by Lazaro Lima
I can’t help but think at that moment that his survival is mine, and that my survival is his.
He is barely in his early twenties; I am thirty-one. It’s summer 2001.
Queer Losses: Lionel, Spring 2002
I have just arrived at the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellows retreat in gorgeous Lake Arrowhead, a meeting of up-and-coming academic minds of sorts. I am part of the new batch of hopeful intellectuals committed to the business of educational justice and more equitable racial, ethnic, and gender representation, and I have been invited to join because of the promise of my work. I am both apprehensive and excited about my first retreat with this group, because I get to meet Lionel Cantú Jr., fast-rising Chicano joto sociologist who’s publishing like a mad man on gay Mexican immigrants. I am quite sure he had to have played some role in my getting to share some of the UC glory and funds to carry my own queer Latino visions further.
The well-behaved young scholar in me approaches him first but cautiously, Lionel my elder only by a few years. He’s engaged in a lively conversation with several people around his table who are obviously just loving his company and his wit. I take this opportunity also to apologize to him again for not having been able to present at a conference he organized at his home campus in Santa Cruz; I remind him that one of my sisters’ life-threatening cerebral hemorrhage kept me focused on family and away from all academic commitments then. He tells me not to worry, and shares his own story of a “little hemorrhage” he had, an eye hemorrhage his doctor detected, likely blood-pressure related. “God,” I say, “you gotta be careful—so much work.” He just smiles.
Lionel and I hit it off during those three days of intellectual support, a queer mentoring relationship beginning to take place: he, a UC professor, articles and books in progress, very popular as a teacher, and even with a partner living with him; me, aiming for all of that, farther behind, especially on the partner bit. Over coffee or wine we talk about strategies of all kinds. He tells me, for example, of the hilarious “anonymous” gay Internet chat-room encounter he had once with someone who ended up being a well-established scholar and the tricky situation he found himself in then as the younger, more vulnerable one. He knew that once the electronic conversation had gotten into real-life details, including respective professional positions, chatting with his “buddy” became potentially risky. We agreed that the academic community can be a tricky thing, especially when it’s mixed with the queer cyber kind.
Several weeks after the retreat, I turn on my laptop one early morning at my parents’ home to read e-mail. I prioritize those related to work, ignore hundreds of others. In one of the first messages I open, Lionel’s book coediting partner, Eithne, writes in the message subject heading: “deeply regret to inform.” I am confused, without first reading the actual body of the message, because they had both told me days before over e-mail that they liked my essay contribution to their book, so it could not be about that. But “regret to inform”? Eithne writes to the other book contributors and me that Lionel died on Sunday, May 26, from cardiac arrest following a ruptured intestine. I just scream at the computer screen: “FUCK!” “This fucking sucks!” “No!” Selfishly, I am angry that I have one less connection in the world. I also think of Lionel’s book that I could not wait to read, and all the gay Mexican immigrants he interviewed in Southern California. The ethical oral historian in me also kicks in with a vengeance. Could we get Lionel’s interviewees together to let them know what happened? Would they care to know? I also think of Lionel’s immigrant partner, Hernando, with no family in the U.S., whom I don’t know at all, but write him a long card anyway, explaining to him what Lionel meant for me even in only the few weeks I knew him. I also let my parents know of his passing, and the important work he was doing. They feel bad and seem to understand exactly why this death is quite tragic for me. That night, tired from working all day and receiving the news of Lionel’s death, I write in my journal before watching ER. I don’t want the academic game to kill me. And when I am gone, I don’t want my name to ring the loudest in an institution.
Around the time of Lionel’s death, I am also monitoring and studying the coverage of queer culture in Spanish-language news media. Another project, yes, as if I don’t have enough to do already: more stress, more work, and more lives to theorize about. I do it mainly because postdocs, as glorious as they are, just don’t pay enough. So I successfully rent my bilingual gay Salvadoran academic brain and soul for several months to track and write about queers in print and television media in Spanish. The work is tedious, often boring and predictable, rarely interesting. But as I watch and read more and more, it becomes painful and sad to realize, after digesting hundreds of hours of televised, pre-packaged Latino culture—my culture—that heteronormativity is deep. It’s not the outright homophobia that freaks me out, the stuff that’s actually easy to expose. It’s the active writing and imaging out of me and my body and my needs that hurt. Watching so much, as if I didn’t already know this, hits me, yet another reminder of queer loneliness at work. Damn, this project is gonna kill me, I tell myself, if I don’t start to laugh about it. Again, I recommit myself, this time to being with my Central American queer writing gang on Monday nights, to continue hanging out and creating visions of our lives. Because I do want to stay alive; even in this heterosexual society I have to analyze and feel day in and day out. It’s so easy to forget the basics of survival sometimes.
War Cries and Other Battles: Winter 2003
It’s early March, and the imperialist drums of war are getting louder. Because I am overworked and overstressed, and I have promised myself to get my academic work done and stay healthy by going swimming three times a week, I choose not to get actively involved in most of the antiwar movement. It’s a decision full of conflict for a Salvadoran immigrant whose life story is all about the U.S. empire across the Americas. I try to resolve my internal conflict of noninvolvement by signing e-mail petitions as much as I can. But that’s all I do. And yet, as much distance as I try to put between myself and the reality of living in the empire, our international catastrophe hits me close very often.
One early morning, with the first cup of coffee in my hands, it’s an e-mail that fucks me up—again. This time, it’s one of the regular e-mail pieces forwarded by Andrés Duque, the very active gay colombiano in the East Coast who keeps us informed of queer Latino lives and deaths here and in America Latina. The long note, an article from the gay Washington Blade about the rift among queer groups about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, makes me scream. I read about New York’s Audre Lorde project taking the lead to condemn the war, a loud queer cry others join, many of color: The National Center for Lesbian Rights, Jews against the Occupation, LATITUD 0—“o Latitude,” the Ecuadorian gay organization with the coolest name—and others. Many others protest as well, actually dozens, but not the national Latina/Latino queer organization—they are not part of this queer stance against an illegal war. And its executive director, clarifying that they are “very concerned with the reality that our government’s priorities are concentrated on a war,” says that the organization “is morally opposed to the war because of the military’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy against gay men and lesbians.” With this argument, it seems, their opposition to imperialism comes in part from not getting an invitation of equality to the imperialist table of the war machine itself. Damn, I think, if this is national gay Latino leadership and analysis in the times of global crisis, then we’re really fucked. Immediately I also feel complicit, and embarrassed that I attended the organization’s fun-filled 2002 gathering in sweaty and sunny Miami. I calm myself down, bitch about it with some of my friends, and recommit to my writing. I have to stay focused.
Days later at home I am having my usual rushed breakfast with my father and my mother—with my father actually, because my mother always privileges family men’s needs first. And so she serves the food but rarely gets to sit with us to eat it at the same tim
e, from beginning to end. But I am there talking with both about war—I, the hyperactive son, sit close to my elderly and slow-eating father while my mother keeps us nourished and listens in, traveling back and forth the short distance between the dining room and the kitchen. They remind me that El Salvador, that tiny little thing around other tiny things in Central America, has also lent its support to the U.S. I laugh, because it’s so predictable, and insignificant, for a little national thing like El Salvador to support something as massive as the U.S. and its capitalist hunger for oil and business contracts. But that tiny Central American thing must do a little global kissing of some imperial ass if it wants its more-than-a-million-strong diaspora not to be treated less kindly in the heart of the Empire. So, immigrant diasporic me and gay me feel like there’s no place to go: the nonprofit queer Latino nation wants to be at the military table of death on behalf of sexual equality, and the nation where my folks and I almost experienced this precise death has little power to make that fresh memory of violence worth anything. Things are pretty bad.
Queer Moves of Lonely Survival: Into Spring 2003
Between rushed L.A. morning and evening commutes to and from UCLA, gyms, my writing group, and suburbia, I am trying to secure a salaried academic future. This is a good year for me, with more than thirty applications for jobs I can actually do, eight preliminary phone interviews, and four outright invitations to visit. My suit, suitcase, and curriculum vitae travel far and fast as I deliver my queer theoretical gospel to whoever wants to listen; many do, and some pretend.
Toward the end of these academic job talks, I tell my audiences that homophobia is as “American” as racism and patriarchy. I remind them toward the end because I want to emphasize that queer racial survival can be quite tough. By the time I invoke these words I have already talked to them about the life of the late male-to-female transgender ranchera singer Teresita la Campesina, a loud and proud mexicana, and how she mattered in history. I talk about her, the artist and the pervert; she and I were good friends for several years up to her death in 2002 from AIDS. I use her life in the best sense of the term to make history (and even a little theory) come alive. With my talk, in these most public forums when you’re supposed to shine and dazzle and prove your theoretical stuff to strangers, I privilege gay Latino community history. Sure, community history that is contested and conflictive and fractured, but queer community history nevertheless: living, desiring folks who commit to life with others, for one another.
In these same job talks, before and after I try to dazzle my audiences through the power of oral history, I sit around many tables with administrators and senior faculty with the amazing power to give you benefits and teaching time release and travel funds as they consider welcoming you to their club. I handle them and their questions well, as honest as I can be when they ask about what classes I’d like to teach, what my second book would be about, where I’d like to live, why I applied there to begin with. I answer well, mostly because I need a job, and even add plenty more to their questions. I have to be on, engaged, sell my body and mind well. But the labor is heavy.
There and in their intimacy, I also often have out-of-body experiences. Because there I am seated around desks and conference tables, this short, young academic with an accent and a hungry desire to take my queer work far, and I suddenly begin to notice wedding bands: plain gold wedding bands around fingers, skinny, fat, and medium-sized fingers, usually white fingers. I have several out-of-body and out-of-mind experiences as I see these wedding bands, such innocent reminders of who I am and where I stand, this lonely academic queer leaving the suburban family nest four times in four weeks to land four jobs in four corners of this country, just to feel that much smaller in the company of wedding bands. After receiving one of the four job offers and taking a second visit to the campus in the Midwest, I feel confident enough to joke with some of the faculty that I am quite an inexpensive candidate, since, having no partner (then), they don’t have to hire someone else as well. Instead, I continue, they could give me that money to attract someone once I take the job. Of course they laugh at my silly, inventive proposition. I am still not sure today how funny the whole thing really was. After giving my talk for a fifth and final time, as an example of a successful talk at a gathering of younger PhDs of color in this same academic pipeline, I realize the truth of my own words, what a weary maricón traveling down lonely academic roads has been trying to convince others about. Homophobia sucks, and it hurts, and there’s no way to overtheorize that, because those wars are quite constant, often silent, even when we think we’re done and we’ve signed on the dotted line. And because I try hard not to be silent about any gender or sexual closets, I know the road and the battles ahead will continue to get quite lonely.
Mentoring: Summer 2003
After my successful job-hunting season, I get to reward myself with some light teaching, a weeklong writing course for hundreds of low-income and/or students of color at UCLA. One of these students, attending the residential program to help him transfer from a community college to the university, comes out to me late one evening. He does it carefully, only after hearing me discuss my research on race and sexuality in front of the classroom. He is a young mexicano, nineteen years old then, quiet and focused in class, observant, with the courage at that moment to mirror himself against an older gay Latino to verbalize this mostly hidden experience of his life. We talk outside the UCLA dorms at around 11 p.m. when both he and I have time, other students, peer counselors, and staff buzzing around us, maybe wondering why this student is talking to the openly gay professor. He confides that he’s actually fine with his being gay, that he’s been out to himself and a couple of friends in the San Fernando Valley since age fourteen. He believes his father suspects something, that his mother doesn’t really know, and that his sister, who does know, is not too helpful. I ask him about gay support and gay friends, about relationships and sexual safety. He asks for general answers mostly, about what to do, what to read, where to go. Carless and young, he is stuck in the expansive dry Valley with not many options. So he searches for answers with professional gay me, and I feel like he’s pulling teeth with little success. I tell him about several books and authors, remind him of my e-mail address to stay in touch, tell him to visit UC–Santa Barbara if he likes. But what else do you say to a young gay Latino, the young man of the family, asking about queer life when there’s so much insecurity around him?
A couple of days after our conversation, the morning when the program ends, I see a family van driving close to the curb at the student dormitory. It’s his Mexican family picking him up on time for their family trip, he tells me. I bid him goodbye with a handshake, very consciously, without breaking those well-understood protocols of the public closet. I also introduce myself to the family briefly—father, mother, and sister—as the Latino profesor. They seem happy to meet me, but even happier they have their son back in their midst. They drive around the curb, the family unit complete again, and take off.
I can’t help but think at that moment that his survival is mine, that my survival is his. He’s nineteen and I am thirty-three.
Survival and Risk: Mid-Summer 2004
In July I finally muster the courageous push to return to that oh-so-routine and oh-so-nerve-racking queer event of HIV antibody testing. This one had to be at least my twelfth or fifteenth since 1991, when I first came out, such a basic practice for queer men in the age of AIDS. This time, however, I knew well that I had had more than one “slip” when having sex with others. “Slips” happen, my friend Ricardo reminded me years ago, so casually, to impress on me the simple reality of desire and needs. But I knew the occasional unprotected sex I had had the previous eighteen months or so had not quite been just slips, that they belonged to a new historical moment of rawness, of being tired of having to discipline the self, of lack of collective queer commitment to remaining negative. With all of that, at least on occasions, I slipped right in. Late in the night after session
one of this latest round of testing, when my blood flowed freely into a clean, glass tube, and a week before I would get my results, I make a conscious point to remind myself in my journal where I have been and what I have done. The memory of the needle’s prick in my left arm that afternoon still fresh on my mind, I try hard to put my anxiety in its rightful place for a moment. This is to be my most honest itinerary of risk, and it went something like this:
Moment Number 1. In winter 2003 one early afternoon, days after receiving my last HIV-negative result at a Pasadena clinic, between academic job applications, in the home of a handsome hondureño in South Central L.A., taller and darker than I am, trying to circumvent my loneliness that day. Likely no more than four and a half minutes of raw sex, his excuse being—as if I needed one that day—that he cannot remain completely hard with a condom on, even the larger ones; he feels very big, too inviting to refuse. As I take a sip of beer, soaked in emotional and erotic confusion, I slowly back off from his heavy, brown dick and remove myself from that warm space of conflict and pleasure. He is disappointed; I am confused. We compromise and end in mutual hand play, just. The instance is too important for me to forget it: he showed me and pushed and argued successfully to enter; I first gave in but then backed off, never to play again with him. Hardly any acknowledgment of each other’s existence in years to come.