particularly bodily orifices.  In terms of the topography of the body, front/below is masculine whereas back/below is feminine.  Penetration is masculine; yielding to penetration by any means, including weapons such as a knife or a bullet, feminizes the male body,.  Therefore, killing is equated with penetrating and carries a masculine libidinal charge.  To conquer, whether it be an enemy, a woman or a city means to penetrate sexually.  There is a peculiar from of homosexual panic at work here, since it is manifested in the macho’s own body.  Even in heterosexual love-making there are male body parts that are held untouchable.  In Dar la cara, also by Viñas, a woman tries to fondle her lover’s nipples.  He rejects her indignantly, stating that such caresses are “only for queers.”

Homosocial triangular configurations appear abundantly.  In Jauría, the relationship between Simón, the protagonist, and his superior in the army, a general, is mediated trough the body of Arminia, Simon’s prostitute girlfriend, whom both men share.  In Rómulo Gallegos’ Canaima, Margos Vargas comments on the resemblance between his best friend, Manuel Ureña, and his friend’s fiancée, Maigualida, whom Marcos himself desires.

The macho man is impervious to pain and shows no emotions, his goal being to avoid the “internalized feminine.”  The only female allowed in his life is the mother, as an object of fetichistic adoration,.   Given the operating gender code, every attempt at male bonding between macho men must end in violent confrontation and/or death, as shown in the relationship between el Sute Cúpira and  Marcos Vargas in Canaima.  No one space can contain two macho men, just as a barnyard cannot contain two roosters.  Macho men are loners, but when in groups they organize according to strict hierarchies admitting only one dominant male at the top, whose precarious position is constantly challenged by other macho men.

Hierarchies, as Freud intimated, provide males with an outlet for their passive libidinal needs in culturally approved and gender-safe ways.  Within Latin American culture, the military provides the best example of what has been called “vassal” relationships, whereby a male is allowed to show submissive behaviors, such as blind obedience, loyalty, and dependency.  These behaviors, culturally defined as “feminine,” define the male’s status as a “vassal” who follows a male leader unquestioningly.  Al vencedor, by Marta Lynch, shows such a configuration by describing its conscript protagonist’s libidinal ties  to his lieutenant.  The leader, in order to trigger and command such submissive behavior, must  prove his superior masculinity to the males under his control, be it intellectually, like the lieutenant, or physically.  There is a  passage in Doña Bárbara where Santos Luzardo, whose “maleness’ is being questioned by his cowhands because he come from the city and is educated, shows he is as much of a man as they are by riding a wild  horse.

The macho male also appears, significantly, in novels dealing with sexual relationships between black and white men.  In both Bom-criolho, by the Brasilian Adolpho Caminha, and Hombres sin mujer, by the Cuban Carlos Montenegro, black men are portrayed as machos who fall in love with white adolescents.  The literary model comes from none other than Othello and, like it, ends in tragedy.  The black protagonists murder their white lovers out of jealousy.  Both novels show how these writers take advantage of a given genre’s parameters—in this case the naturalist novel—to deal with topics marginal to the canon. Hombres sin mujer goes further, tracing the protagonist’s psychological and spiritual growth through his love for the young man he eventually kills.

In a number of novels, including the two just mentioned, the males who arouse other males (such as the raped soldier in Viñas’ Dar la cara) share a number of peculiar physical characteristics. They are white-skinned, blond and blue-eyed.  There is a cultural perception that somehow this male type is “feminine.”  Conversely, dark-haired  hairy males are not perceived as homosexual.  I still recall having taken a Peruvian acquaintance to Christopher Street “to look at the gays.”  He could not believe that those well-muscled, bearded types in leather outfits could be faggots.  He remarked that they looked like policemen or soldiers, thereby touching upon a major cultural blind spot and highlighting to what extent masculinity is associated with uniforms and the military in Latin America.

Death for homosexuals has long been a Western literary commonplace. They commit suicide, as in  Augusto d’Halmar’s La pasión y muerte del cura Deusto,  Alfonso Hernandez Catá’s El ángel de Sodoma or Marta Brunet’s Amasijo.   Others are assasinated  or simply disaapear, as in  Isaac Chocrón’ Pájaro de mar por tierra, and Manuel Mujica Lainez’s Sergio.  Homosexuals also serve as convenient cultural scapegoats for all kinds of social evils.  In Mal don, the Argentinean Silvina Bullrich “exposes” homosexual mafias which, according to her, rule Argentina’s literary circles.  She also examines the hierarchical structure of gay relationships.  Homosexual couples are described as conforming to parameters of social, economic, educational and age asymmetry.  The dominant male is usually older, more educated and socially prominent than the younger “submissive” partner—the same pattern Cornelia Butler Flora has detected in Latin American photo-novels as favored for females in heterosexual relationships.  The couple’s younger member usually occupies a servant role in relation to the older partner, who is married and has children, as in Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversación en la catedral. 

Egalitarian relationships do not seem to occur.  It is essential that the appearance of heterosexuality be maintained. Bisexuality is strictly enforced as the only way out for homosexuals to enter some kind of public life provided, of course, that their deviant behavior be kept as secret as possible, as in Jaime Bayly’s  No se lo digas a nadie Egalitarian relationships are so rare that Ian Lumsden, writing in Homosexuality, Society and the State in Mexico, points out that for Mexicans, homosexuals who insists on having rights such as shared responsibilities and flexible sexual roles within a relationship are called “los internacionales,” a word underscoring the belief that anything having to do with homosexuality, for better or for worse, comes from outside the culture.

Culturally enforced bisexuality is also found in Humberto Hermosillo’s landmark film “Doña Herlinda and her son,’ where the relationship between the protagonist, a doctor, and his lover, a music student, is mediated by the doctor’s mother, a true dea ex machina in terms of the plot.   She arranges a marriage for her son and solves his “problem” by having the wife and the male lover live in separate wings of her own house. This utopian arrangement points to three important factors relating to homosexuals and their families.  Unmarried children are not expected to leave the family home but to live with their parents and take care of them.  In order to aspire to a place in society, the homosexual must satisfy the condition of heterosexuality.  In rare cases a male lover will be incorporated into the family unit, and some kind of socially acceptable explanation for his presence will be found. The opposite is more likely to happen.  In both Colombia and Brazil, for example, there are right-wing death squads dedicated to the wholesale extermination of homosexuals in the name of social purity, whereas the persecution of homosexuals in socialist Cuba has been amply documented.

A variant of the stereotype associates sexual deviance with criminality as can be seen in the Colombian novels El divino, by Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazabal and Nuestra señora de los sicarios by Fernando Vallejo, or Plata quemada, by the argentinian Ricardo Piglia..  It is not coincidental that the latter two have been made into movies.  The only Latin American film with a positive message about same sex male relationships I have seen so far is the courageous “Una historia de amor” from Argentina. 

The Chilean Marta Brunet, in Amasijo, prefers the psychoanalytic explanation, creating a protagonist who was turned into a homosexual by his mother by dressing him up as a girl, making him wear long curls (he too was blond) and suckling him until he was four years old.  The same approach appears in Cien años de soledad in the character of the last  José Arcadio, who is a pedophile (and a blond), is drowned in a pool by his young sexual playmates and represents the moral and physical decadence of the Buendía family  The connection between (homo)sexuality and national  decadence has been explicitly explored in Peruvian left-wing novels such as José Diez Canseco’s Duque and Oswaldo Reynoso’s  En octubre no hay milagros.  In both, upper class gay protagonists are made responsible for all kinds of social evils and serve to illustrate the necessary social decay associated in left-wing ideology with middle-class capitalism.       

Very few novels offer any kind of positive outlook on the subject of homosexuality.  My rare examples come from Mexican novels..  Después de todo, by José Ceballos Maldonado is a first person narrative recounting the protagonist’s sexual adventures and ending in a defiant note which gives the novel its title.  It stands in sharp contrast to Manuel Zapata’s searing En jirones, where a homosexual relationship is clinically described in all of its sadomasochistic intensity.  Zapata offers a much needed antidote in his delightful Melodrama, the only Latin American novel I have read so far where gay characters are offered the possibility of “living happily ever after.”  Memorias de Amadis, by Luisa Josefina Hernández, contrasts a maladjusted heterosexual couple with a well-adjusted homosexual one.  Its gay protagonist is a general in the Mexican army, a bold departure from the common stereotype of military men as totally heterosexual. 

The fact that so many gay Latin American writers have moved to the United  States has produced a new type of literature which is more open on the theme or sexuality in general and specifically homosexuality.  The development and growth of Queer Studies within the American Academia has in turn provided a critical/theoretical framework with which to study cultural productions by/for homosexuals.  However, the works of htse authors—Sonia Rivera Valdés,  Miguel Falqués-Certain,  Emilio Bejel,  Pedro Monge, Alberto Sandoval and Moisés Agosto among others –in spite of being known within the confines of the Latin American diaspora in the United States,  still struggles to achieve a place within an already marginal canon.  There is much still to do in order to shape the inclusive canon of Gay Latin American liiterature.

Alfredo Villanueva-Collado

New York