Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing by Lazaro Lima & Felice Picano

Author:Lazaro Lima & Felice Picano [Lima, Lazaro & Picano, Felice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Published: 2011-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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