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Pluralistic struggles in gender, sexuality and coloniality: challenging Swedish exceptionalism

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Pluralistic struggles in gender, sexuality and coloniality: challenging Swedish exceptionalism

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An gay erotica store in California that has a great Instagram account!!

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https://minniebrucepratt.net/leslie-feinberg/

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I shared life and home with Leslie Feinberg, the novelist, historian, and trans activist, for over 22 blissfully happy years.

In 1992 I met Leslie at hir slideshow/lecture in Washington, D.C., where ze spoke on the historical basis for unity among people who experience different oppressions—and where ze read, looking up at me, from hir classic “Letter to a Fifties Femme.” Not long after, ze became my “one and only,” my beloved.

Leslie died in 2014, with these last words: “Remember me as a revolutionary communist.” Hir obituary, which ze dictated to me before ze died, can be read here

I fell in love with Leslie because of hir voice, hir vision and hir revolutionary optimism. If you don’t yet know hir work, rush to hir WEB sites lesliefeinberg.net and transgenderwarrior.org

Minnie Bruce Pratt and Leslie Feinberg
Camp Trans, Michigan, 1994.

Minnie Bruce and Leslie, Boston.
Photo: Marilyn Humphries © 2003

My adult life has been an exhilarating struggle to resist, militantly, the oppressive categories that the ruling status quo places on us–and to live, triumphantly, the identities and complexities that we feel to be true for ourselves. As my life and Leslie’s flowed together, I gained immeasurably in my understanding of that struggle—in my understanding of how we live all our sexualities, sex identities and gender expressions.

The stories in my book S/HE are about these complexities in our daily life—and many of them are also love tributes to Leslie. I could write a book about how much I love hir—and I have. Below is one of the stories—my “Kisses” for Leslie.

Minnie Bruce and Leslie, New York City.
Photo: Bill Hackwell © 2000.

Kisses

We climb down the stairs to your gym, a basement of grey gun-metal machines lined up in rows, each array of equipment designed to augment a specific segment of the body, the deltoids, the pectorals. It looks like the inside of a factory, a body factory. You say you work out early in the morning because then you can take your time. No men waiting in line for their turn while you wrestle with yourself to sweat on the weights as long as you need to. The bulletin board has a magazine picture up, a row of women with defined and staring muscles. You point to the woman who is most sculpted, whose muscles are most precise, and say she lost the body-building competition because she had gone too far toward masculinity. The judges preferred more blur in a woman’s body. You say you want me to come with you one day as you work out, to spot you, my hand out to break and balance a slip as you lift. I say that I’ll murmur, “You can do one more, baby, one more for me,” while I kiss the back of your sweaty neck. But you demur: No kissing here.

It’s a gay gym, but a few heterosexual couples insist they can do it anywhere they please, the man and woman who rolled writhing on the mats, while the infrequent men caught at it with each other in the bathroom are always kicked out. Though we are two women, here we’d be seen as heterosexual, and resented. No, no kissing here.

In the Tastee Diner we’ve had our french fries and cole slaw and a shared chocolate milkshake. Full of comfort, I put down the tip, you go pay the check. When you come back to the red plastic booth, some old 60s song is playing. You take me in your arms and begin to dance with me in the aisle between the booths and the coat racks. At the next table two women are scandalized, their eyebrows in O’s of astonishment. Later you joke that they wanted to hold you responsible, to say, “Young man, this is not a dance hall.” But I was moving with you far beyond  boyfriend and girlfriend, beyond a lingering kiss taken over lunch. I was giving myself to you in the way I have perfected over the years since the summer night I stood by another butch lover, drinking beer outside the hidden back door of a small town gay bar. Since the moment a drunk white man staggered out past us, and began to taunt me with his invitation, “What are you doing with her? Come with me. I can give it to you.” Bewildered, I turned my back on him, moved closer to her, put my hand on her bare muscled forearm. Whoever she was, she was not a man, and I was not the woman he thought I was. But in daylight, in public, in a parked car near her job, she wouldn’t let me kiss her.

I have waited years for you who wants to flaunt me on her arm, my face radiant with desire, as if I’d put my face deep into a lily, heavy with pollen, and raised it to you, smeared and smelly with butter yellow, sated but not yet satisfied, our meal not yet finished as I cling to you in the aisle of the dilapidated diner.

Minnie Bruce Pratt
From S/HE
(Firebrand Books, 1995)

A Short Selection of Leslie's Writing

Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come

Stone Butch Blues – 20th Anniversary Edition—FREE download, AT-COST print

Rainbow Solidarity In Defense of Cuba

Lavender and Red: LGBTQ+ Socialist Histories

Transgender Warriors

Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink-or-Blue

Drag King Dreams: A Novel

More from S/HE

Perfume

House party, lesbian porn videos in the basement, and the butch I stand next to, watching, says, “Why does every woman in these videos have long finger nails?” All the women fucking femme to femme on the TV video are white, but the party is thoroughly mixed, the dance floor rocking with the sway of African-American, Latina, and white girl hips. Upstairs there’s birthday cake with purple sugar roses, and a game being played. A cluster of femmes rate candidates 1 to 10 on a butch scale. One butch who professes ignorance about “roles” is pulled protesting into our circle in her tight white undershirt and her jeans, the keys at her belt jangling. She’s awarded a 10 and wanders away, bemused. A femme explains to me about pedicures, stretching out her polished nails, hand and foot, like a luxurious cat. She and I look down and note that all the femmes have shed our shoes and are walking around barefoot, while the butches are still neatly shod in loafers, boots, or sneakers. My date gets a lower rating than she thinks she deserves and demands to be upgraded; she’s granted a 10 for butch arrogance. One woman throws her shoulders back, swaggers her breasts, and proclaims that she is a femme “with butch attitude.”

Downstairs, to “Real Love,” I dance with a friend in a see-through slinky blouse that shows off her breasts. We move loosely, eyes accepting eyes, not looking to the side or down, but knowing who we dance with. She shows me how to work my skirts, stirring heat up around us. She tells me she’s got a new perfume, spicy lemon, “So that when I sweat, I’ll smell irresistible as fresh-baked poundcake.” She urges me to buy the gardenia oil I’ve been considering. Our dates are sitting this one out, two square-shouldered women in slacks and loafers side-by-side on the dilapidated plaid sofa. I begin to flirt with my friend, wordlessly, letting my eyes linger on her silk-stocking ankles, on her powerful hips clearing a space around us, on the profusion of her coiled dredlocks and pendant earrings. I glance at some bit of her womanliness, then glance at her eyes, a visual kiss of appreciation. Soon we begin to laugh so hard that I say, “They are going to come over in a minute to see what we’re up to.” And just then our dates begin to squeeze through the crowd toward us, slightly anxious looks on their faces, as we dance call-and-response with each other, just beyond the reach of their hands.

Husband

At the March on Washington, the man sitting next to me on the grass asks “Is he your husband?” as I return from kissing you, as you step down from the microphone. On stage Peggy DuPont in beaded white chiffon is ferociously lipsynching and tailswitching a drag queen’s answer to the introduction you have given her, praise from a drag king resplendent in your black-on-black suit. In the audience I hesitate over my answer. Do I change the pronoun and the designation of “husband”? Finally I reply, “Yes, she is.” He hesitates in his turn: “He hasn’t gone through the operation?” The complexity of your history crowds around me as I mentally juggle your female birth sex, male gender expression. I say, “She’s transgendered, not transsexual.” Up on stage Miss Liberty is reading, with sexy histrionics and flourishes of her enormous torch, a proclamation from a woman who is a U.S. Senator, a speech that trumpets and drums with the cadences of civil rights. The man blinks his eyelashes flirtatiously, leans toward me, whiskey on his breath, waves his hand at his companions, “We’re up from North Carolina.” Then, femme to femme, he begins to talk of your beauty: “He is perfect. If I ever wanted a woman it would be someone just like her.” With innuendo and arch look he gives truthful ambiguity to what he sees in me, in you, something not simply about “gay rights.” The queen whispers in my ear with his sharp steaming breath, “Don’t let her get away. Hang onto him.”

Mimosa

I can see a smear of rose dawn through the tent window when you kneel between my legs and slide your cock inside me. For a second I feel cool inside and out, cool breeze on my arms, cool silicone dildo sliding over labia, vulva, vaginal muscles and skin. You press deep, resting your full length on mine, surrounding and penetrating me with love. I begin to cry, to be so filled by you, without the cringing and fear that once rode inside me at this moment. You have come inside me because I have asked you to; you begin rocking inside me.

The birds are chattering, a mocking bird is floating the doublets and triplets of song over us. The sun begins to heat the air of our domed tent, sweat slides from your chest over my breasts. You heighten my desire with your stroking, stroking, and after a long ecstatic journey, after what you later tell me is perhaps an hour, I come to orgasm from your fullness, from your glancing against my clit. Again I begin to cry, wrenchingly, as you rest on me.

In ten years of marriage to a man, I never came to this from the pleasure of him inside me. There was always elaborate manipulation of me by him, contortions of fingers, penis, always the fear of possible pregnancy, always his fear of me. But you are excited by my desire, close to orgasm yourself. The birds have subsided into whispers. A sudden rain shower rocks the tent in the sun, and I lie safe in your arms.

You are a woman who has been accused of betraying womanhood. In my groans of pleasure from your cock, perhaps some would say I have betrayed womanhood with you, that we are traitors to our sex. You refusing to allow the gestures of what is called masculinity to be preempted by men. Me refusing to relinquish the ecstasies of surrender to women who can only call it subservience. Traitors to our sex, or spies and explorers across the boundaries of what is man, what is woman? My body yawns open greedily for what you are not afraid to give me.

We dress and unzip ourselves from the tent. Walking down the red dirt road muddy from the rain, in the sharp morning light, we pause to caress the mimosas of the sensitive plant, to draw our fingers along the tiny ferny leaves to see them fold up instantly, a spasm of motion at our touch.

Minnie Bruce Pratt
From S/HE
(Firebrand Books, 1995)

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I shared life and home with Leslie Feinberg, the novelist, historian, and trans activist, for over 22 blissfully happy years.

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By Michael K. Lavers and Victor Maung
LGBTQ activists in Myanmar have joined the growing protest movement against the Feb. 1 coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi and her democratically elected government.

Min Khant Zin, a drag queen who works at a gay bar in Yangon, the country's largest city, told the Washington Blade that he and his friends received a lot of media attention after they decided to participate in the protests while in drag. Khant Zin, who identifies as queer, added this decision was deliberate.

"Most of the openly gay people in Myanmar are makeup artists and cross-dressers. They do not stand out in the crowds when they wear female costumes, but someone with drag costumes will," said Khant Zin. "This is my intention."

"We want people around the world to know about the LGBT community's contributions for the fight for democracy," added Khant Zin.

Saw Zin Maung Soe is an LGBTQ activist who founded CAN Myanmar, a civil rights organization that is based in Mandalay, the country's second-largest city.

Maung Soe told the Blade that around 100 members - gay men and lesbians from different socio-economic backgrounds, gender queer people, straight allies, doctors and engineers - participated in a protest that took place in Mandalay on Feb. 8. Maung Soe said some of them were part of a group of protesters against whom the police used water canons and rubber bullets.

"We have to be cautious because we look different and are easily noticeable," Maung Soe told the Blade. "We are worried we might be targeted by the police forces and counter protesters."

"We are all coming to the protests to support the greater cause," added Maung Soe.

Khant Sithu, a Burmese college student in New York who identifies themselves as LGBTQ, is among those who have gathered in front of the U.N. to protest the coup.

"Regardless if you are gay or straight, we all vote for the political parties we like," Sithu told the Blade. "People in Myanmar have overwhelmingly voted for Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD party. Now, the military dislikes the situation and detain the civilian leaders."

The coup toppled Suu Kyi and her government less than three months after her National League for Democracy party trounced the military's Union Solidarity and Development Party in Parliamentary elections.

Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, was under house arrest for nearly 15 years until her release in 2010. Suu Kyi in 2016 became Myanmar's state counselor, which is roughly equivalent to prime minister.

Suu Kyi, who has faced global criticism over her response to the plight of the Rohingya, has been charged with illegally possessing walkie-talkies. The U.S. is among the countries that have imposed sanctions against the Burmese military over the coup.

Consensual same-sex sexual relations remain criminalized in Myanmar under Section 377 of the country's Criminal Code.

Activists said Suu Kyi's government made an unofficial pledge to amend or repeal Article 377 and other anti-LGBTQ laws during its second term in office that would have ended in 2025.

Maung Sue told the Blade there was not "much progress for LGBT rights under Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD government's administration in the last five years."

"We LGBT activists got invited to observe the parliamentary sessions and we were asked to participate in policy dialogue," said Maung Soe. "The issue of LGBT rights was never a priority, even for the civilian government."

A group of activists have nevertheless released a statement that criticizes the coup and demands the release of Suu Kyi and other civilian leaders who have been detained.

"We LGBTI people in Myanmar demand the release of elected civilian leaders in detention, the cancellation of the new Administration Council formed with military officials and pro-military persons, the lifting of the military's intervention against convening of the new Parliament with elected members of Parliament," reads the statement.

"Since we, LGBTI people, have a history of active participation in past political activism, we want to announce that in this military coup, we will stand with the people and the government employees who are starting the civil disobedience campaigns," it adds.

Yuya, a transgender activist who spearheaded the letter, described it as a "statement by the LGBT people in Myanmar."

"We are human beings and we are citizens," Yuya told the Blade. "We have not been recognized because of the system, but we have tried to correct it. We do understand that we should not expect things to change 100 percent overnight, but we for sure do not want things to go back to ground zero and start again from scratch."

"So, like others, we participate in civil disobedience movements and others ... we have many things to contribute to it, because we are all concerned," added Yuya. "Our leaders (referring to Suu Kyi) have fought for us. They were imprisoned for years in order for us to be here today. This is the time for us to contribute what we could for all of us again, so that generations may not suffer human rights abuses and this coup shall be the last one we experience."
This article originally appeared in the Washington Blade and is made available in partnership with the National LGBT Media Association.

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LGBTQ Activists in Myanmar Join Protests Against Military Coup

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By Michael K. Lavers and Victor Maung LGBTQ activists in Myanmar have joined the growing protest movement against the Feb. 1 coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi and her democratically elected government.

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Ahmed Ibrahim - Queerness in Egypt

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in closets, under floorboards:
i am tired of being denied
an ancestry
an existence
some semblance of realness
to make recourse to
i am tired of listening
of understanding and making do
of trying to explain to you
everything
i am left absolutely

nothing
no history, no memory
rigorous enough to save me
an alien
abhorrent

scurrying back to safety
in closets, under floorboards
creaking and cracking
corrupting and conspiring

against me - everything
no form, no substance
no ontological resistance
and even then, an insistence
to crawl out, a persistence
flowing from within me

a legacy
a network of voices
a collective - where or
when is my community?

in closets, under floorboards
creaking and cracking
conspiring on corruption and
halting the production
the manufacturing of a history
of meaning and ideology

and being national enemy
in my own living room
on the street, in the mirror
in the bathroom staring back at me

a body
and every inch an injury

thank you for carrying me
for being all the proof i need
of a history unseen
of legacies pulsing and
packed tightly
producing inaudible harmonies
screaming fuck you
to the binary

an entire trajectory enfleshed in me

The summer I turned 21 was tumultuous to say the least. Even as I write this, admittedly in a much safer and healthier space, the prospect of revisiting, of digging up and relaying that experience is daunting. On the one hand, liberal commitments to include me have proven to be quite insidious. Unless I perform my intimate experiences of trauma and terror, I am illegible, illegitimate. On the other, it is those very intimacies that animate my life, and my performances of them will not only never be complete, they might also risk a complicity with those same imaginations that negate me. But where does one draw the line between this tedious and taxing rehearsal, a price many must pay under totalizing discourses of human rights, and acts of self-authorship that project oneself, as it were, into existence? Hesitating, I write nonetheless, in the spirit of that mode of authorship, and the connections it has formed between me and the few who have read my writing, as well as the potential connections that have yet to be formed, that are forming constantly. A politics of ephemeral presences.

A few days into the summer, my father confronts me about my perversions. And while this is not the first time, what made this confrontation different was that he had acquired proof. As I slept, my father went through my phone and found objective, undeniable evidence that his son was a خول. 2 It had ceased to be a fleeting suspicion, and was now concretized as a testament to his failure as a father. What ensues is a series of physical and emotional altercations that leave me in bed for the majority of those three months. In the frenzy, he demands of me the telephone numbers of my co-conspirators and our alleged ringleader, who to him must have been the reason his easily-influenced son was dragged into this. I refuse and he smashes my phone to pieces. With nothing to lose, I attempt to, quite naively, stand my ground and fight him, convince him otherwise, appeal to his humanity first and then his rationality, but this spirit is short-lived and I eventually succumb to my plight. There was nothing I could do to change the situation I was in, and so I sank into my mattress and stewed for hours or days on end, staring into my closet.

During this time, my thoughts wander to and from queer liberation. I remember the repertoires of contention deployed by queers in the West in the name of making coming out political. Cocooned, I recall romanticizing riots and public dissent and the refusal to go back into hiding. How many times had I looked to Stonewall for inspiration and longed for a revolution that would pave the way for generations thereafter to live without fear? I peek out from under the covers only to realize that the air outside is not any clearer, that it is thick with corruption, and that so many of us could barely breathe. With the future no longer in purview, it became clear that these were dreams not made for me. Illusions of escape that now stung too much to even entertain. Perpetually waiting for my life to "begin," it all crystalized that summer; that none of this was new, that it was in fact a plight predetermined, one which suspended me and people like me in these edge-of-existence experiences, saturated, steeped, and stuck. Rotting as I was, the closet staring back at me, a silent witness and testament, I think "when or where is my community?" There were many others like me, I knew that for sure, some friends, lovers, or strangers, but where were they? I began to imagine them in the buildings around me, or strewn across cities, in their own bedrooms, sinking and stewing, looking or hoping for me, as I was for them. I know that, had it not been for my privilege as an individual that has access to people with which and places wherein I can feel relatively safe, I would not be the person I am today. And this gratefulness and grief for "community" leads me to question the way in which these legacies of trauma are always necessarily felt in isolation. That there was only ever room for one in the closet so to speak, but that there were also more closets than I could count. Enough perhaps to make the claim that the particular violation we experience as queers in this part of the world could be construed as generational and historical trauma. We were and are everywhere and nowhere; pathologized and criminalized, struck out from archives, yet strewn across cities and states still, troubling institutions as we go. In our mutual expulsions from society par excellence then, what stood in the way of "community," as that which would/does offer alternative social, political, familial formations? "Communities" constructed around an impulse to live otherwise, however way that may look, and which, in so doing, counter the individualization of the closets in which we retreat, from which we emerge, and through which we might rearticulate a progressive politics together (Sullivan, 2003).

It seemed clear to me that it was precisely these lived experiences of violation and contestation that were the foundations upon which queer individuals negotiated senses of self and of belonging together against the backdrop of authoritarianism and state insecurity. What was interesting, however, was how this happened - specifically, what facilitated the transferability/communicability of these particular experiences between queers, and what that might tell us about what it means to lead "a queer life" here. Traditionally, this sort of questioning implicates multiple theoretical trajectories that have been occupied with similar questions for quite some time now, and that offer important insight into the ways in which subjectification is always already a sexed and racialized process (Wittig 1992; Fanon, 1970). In this regard then, I am also attempting here to unpack this process of subjectification, though to quite different ends. My aim is not merely to ask how a heterosexual economy produces "the figure of the non-heterosexual" or the queer subject, if that is a relevant designation, along specific lines, but more importantly to inquire after the conditions of possibility behind such a production in an authoritarian context like Egypt. I argue, however, that the conceptual tools at my disposal are limited by the fact of their incapacity and breakdown when taken out of the contexts in which they were designed. To say then that heterosexuality, for example, is compulsory is to completely gloss over the ways in which Western epistemes have contributed to the production of a stable "subject" that may voluntarily reject their heterosexualization. This presupposition of coherence is dangerous in several respects, most importantly for its failure to account for the inconsistencies integral to its own project of stabilizing, managing, and ordering subjects en masse. What becomes then of this model of subjectivity, even of queerness, when it is brought to bear on "subjects" that do not fit neatly within its confines? Indeed, they resist these fictions of coherence precisely because they are constituted at the intersections of multiple axes of violation that position them quite queerly vis-à-vis such constructions. What I offer here by way of an answer is no less inconsistent. And so, ordained by this breakdown of the conceptual strategies in which I have been trained to look for or at queerness, this article is an attempt to both work through such inconsistencies, as well as point to shared threads that offer spaces for a radical reconstitution when harnessed collectively. The now taken for granted optic of compulsory heterosexuality then not only has no room for these queered subjects, but it also reduces their complex relationship to the states that produce and position them as such, as well as the role this plays in statecraft.

And so, by enacting a reflexive return to our initial encounters with the ambiguous and multivalenced potential offered by queerness, I locate and piece together the traces of an always already lost/forcibly disappeared network that is constantly unfolding nonetheless. The promise of queerness, calling out to the alienated subject. Taken together, these individual/ized encounters form structures of queer knowing, moving, and feeling that counter this individualization, which I argue is an integral part of the repertoire of techniques designed to foreclose the potential of a queer collective (Muñoz, 2011). It is with this in mind that I posit what I call authoritarian heterosexuality as a particular and particularly potent political regime, one that is entangled in colonial legacies and local sedimentations that inform the contemporary Egyptian state's attitudes towards queers specifically, and towards its citizenry more broadly.

I should note here that my thinking on these issues is indebted to a form of connectivity and commitment that I believe to be queer, or at least that ushers in those ambiguous and charged potentials that are part of its architecture. And much like I am indebted to my network of queer friends and family for giving me the space to explore and enact all that was foreclosed to me necessarily, it is in our relationships and the conversations we have that I looked for queerness. Contemporaneously charged by the chokehold of a state apparatus that leaves no room for us except "in the closet" or in its crosshairs, our specific and communal negotiations of our constant violation at the hands of this regime make up something of a roadmap to queerness. And by using this affective material as my entry point into an analysis of what queer might really mean here, I am able to reveal the traces of this violating constitution. Put differently, by engaging in a structural analysis of diverse articulations and experiences of queerness, I am simultaneously engaging in an analysis of the ways in which authoritarian regimes, in their efforts to eradicate queerness, end up producing it along lines that are perhaps illegible when read with the optic of traditional queer theory. To this end, I will be foregrounding my analysis in "the closet" as both a material artifact and disciplinary technology of this heterosexist regime that works to impress a damaging sense of individualism in subjects, as well as a site of potential for queers to collectivize, once the inconsistencies and similarities between such designations as "in" and "out," "private" and "public," and "individual" and "collective" are parsed out (Sullivan, 2003).
Queering Method: Fixations, Limitations, and Openings
I have been writing this paper, doing this work, for upwards of three years now, but in the last few months the arguments I have been attempting to make have changed considerably. In large part, this is because of the ongoing familial strife I am still struggling to maneuver, and which has animated, and at times completely halted, this process. Energized then by personal, political, and intellectual desires to make sense of my experiences, my stances have been quite reactionary, and justifiably so. Along the way, however, I became stuck in a solipsistic mode of thinking that limited me in several respects, and, quite ironically, mimicked the alienating individualization that I was so keen on unpacking. Inspired as I was by dialectical materialism, critical theory, phenomenology, queer theory, performance studies, and the intersections between them, I became walled off from other queers for whom experience was not a "potent site of inquiry," but rather a medium through which connections could be formed communally. I had developed a fixation with theory because it was a gateway of sorts to understanding my own experience, but no matter how much I read, I was still so incredibly frustrated. At the beginning stages of this research, my dysphoria had become utterly paralyzing, and my efforts to theorize it left me too anxious to write, thinking my experience was isolated and not enough to build an argument from. This culminated during the summer because it felt as though theory was useless to me then; indeed, it was. As I mention above, what mitigated this was the love and support I received from other queers; an affirmation no one else could offer me. I decided then that it would be counterintuitive to remain within the orbit of my experiences alone, and that engaging the people around me about the questions I had about subjectivity and sex would offer more by way of a nuanced analysis that was about us, for us, and by us. My research then became, or revealed itself as always having been a love letter to queerness, to other queers, to myself. I not only regained a sense of confidence in what I had to say as a result of these connections, but I also began to understand them as, in their own right, future-building projects that were decades in the making, perhaps even more. And it was this that inspired another fixation of mine, that of drawing my closet. This stemmed from a desire to untap what would be the paradigmatic experiences of a queer life, which both point to alternative spatiotemporal registers as well as make up the bedrock of structures of feeling that were at once universal and particular (Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 1999). In order to understand the ways in which queerness presented itself, called out to, began to unfold before and reoriented subjects, it seemed fruitful to engage in a series of practices of unlearning that were guided by questions that (though having changed multiple times throughout the research) were aimed at returning to what at the time seemed to me as a moment of initial deviance - our first encounters with queerness. The closet then, in its physicality as an artifact of a heterosexual regime which it itself naturalizes, its deployment as a barrier within oneself which produces the impression of privacy and interiority, and as a conceptual space to begin thinking from about the nature of such a charged subjectification, became the first place I looked for these structures of feeling.

With this in mind, I reached out to long-time interlocutors to ask what exactly "coming out" entailed, what it was that one "came out" to and where from, and what relevant distinctions occurred to them between "in" and "out" in that sense. As well as more casual conversations, I resorted to traditional semi-structured interviews, with an added exercise that asked the interlocutors to reflect visually on one or more of a series of prompts of the same nature. What I ended up with was more material than I knew what to do with on the one hand, as well as the breakdown of the conceptual framework I had begun this endeavor with. The visual material in particular was illuminating because it both allowed the participant (and, by extension, me) access to a memory or feeling that was fleeting and difficult to articulate, while also making the identification of relevant structures of feeling much easier due to the recurrence of themes and visual motifs which pointed to fragmentation and individualization as important threads that tie these diverse experiences together. There remains much more to be said of the visual material on its own, but for the purposes of this article, I have used the pieces in conversation with the accompanying interviews. All the material, however, whether visual, written, or recorded, was analyzed with the respective participant, and revisited at each stage of the process.

As a final comment on my methodology, I should note that though the interlocutors with whom I worked on this research are relatively similar in terms of class and racial backgrounds, they are diverse in terms of their attachments to queerness, their positions as sexed subjects, as well as their political aspirations - some of which highlight significant tensions facing queer activism historically as well as in the contemporary. Similarly, while our social/economic/geographic proximity of course facilitated this transferability I am interested in, I am weary of making any sweeping generalizations about a queerness that transcends class and racial boundaries. And though I had intended to reach out to individuals outside of my pool of long-time interlocutors and collaborators, I was subject to familial constraints that made this difficult. My intention, however, is neither to present a comprehensive view of queer life in Egypt, nor even of the interlocuters' lives. It is rather to locate those always already forcibly disappeared networks in the making that connect queers here, and by piecing together these fragments of individual and subjective experiences, present a potential that can be directed and channeled collectively. By pointing to these structures of feeling, by no means complete or static, my aim, again, is to nod to queerness as opposed to capture it.
Queer Here?: Authoritarian Heterosexuality and the Nation
As intimated above, the guiding impulse behind this research has been a desire to see my experiences given their due weight as worthy sites of scholarly inquiry, and not as a curious and tragic addition to what would be a catalogue of gayness around the world. Indeed both the practice of cataloguing, and the production of categories integral to such a project, have been critiqued to no end for the ways in which they flatten difference under universalisms that elide the materialities of race and class that are both inextricable from and constitutive of queer experiences in this part of the world (Muñoz, 1999; Rao, 2014). However, this imperative is nonetheless relevant to any analysis of sexed and gendered life, particularly in the SWANA region. This is partially due to the continued commitment many queers still have to global discourses of LGBT rights, one that, in significant ways, shapes their attachments to self and state, as well as their political imaginations of what a liberatory future might look like and where it might take root. Moreover, such discourses are also relevant for the reactions they induce on the part of the Egyptian state. And while it is not within the scope of this article to give an exhaustive history of the politics and problematics of LGBT discourses in Egypt, it is important to give a brief sketch in order to contextualize the experiences I will introduce below.

A common feature amongst authoritarian state apparatuses has been the enforcement of emergency laws which, among other things, escalate particular offenses and the judicial processes associated with them to the level of "matters of national security." One consequence of this designation is the diagnosing and sensationalizing of an alleged social/moral ill, thus justifying the especially violent means with which it is treated. The Queen Boat arrests and the ensuing moral panic of 2001 were the first heavily publicized incidence of legal persecution of queers in the country, sparking much controversy within and outside of its borders. Pratt (2007) has argued that such an event was purposefully utilized by the state in order to produce a spectacle that would, on the one hand, divert a disillusioned and demoralized public from the rapidly worsening economic recession, and on the other, assert an image of masculinized national integrity/sovereignty in the face of encroaching imperial threat and shifting political economies of gender. This anxiety over an untouched national essence is perhaps also a staple amongst authoritarian postcolonies, paradoxically missing the irony in holding onto an idealized essentialism when it is precisely essentialized renderings that have and continue to plague the region (AbuKhalil, 1997). Even more paradoxical, the efforts to define Egyptian-ness with all that is masculine, heterosexual, Islamic, and when it is useful Arab, and against the western homosexual imperial agenda, simultaneously resulted in a discursive explosion in the public sphere. Now, the state had officially recognized the existence of "homosexual perverts," albeit only to eradicate them. The legacy of the خول as national enemy has continued with several minor incidents which peaked once again with the Mashrou' Leila arrests in 2017, still the largest campaign of witch hunts the country has seen to date. What all these incidents share in common is the "'[performance of]' a discourse of national security through which national sovereignty was (re)produced and political order was maintained," using the very bodies of predominantly gay men and transwomen as fodder for this image (Pratt, 2007, p. 129). Two days after the concert, the raids in full force, I crumble under the weight of a world that has no room for me and find myself running through the streets frantically crying, convinced I am being followed, and not sure whether I should lead whomever they are to where I live. I somehow make it to my room and try my best to sit still and let what I later realized was a panic attack subside. My sister finds me and I don't know how to explain to her the magnitude of my fear. Through tears, she tells me that I need to lay low because it was not safe here. How could I tell her that I knew that too well, that I had learned from older queers in my circle what to do during raids to keep myself safe, but that I was still too paralyzed by fear? The violence in the air was and is still palpable, and threats of forced disappearance, torture, harassment, and social, economic, and/or religious ostracism/disenfranchisement are active considerations in the minds of queers, whether or not there is an ongoing raid.

In this sense then, terms like "gay" are not only dangerous for queers to adopt or rally under, since they align them with American conspiracies to infiltrate and undermine Egyptian authority, immortalized in the image of the unwavering patriarch. They also fail to encompass the full range of experiences that animate the lives of those that have queer(ed) attachments to sex and gender, and thus to nation. Experiences of violation/constitution that are not, to use Mikdashi and Puar's (2016, p. 219) framing, "exceptional in these sociopolitical spaces: [they are] additional precisely because war, genocide, occupation, oppression, dictatorship, terrorism and killings are part of the everyday fabric of life for many people that live in the region." Such technologies of violence are then instrumental to the production and management of docile citizen-subjects. And while it has been argued that the most intimate tool of this violation is the category of sex and its parallel naturalization of the political and economic imperative to heterosexualize society, processes of state formation in the region require additional attention to the ways in which these colonial impositions have been "[embraced and resignified]," reworked and sedimented upon throughout history by local authorities (Wittig, 1992; Lugones, 2007; Rao, 2014, p. 177). Within such a charged context that positions queers at the interstice between non-being and being-target, caught in the crossfire of competing discourses of liberalism-as-liberation and obedience/loyalty to one's family, religion, and country, I agree with Rao that "homophobia" is "too narrow a term to encompass locally rooted affects that express hatred of the queer" (ibid.). In the remainder of this article, I will focus on the experiences produced by these affects and agendas in order to argue that the Egyptian state's strategies of authoritarian heterosexuality violate and queer subjects in constitutive ways. By exploring subjective articulations of the precarity of queer life here, I read these strategies as fundamentally fragmenting, producing subjects that are queer due to their positions vis-à-vis heterosexist constructions of self, nation-/state, and society. Similarly, by beginning from experiences of "the closet," I point to the mythologies sustaining such a construction, and which I argue are integral to its functioning as a barrier between queers that forecloses the potential of a radical intersubjectivity.
Closeted Subjects: Coming Out or In?
For Meem, manhood presented itself as "one big joke that [they weren't] in on." Saturated by heteronormativity, and confronted with the fact that those around them seemed to have no qualms with it, Meem describes to me the alienation they felt but struggled to name. "[It was as though] I was picked from a crowd, pulled aside, and got a sticker put on my forehead." This experience of being marked is common amongst many of the individuals I worked with on this research, pointing to shared feelings of abjection amongst queers. The realization of/reconciliation with this mark, however, came in stages that Meem reflects on in the piece above, "I've lived in three houses." The piece emphasizes their position vis-à-vis their closet in three loosely bounded stages of their life. In the first panel, Meem is in the third grade, pressured by the weight of an emerging and vacuous lack from which they turn away, "because that wouldn't make mom and dad happy." The next panel depicts a critical juncture for Meem. Their closet was now "overflowing", and they could no longer turn away. Elaborating on this stage, Meem tells me about the strenuous activity of performing heteronormativity, which exacerbated an already overwhelming pressure they felt to change, or at least conceal what had become clear to them was an aberration (their queerness). Finally, in the last panel, Meem surrenders, "it wasn't like an 'I'm accepting myself coming out,' it was more of an 'I've been defeated and here's me declaring it." Meem remains ambivalent about this stage however, at times preferring to be innocuous, noting that they "seem to coexist pretty nicely" with their closet, yet still somehow caught between surrender and embrace. What is clear though is that, for Meem, the closet stood/stands in as their interior self to which they have a tenuous relationship. On the one hand, the illusion of privacy offered by the closet impresses upon Meem the feeling of an intimate interiority in which they can deposit their dirty little secret, while also producing the desire to "confess" all that is hidden there (Sullivan, 2003, p. 54). The closet naturalizes these machinations precisely because it is both a material artifact of a heterosexual economy, as well as a technology of sexed subjectification in its own right. If then the closet presupposes that which contains it (a heterosexual world), by that same token it also presupposes that which it must contain (a heterosexual subject). The realization of a mark and resultant internalization of a lack that Meem, as well as many queers experience, is perhaps then the moment at which the closet begins to creak open, revealing itself as a structuring force in the subject's life due to that subject's queerness vis-à-vis subjectivity par excellence.
Living Up to Labels
I began each interview by asking the participants how they would like to be referred to in this text and what additional information they felt that they wanted to share. This was partly because I was keen on avoiding issues of misrepresentation, particularly for this group of individuals whose very legibility and safety hinge on these discursive strategies. But it was also an attempt to probe these strategies and ask after how they have affected each participant's capacities for action, as well as their senses of self. With Aurora, this ended up being the majority of what we discussed. For her, the process of questioning her sexuality and gender came in stages, grounded in a felt knowledge that she was/is otherwise. Before arriving at the term "genderqueer," she tells me of the arduous struggle to find a perfect term to describe her experiences, one that was fraught with gatekeeping, paranoia, and shame. When I asked her to revisit her earliest memory of queerness, she gave me the above piece depicting her initially confusing yet quite affirming experience of an "other type of attraction to things gendered feminine." For her, performances of femininity called out to a latent and as of yet unexplored potential that she was "something other than a man ... دي كانت المساحة الصغيرة اني اكتشف نفسي." 3 Calls such as these, however, became filtered through the language of LGBTQ identity, prompting Aurora to feel excluded on account of her non-normative patterns of sexual attraction and failure to adhere to rigid binaries of sexual or gendered self-definition. Compounding this isolation she felt from queers, her own queerness as well as her struggle with mental health continued to trouble her. Not only were LGBTQ identities too rigid to encompass the full range of her experiences, they also made her feel estranged from them on account of their western origin: " 4انا حتى مش مستوعب how to talk about my gender and sexuality from the perspective of an Arab." And though terms like "genderqueer," or simply "queer" presented her with the promise of a fluidity with which she could continue searching for what felt right, Aurora is still wary of identarian language altogether. She draws an interesting distinction between "identifying with something" or identity as the mathematical equality of variables ("I am equal to or like this"), which has been empowering for her in terms of her own self-definition, and the traditional liberal conception of identity or "identifying as something," which is automatically read as "playing pretend" ("I am not actually this"). For her, "[getting] stuck" in this second conception of identity inevitably leads to a fundamental estrangement from one's local context as well as one's own experiences by proxy, due to the entanglement of identity with the disciplinary practices enshrined it its architecture. She posits two forms of questioning of one's sex/sexuality/gender. The first is identitarian, or tied to the labor (ultimately futile) of proving one's "term-ness" to oneself and others, and which originates with the internalization of shame and self-loathing to the effect that one constantly questions their own validity: "was it real? ...هل انا فعلن asexual? ممكن أكون بكذب." 5 This harmful mode of questioning is reinforced externally as well as from other queers who practice forms of gatekeeping and policing of who gets to use what term and when. The second form of questioning emerges from the promise of queerness to allow an individual to engage in generative experimentation and pursuit. And while she is critical of identity, Aurora believes in the political imperative of coming out as a prerequisite for liberation, pointing to a major impasse in queer organizing in the region - the question of visibility.
Wide Open, Closed Shut: The Double Function of The Closet
In order to parse out this impasse, I began to adjust my questions so that I could better understand the ways in which practices of making oneself or one's queerness visible/invisible complicate simple binarizations of in/out and docility/agency. It is important to add here that this particular problematic of when, if ever, to be visible, and what role visibility has in a progressive queer politics, if any, has different stakes for different constituents. Amir's formulations on the matter were interesting for me because they pointed me to the dual nature of closeting as at once asphyxiating and agential, depending in intensity on the subject. For them, the discourse of "coming out" as a moment of full disclosure is, in all regards, white; "there is no such thing as being completely out or in." Rather, queers in Egypt are "out" in some contexts, while not in others. This conception of relative outness allows Amir to posit "in" as a mode of hyperawareness of the way they are being read, telling me that they are most in when they are pandering to cis-normativity so as not to call attention to themself, whether on the street, at work, or with family members and others with whom they are not comfortable. In contrast, Amir describes an idealized outness that hinges on the absence of a filter on themself or the way they act or present, when/where there is no "codification" of their body and thus their sex/gender. In this way, coming out for Amir represented a process of realizing how much of themself they had to repress in order to be undetectable, " 6 مدقوقة لغاية جوا جزمتي but then I let it come out." This coming out as gradual seeping out was aided by their group of queer friends; however, the naming of their queerness came later with the Mashrou' Leila arrests of 2017.

[during the arrests]
طبيعي أكون متضايقة، في ناس بيتقبض عليها
for existing. This sucks ... but why am I so personally affected by this? Why am I so outraged? At work,
الناس بتتكلم في الموضوع
why is it that
انا حاسة اني مش قدرة اتنفس و{بروج الحمام كل شوية} عشان اعيط و بنهار نفسيا؟ 7

At this moment, it became clear to them that they would never enjoy the peace of mind their non-queer counterparts did, and instead decided solidarity with their community was more important to them. And while they noted to me that the closet for them came to represent the feeling of being unsure of oneself, a self they struggle to fully accept, they concede to that same closet the potential to be harnessed for reasons beyond its mandate, so to speak. I agree with Amir here that, at a fundamental level, to lead a queer life in a postcolony like Egypt is to learn to be malleable, multifaceted, and resourceful. In other words, "learning through experience when to act, how, and where ...بالإحساس و بالتجربة ," 8 in order to construct a representation of oneself. They maintain, however, that such a mode of existence is in fact quite difficult, often producing a feeling of "losing oneself in all the performances." This fragmentation is then mitigated and healed by what I refer to as queer connectivity, "لحد ما قابلتهم ماكنتش عارفة انا مين." 9
Answering Queerness' Call: Connectivity and Resignification
In the earlier stages of the research that lead to this paper, I too was at an impasse of sorts with regards to how to get at what seemed to be an interstitial subjectivity that was common amongst queers here. Though looking specifically at trans subjectivities at the time, it seemed clear to me that this placed queers in a zone of non-being in the Fanonian sense (1970). The trans individual was then trapped in a failed subjectivity that could not transcend into the social, and was thus alienated. After engaging my queer and trans colleagues on this, however, it became clear that this conception of the liminality we experienced was too rigid. Even the experiential and visual material I gathered for this project resisted this determinism, and required a lot of revisiting and reconceptualizing together. In this section I read this material as examples of what for Butler would constitute a resignification. Indeed,

One does not stand at an instrumental distance from the terms by which one experiences violation. Occupied by such terms and yet occupying them oneself risks a complicity, a repetition, a relapse into injury, but it is also the occasion to work the mobilizing power of injury, of an interpellation one never chose. (1997, p. 383)

To repeat disloyally, however, is to respond affirmatively to that violation, to re-signify on one's own terms. And if we concede to queerness its capacity to call out to the alienated and heterosexualized queer, it becomes clear that this "subject" who is at the intersections of axes of violation, indeed confronted with and constituted by them, is not fully a subject at all. And though they cannot entirely reject "subjectivity" in this sense, they are nonetheless caught in its orbit, subjected by it. However, by responding to queerness as an alternative register of calls, queers push back at these confines by re-signifying the very media through which this subjection occurs. They perform/relate/appropriate/desire themselves queerly.

When I asked Nuun to draw their "coming out," they give me this two-paneled piece, "HOW IT WAS - HOW I FEEL/SEE MYSELF." In the panel on the left, Nuun reflects on coming out as a process of self-realization through confrontation with that which was "always there, in the background, but suppressed." For Nuun, the realization of their queerness was tied to a hyperawareness of the multiple gazes on their body. The drawing depicts a scene wherein Nuun is at a women's hair salon, their gaze locked at the reflection staring back at them, and "the contrast of the brownness [of their hand] in that space." To them, queerness was always already racialized, sexed, and gendered, and their sudden and violent hyperawareness of their body was only exacerbated by their struggle to perform along normative heterosexual lines, eventually culminating in the moment depicted where they decide to "just chop it [their hair] all off." And though Nuun tells me that, in retrospect, their desires to fashion themselves otherwise were, at the time, heavily influenced by "what [they] thought white people would look like when they chopped off their hair," they still look back on this act as profoundly agential for them. In itself, it instigated a process of "coming to terms" with themself by quite literally re-signifying their gendered, sexed, and racialized body in an affirmative gesture. In the panel on the right, Nuun is much more ambiguous about this process however, relaying to me that they "don't think [of themselves] as a physical entity or human being, but more as an amorphous blob suspended in space." This in part stems from the reflexivity of their hypervisibility due to their transgressions of heterogender norms, which in turn thwarts their desires to be innocuous. Nuun describes to me multiple encounters with uber drivers who, upon seeing them, cancel the trip and leave. And though they laugh to friends about this, the accumulation of instances like these continue to burden them. Nuun tells me that, for a long time, they sought refuge on the internet, saying "it sometimes feels like the only place where I actually exist," as opposed to offline, "in classes for example ... it's like a robot that's sent off, that's not really me." Online platforms thus mediated Nuun's alienation because they allowed them to elaborate/articulate themselves otherwise: "I was read as a boy and I partook in that." This active partaking in a construction of a self marks a shift in the ways in which queers enter self-other relations, usually negating; and yet now by re-orienting that self towards queerness (and other queers), an affirmation occurs through the very re-negotiation of relational terms offered by the queer internet spaces in which they interacted. This yearning for recognition and reconciliation was echoed by the other individuals I worked with for this paper, all emphasizing the gradual negotiation and understanding of oneself through the affirmation offered by, at times, just the existence of other queers.

For Malak, this is a problem of "exposure." Though, for example, she possessed a knowledge of her attraction to other women, it was always an ambiguous one. She notes, however, that in the meeting of "different groups in the community," this attraction was affirmed with the aid of "an other familiarity ... اكتشفت حاجة في نفسي جديدة بس قديمة" 10 Even at a discursive level, Malak has entered a register wherein she can make reference to this "community" within which she locates herself, however tenuously. Socially, mutual recognition mediates a rift that occurs between the queer individual and themself, and between them and other people/the world. Put differently, between inside and inside, and inside and outside, revealing the relationship between the two to be more porous and dialectical than these concepts allow. This sort of relationality, or queer connectivity, works to heal individuals saturated in and by heterosexuality which fragments queers in such similar ways as to make the experience of "living a double life" a universal paradigmatic feature of a shared/collective "queer life." In speaking to this fragmentation, Malak distinguishes between the calculated and paranoid self-fashioning that contributes to her feelings of individualization and alienation, and the freedom of a directed self-fashioning that is aimed at the excavation of affirmative potentials when with other queers. The directional or intentional nature of this self-fashioning is one that, for her, is exemplified in what queers are best at - "spotting" other queers. For Malak, the combination of signifiers and context marks certain individuals as recognizably queer, opening up a concealed desire to reach out to them as they are presumably reaching out to you. Malak describes this form of signification as "making a statement ... letting people like me know that I am like this." This desiring of oneself through others, I believe, constitutes an active and affirmative occupation of one's body (which is marked) by re-signifying it in queer terms, for queer purposes.

In an effort to understand the transitions between these two modes, Malak points me to her home as a nexus of pain. In the drawing, Malak dissimulates the bedroom as "private" space, "ما في حاجة عندنا اسمها باب مقفول." 11 Waiting until her mother leaves to masturbate, Malak depicts a scene where she glances at her reflections in the mirrors on her dresser and closet staring back at her. Emphasizing her position within the physical layout of the room, the lines divide Malak along with the space. The bedroom itself sustains an illusion of privacy, individualism, and autonomy that are integral to the coherence of a subject that wakes up every day, stands before their closet to make a decision about how they will be seen, and goes off to be productive. Malak is, however, keenly aware of her precarious access to this illusive and illusory autonomy, pointing to the ways in which she is, as many queers articulate, infantilized by the militarized paternalism that characterizes both "public" and "private" spaces in Egypt. The door is indeed always open, and the innermost intimacies of queer individuals are precisely what get to be exploited by authoritarian heterosexuality. Once more, it is the space (conceptual and material) of the closet which naturalizes it, by presupposing the subject that will stand before it, indeed even offering them a place to deposit their "dirty little secret," since the world beyond this closet produces it necessarily as such. The fragmented reflections in Malak's drawing punctuate the split that she embodies as a queer - which, to her, gains its meaning precisely from the intersections of her marginalization. Queerness as she was introduced to it is "a radical inclusivity" that, in its non-specificity, offered the promise of a wholeness that could be achieved with other queers and with oneself. This fragmentation of her in the drawing then alludes to the way in which something of an authentic Malak is both caught up in and birthed out of these intersections. Malak too here becomes a nexus of power relations of which she is no longer a passive recipient. She finds ways to make due, as all queers must. Our entanglement in and constitution by violence then charges us in varied ways that are difficult to pin down or ascertain at the outset. But we are charged nonetheless with that ambiguous potential that we, with other queers, learn to channel, direct, and hone for the purpose of conducting the terms of our violation.

On a final note, it seems that queerness is always closeted/closed off by heterosexuality, that the closet is indeed heterosexual because it conceals and naturalizes a topography of power that it itself presupposes in order to legitimize its claims to originality. In this paper I have attempted to explore the conditions of possibility of a divide between in-private/out-public to show that such a divide is indeed an effect of power. By positing a public, one must presuppose a protector of this public, ushering in the state as benefactor. This becomes the realm of politics. The private then gets to be defined oppositionally as apolitical, obscuring the insidious ways in which this realm is, too, a site for the inscription of power. Ideology is naturalized as feelings of shame, guilt, etc., despite them being techniques of discipline and subjection - insofar as they are formed in response to fears of social exclusion, legal punishment, or divine retribution. In spite of these overwhelming efforts to quell it, however, queerness emerges and connects isolated nodes, offering queers, their meeting itself a self-sustaining and troubling act, an opportunity to collectivize in radical ways.
lover, we were never meant to find each other
lover, we were kept from one another, lover
lay down your arms, let's bind each other
in the rubble, we can mother
futures, lover, future-lovers
we can fight todays together

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It is with this in mind that I posit what I call authoritarian heterosexuality as a particular and particularly potent political regime, one that is entangled in colonial legacies and local sedimentations that inform the contemporary Egyptian state's attitudes towards queers specifically, and towards its citizenry more broadly.

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L'arte della gioia (the art of joy - l'art de la joie - el arte del placer)

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L'arte della gioia (the art of joy - l'art de la joie - el arte del placer)

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Goliarda Sapienza

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L’arte della gioia è un libro postumo: giaceva da vent’anni abbandonato in una cassapanca e, dopo essere stato rifiutato dai principali editori italiani, venne stampato in pochi esemplari da Stampa Alternativa nel 1998. Ma soltanto quando uscì all’estero – in Francia, Germania e Spagna – ricevette il giusto riconoscimento.
«Una narratrice siciliana meravigliosa», «una vera rivelazione», «magnifico, magico, commovente: un capolavoro», «un romanzo impostosi con il passaparola», «forse un altro Gattopardo»: con queste parole la stampa d’oltralpe accolse la pubblicazione del libro in Francia, facendone un vero caso editoriale. In quasi ogni recensione veniva provocatoriamente sottolineata l’incapacità dell’Italia di riconoscere e valorizzare i capolavori che ha in casa.
Nel romanzo, tutto ruota intorno alla figura di Modesta: una donna vitale e scomoda, potentemente immorale secondo la morale comune. Una donna siciliana, una «carusa tosta» in cui si fondono carnalità e intelletto, che attraversa bufere storiche e tempeste sentimentali protetta da un infallibile talismano interiore: «l’arte della gioia».
Modesta nasce il primo gennaio del 1900 in una casa povera, in una terra ancora piú povera. Ma fin dall’inizio è consapevole, con il corpo e con la mente, di essere destinata a una vita che va ben oltre i confini del suo villaggio e della sua condizione. Ancora ragazzina è mandata in un convento e da lí, alla morte della madre superiora che la proteggeva, in un palazzo di nobili. Qui, il suo enorme talento e la sua intelligenza machiavellica le permettono di controllare i cordoni della borsa di casa, e di convertirsi in aristocratica attraverso un matrimonio di convenienza. Tutto ciò senza mai smettere di sedurre uomini e donne di ogni tipo. Amica generosa, madre affettuosa, amante sensuale: Modesta è una donna capace di scombinare ogni regola del gioco pur di godere del vero piacere. Sfidando la cultura patriarcale, fascista, mafiosa e oppressiva in cui vive, Modesta attraversa la storia del Novecento con quella forza che distingue ogni grande personaggio della letteratura universale.

«Il tempo lavorerà a favore dei libri di Goliarda Sapienza. E questo non è un augurio: è una convinzione».

(Cesare Garboli, Goliarda Sapienza, l’arte di una vita)

«Un libro così non si scrive per correggere la propria vita, quanto per allargarla».

(Domenico Scarpa, Postfazione all’Arte della gioia)

«Lo sguardo di una narratrice meravigliosa nei suoi slanci ora razionali ora passionali, la rivelazione di un temperamento di scrittrice senza pari».

(René de Ceccatty, «Le Monde Des Livres»)

«Chi l’ha letto ne rimane segnato, chi l’ha letto dice che questo libro insegna a desiderare».

(Manuela Vigorita, Se l’arte della gioia diventa libertà)

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L'arte della gioia, Goliarda Sapienza. Giulio Einaudi Editore - Supercoralli

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L'arte della gioia. L'arte della gioia è il libro scandalo di una scrittrice straordinaria. È un romanzo d'avventura. È un'autobiografia immaginaria. È un romanzo di formazione. Ed è anche un romanzo erotico, e politico,e sentimentale. Insomma è un'opera indefinibile, piena di febbre e d'intelligenza, che conquista e sconvolge.

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"No Easter Sunday for Queers" in Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma

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"No Easter Sunday for Queers" in Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma

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http://uhlangapress.co.za/koleka-putuma-collective-amnesia

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Winner of the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry
Commended for the 2018 Ingrid Jonker Prize
City Press Book of the Year 2017
A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2017

This highly-anticipated debut collection from one of the country's most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma's exploration of blackness, womxnhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing. In them, Putuma explodes the idea of authority in various spaces - academia, religion, politics, relationships - to ask what has been learnt and what must be unlearnt. Through grief and memory, pain and joy, sex and self-care, Collective Amnesia is a powerful appraisal, reminder and revelation of all that has been forgotten and ignored, both in South African society, and within ourselves.

Koleka Putuma was born in Port Elizabeth in 1993. An award-winning performance poet, facilitator and theatre-maker, her plays include UHM and Mbuzeni, as well as two two plays for children, Ekhaya and Scoop. Her work has travelled around the world, with her poetry garnering her national prizes, such as the 2014 National Poetry Slam Championship and the 2016 PEN South Africa Student Writing Prize.

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Koleka Putuma, Collective Amnesia - uHlanga

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This highly-anticipated debut collection from one of the country's most acclaimed young voices marks a massive shift in South African poetry. Koleka Putuma's exploration of blackness, womxnhood and history in Collective Amnesia is fearless and unwavering. Her incendiary poems demand justice, insist on visibility and offer healing.

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A joyful celebration of the LGBTQ+ community’s development, history, and culture, packed with facts, trivia, timelines, and charts, and featuring 100 full-color illustrations. Compiled and designed by queer power couple and illustrators extraordinaire, Ashley Molesso and Chess Needham, founde

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Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz

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Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz

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Subjects
Native and Indigenous Studies, African American Studies and Black Diaspora, Critical Ethnic Studies

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal-an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea-as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.

"Tiffany Lethabo King's concept of the shoal breaks new ground for thinking through the relationships between Indigenous peoples and African Americans and genocide and slavery as well as how they have formed our contemporary politics. Her rigorous engagement with Black and Indigenous studies will create a better dialogue between the two fields." - Mishauna Goeman, author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations

"In this innovative contribution to both Black and Native studies, Tiffany Lethabo King dares to think the simultaneously distinct yet edgeless relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity. It's the geological formation of the shoal-that zone just offshore, neither land (often reductively linked to the Native) nor sea (often reductively linked to the Black)-that allows King to pull off this ethical project. Indeed, The Black Shoals is Black ethics, where the ethical emerges as that distinct, ever-developing gathering of Black and Native life under shared conditions of settler terror." - J. Kameron Carter, Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

"If I were teaching a grad seminar in the fall I would include both The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. I hope you will too." - Christina Sharpe, via Twitter

"King's scholarship represents a masterful mix of precision and sensitivity in describing the historical Native anti-blackness, as well as the historical cooperation between Africans and the European settlers King identifies as 'conquistador humans,' in dispossessing Natives of their land."
- Darryl Barthé, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"King's book is an important participant in a small but growing scholarly movement seeking to understand and unravel the logics of settler colonialism and conquest by breaking down scholarly silos between groups that frequently interacted and interact. Moreover, what King has so well begun can be built on by other scholars." - Laura Goldblatt, Lateral

"Tiffany King's poetic and theoretically compelling text is both an invitation and disturbance, or a provocation to be unmoored, to be thrown into chaos and to place one's feet at the shoal of something other than traditional (normative) notions of sovereignty, nation, and citizenship." - Shanya Cordis, GLQ

"A multivocal, wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary project, . . . Tiffany Lethabo King's book is both timely and prescient. . . . For those who would like to explore Black and Indigenous thought, especially the conceptual and methodological overlaps between the two fields, this book is an exceptional primer." - Michael J. Kennedy, The Black Scholar

" The Black Shoals offers a rich analysis of how scholars, activists, and artists have contended with conquest, conquistador-settler epistemologies, and Black-Native relations. . . . King's 'shoal' offers an analytic through which to theorize what ethical and sustained exchanges between Black studies and Native studies might look like." - Mary McNeil, Native American and Indigenous Studies

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Subjects Native and Indigenous Studies, African American Studies and Black Diaspora, Critical Ethnic Studies In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal-an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea-as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies.

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The Four Profound Weaves

2021 Nebula Award Finalist
2021 Ignyte Award Finalist
2021 Locus Award Finalist

The Surun' do not speak of the master weaver, Benesret, who creates the cloth of bone for assassins in the Great Burri Desert. But Uiziya now seeks her aunt Benesret in order to learn the final weave, although the price for knowledge may be far too dear to pay.

Among the Khana, women travel in caravans to trade, while men remain in the inner quarter as scholars. A nameless man struggles to embody Khana masculinity, after many years of performing the life of a woman, trader, wife, and grandmother.

As the past catches up to the nameless man, he must choose between the life he dreamed of and Uiziya, and Uiziya must discover how to challenge a tyrant, and weave from deaths that matter.

" The Four Profound Weaves is the anti-authoritarian, queer-mystical fairy tale we need right now." ―Annalee Newitz, author of The Future of Another Timeline

"A beautiful, heartfelt story of change, family, identity, and courage." ― Library Journal, starred review
Buzzfeed Best Book Releases of the Week
Publishers Weekly 2020 Top-10 Fall SF, Fantasy, and Horror
Book Riot 10 Great Adult LBGTQ+ Fantasy Books of 2020
Foreword Book of the Day
Autostraddle Queer and Feminist Books Coming Your Way in 2020
[STARRED REVIEW] "Nebula-nominated Lemberg's first novella, set in their deeply queer "Birdverse" universe, presents a beautiful, heartfelt story of change, family, identity, and courage. "

[STARRED REVIEW] "Lemberg's outstanding debut . . . expands on the short stories of the Birdverse that they have been publishing for about a decade . . . Lemberg writes deeply considered, evocative portraits of their characters, handling sexuality and gender especially well. This diverse, folkloric fantasy world is a delight to visit. -Publishers Weekly

[STARRED REVIEW] ""R. B. Lemberg spins a world of singing gods, desert nomads, and magic humming in the wind in The Four Profound Weaves . . . Impressive world building renders the shifting hues of the desert sands and the cold stone of The Collector's palace in tight prose. Social structures and customs are relayed with the same deft hand; the free, accepting atmosphere of the desert and its people ends at Iyar's stifling walls."

"Go read this story, tell it to your friends, and help us get to that future that we so desperately need."
-Trans Narrative

"R.B. Lemberg writes with a luminous pen, spraying light all around their words and ideas. They create a universe where carpets and cloaks bear history and the future. A perilous chase, with assassins and gods in pursuit, reveals the fluidity of life by following the threads-both bright and dark-that weave together to create a complex and mystical journey toward friendship, family, and love."
-Jewelle Gomez, author, The Gilda Stories

"R. B. Lemberg's The Four Profound Weaves tells the journey of a pair of aged and appealing wanderers searching for magic, art, identity, and peace. Thought-challenging points-of-view weave together stark violence, intricate powers, and the musings of long and complicated lives. The Four Profound Weaves contains imagery that glows on the page."
-Patricia McKillip, author of the Riddle-Master Trilogy and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

"I am staggered by the richness and intricacy of R. B. Lemberg's imagination. The Four Profound Weaves is an intense and emotional story of a journey of change, growth, and courage."
-Kate Elliott, author of the Court of Fives trilogy

"R. B. Lemberg's The Four Profound Weaves takes the reader on a deeply resonant journey of transformation and strength. Lemberg's lyrical skill, combined with unforgettable characters and the magic of the Birdverse makes a stunning fabric over which this story plays beautifully."
-Fran Wilde, author of The Bone Universe and The Gemworld series

"This story, very poetically, holds a mirror to society. It discusses the nuances of the trans experience and made me assess things I hadn't previously known or understood. It has had a profound impact on me. . . . The fifth profound weave is the way Lemberg takes feelings about gender, love and family, aging, and death and weaves them together into this captivating story."
-A Bookish Reader

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2021 Nebula Award Finalist2021 Ignyte Award Finalist2021 Locus Award Finalist The Surun' do not speak of the master weaver, Benesret, who creates the cloth of bone for assassins in the Great Burri Desert. But Uiziya now seeks her aunt Benesret in order to learn the final weave, although the price for knowledge may be far too dear to pay.

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Buy Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Atherton Lin, Jeremy (ISBN: 9781783785834) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/deleuze-guattari-and-the-schizoanalysis-of-trans-studies-9781350174801/

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Putting Deleuze and Guattari's concepts to wide-ranging use, leading trans theorists and activists develop innovative ways of thinking about trans identities, and the processes involved in liberating desires from the gendered ego. The first volume of its kind covers a broad mix of subjects including transecology, corporalities of betweenness, black transversality, toxic masculinity, and transvestism.

Led by the overarching concept of schizonalaysis and responding to the need to move beyond the hetero-patriarchy currently dominating both progressive and regressive discourse, Ciara Cremin outlines the potential for radical departure from the status quo concerning gender identity, sex, bodies, and politics. Arguing that trans people are at the forefront of debates on gendered dichotomies as a result of becoming something other than their assigned gender, Cremin and her contributors theorise the possibility of a society which does not rely on gendered forms of oppression for its existence. Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Trans Studies is an essential, ground-breaking resource for theorists, activists and students interested in trans theory today.

Introduction: A Trans Woman's Perspective on Deleuze and Guattari, Ciara Cremin (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
1. The Ontopolitics of Gender as Transindividual Relation, Sam Berlin (University of Bristol, UK) and Sage Brice (University of Durham, UK)
2. 'How Do You Make Yourself A Trans- Body Without Organs?' Posthumanism and Embodiment in Trans- Imperceptible Subjectivity, Charlie Bowen, (KU Leuven, Belgium)
3. Gender Territory: A Response to the Charge of Conservatism, Glen Melville, (KU Leuven, Belgium)
4. Trans* Teratologies, Janet B Watson (Deakin University, Australia)
5. Dysphoric Assemblage: How the Gender Binary Was Never Supposed to Work, Mat Fournier (Ithaca College, USA)
6. Transmolecular Revolution, Abraham B. Weil (California State University, USA)
7. Materializing Transgender Becoming: Norms, Failures and Ethics of "The Traveler's Book of Gender Wandering", Kaochen Liao (Fo Guang University, Taiwan)

8. The Death and Rebirth of Transvestism, Torkild Thanem (University of Stockholm, Sweden)

Published

24 Feb 2022

Format

Ebook (PDF)

Edition

1st

Extent

208

ISBN

9781350174801

Imprint

Bloomsbury Academic

Series
Schizoanalytic Applications

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

This is the anthology I've been waiting for: one that brings Deleuze and Guattari's scattered, elliptical references to transsexuality and non-binary gender into robust engagement with the field of trans studies that has grown up after their deaths. Both Deleuzoguattarian and trans studies will be enriched by this provocative encounter.

Susan Stryker, Executive Editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly; Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, Mills College, USA

Schizoanalysis of Trans Studies transforms the way we think about gender and social life. Situated at the forefront of debates in gender studies, queer theory, and beyond, this anthology not only takes on the implications of trans studies, it takes on key issues of global as well as gender politics, and survival. Read it. We need this thinking. Now.

Susan Rudy, Honorary Senior Research Fellow and Director, Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary University of London, UK

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Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Trans Studies

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Putting Deleuze and Guattari's concepts to wide-ranging use, leading trans theorists and activists develop innovative ways of thinking about trans identities, and the processes involved in liberating desires from the gendered ego. The first volume of its kind covers a broad mix of subjects including transecology, corporalities of betweenness, black transversality, toxic masculinity, and transvestism.

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Step into a world of discovery, exploration, and adventure in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a boundary-breaking new game in the acclaimed series. Discover what has become of the kingdom of Hyrule in this stunning open-air adventure for Nintendo Switch and Wii U.

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Pedro Lemebel - The Night of the Minks

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Santiago swayed with earthquakes and the political upheavals that would fracture the young Unidad Popular. In the air, an ominous fog thick with the smell of gunpowder and the rattle of pots, rich señoras banging a duet with their bracelets and jewels. Those blonde ladies shrieked for a coup d'état, a military turn to put an end to this Bolshevik scandal. Looking them over, the workers grabbed their bulges, offering sex, laughing their heads off, laughing with every tooth, with every free breath they happily breathed lining up for lunch in front of the UNCTAD. A few locas squeezing in line, pretended to lose their vouchers, digging in their boho bags, pulling out tissues and cosmetics, until they found their coupons with triumphant squeals, with lascivious glances, with quick groping fingers that slid down the sweaty bodies. Those proletariat muscles waiting in line for their trays at the people's kitchen in that long-ago December 1972. They were all happy, chatting about Música Libre, el lolo Mauricio, his olive mouth and Romeo haircut. His bell-bottom jeans, so snug around his hips, suctioned to his little bouquet of illusions. All of the locas loved him and all were his secret lovers. I saw him. He said this to me. I bumped into him just yesterday. They rushed to invent stories about TV's bachelor prince, saying he was one of ours, had a touch of lavender, one even swore she'd bring him to the New Year's party. To the big spread promised by la Palma, that rough loca who ran a chicken stand in La Vega and who, trying to pass for chic, had invited all of Santiago to her end-of-year fiesta. She said she'd kill twenty turkeys so the locas would get stuffed and not leave bitching. Because she was happy with Allende and Unidad Popular, she said this New Year's even the poor would eat turkey. And so the rumor ran, her party would be one to remember.

The whole world was invited: the poor locas, las locas from Recoleta, las locas feigning middle-class, las Blue Ballet locas, las locas from la Carlina, las locas working la calle de Huérfanos selling sex to the night, la Chumilou and her travesti gang, the stylish queens from Coppelia, and la Pilola Alessandri. They all met on the UNCTAD patio to plan the evening's attire. The ruffled shirt, the Saint-Tropez belt, the striped pants, no, better yet, the wide-legged ones with pleats like a maxi, plus the clogs, and, on top of it all, a mink coat, sighed la Chumilou. You mean rabbit fur, pretty, because I don't think you have a mink. And you, princess, what color's yours? I don't have one, said la Pilola Alessandri, but Mother has two. I'd have to see them. Which, the white or the black? Both, said la Chumilo, her voice a dare. The white one to bid goodbye to '72, which was a party for us broke maricones. And the black to ring in '73, which, with so much fucking pan banging, seems to be coming hard and heavy. La Pilola Alessandri, having offered her coats, couldn't back out. So that night, the last of the year, she arrived at the UNCTAD in a taxi and, after kissing her hellos, unveiled her mother's stolen furs, saying they were authentic, her father had bought them in la Casa Dior in Paris, and he'd kill her if anything happened to them. But the locas weren't listening, wrapping themselves in the furs, voguing and catwalking to the bus stop, making a to-do over how they hadn't eaten, not even a nibble, which, for that matter, neither had la Pilola who, in the drama of procuring her mother's coats had missed the family banquet's lobster and caviar, and, her stomach in a knot, was as starving and desperate as anyone to reach la Palma's and her turkeys on their spit.

Crossing in front of the precinct, the rich queens hurried along not wanting any problems, but the pigs shouted something anyway. So la Chumilou stopped and slipping the mink off her shoulder, she took out her fan, and, batting it, said she was ready for the night. Afterwards, in the bus, she didn't stop showing off, dragging the coat down the aisle, playing stewardess. Singing a dirty cuplé, turning the trip into stand-up with punch lines the others, inflamed by the summer night, shouted back. When they arrived, there wasn't a scrap of turkey; a punchbowl of wine mixed with fruit and a smattering of gnawed canapés sprinkled the table. La Palma, apologizing continuously, ran from one side to the other because the stylish queens had arrived: the "it" girls, the sophisticates, the jet set disembarking the plane. Those blonde snobs who snubbed her in la calle de Huérfanos, the same locas who hated Allende and his Popular Front. Girls spilling over with pearls and tears because those bums had confiscated mommy's country estate. La Astaburuaga, la Zañartu, and la Pilola Alessandri, such gossips, such vipers, so elegant in their mink coats. In minks like la Taylor, like la Dietrich, they arrived in Recoleta by bus, imagine. The neighborhood emptied out to catch a glimpse of them, of those ladies, shiny as movie stars, models out of Paula magazine. And the people who'd lived there forever were stunned, without words, as they watched the girls enter la Palma's house for that coliza party she'd been talking about for months. Speechless, as the girls, enfurred in the summer heat, looked at the house with nausea, saying sideways: what chic decor, girl, pointing to the plaster candelabrum adorning the table, the shabby table with its plastic tablecloth and its chicken bones and crumbs. La Palma, not knowing where to put herself, spewed explanations, saying again how there'd been a mountain of food: twenty turkeys, crates of champagne, salads, desserts galore. But those common locas didn't leave a thing, they were so starved, they'd eaten everything. They'd eaten as if a war were coming.

Spinning all night, queer cumbias splashed the first sunrise of '73. When everyone cut loose with fresh bottles of pisco and carafes of wine the rich locas sent for, class nuances were lost among the toasts, hugs, and caprices unfolding beneath the patio's balloons and streamers. Slum alliances and lowly seductions, ass pinches and handshakes from the neighborhood workers who'd come to gawk at the shiny pompadour girls, friends of the hostess. Digs and jabs and fresh allusions to the absent feast sizzling into laughter. In the quiet between songs, la Pilola shouted, they stole your turkeys, girl! And la Palma fell back to explaining, exhibiting the cemetery of bones discarded in the middle of the table. At first, there were the hostess' tomato-red blushes and apologies when a cumbia ended and the rich girls would shout, ration out that turkey, girl, but, later, the alcohol and the tipsiness turned her shame into a party game. The locas collected bones and stacked them neatly on the table into an enormous pyramid, a common grave they illumined with candles. Nobody knew where some messy loca found a tiny Chilean flag to stick at the apex of the sinister sculpture. Then la Pilola Alessandri got upset, and said with indignation that it showed a lack of respect for the army who had given so much for the nation. That the country was a rabble-rousing disgrace under Unidad Popular who had everyone dying of hunger. That the common locas didn't know a thing about politics and didn't have any respect, not even for the flag. And that she, for one, couldn't stay a minute longer, so they should give her her minks because she was going home. What minks, girl? replied la Chumilou, fanning herself. We common locas wouldn't know what one looked like. And in this heat? In full summer? You'd have to be very stupid to wear a pretty fur. So then the posh queens realized it had been awhile since anyone had seen either of the fine furs. They called for the hostess who, drunk, was still collecting bones to add to her monument to hunger. They looked in every corner, stripped all the beds, asked the neighbors, but no one remembered seeing minks flying above Recoleta's tin roofs. When la Pilola couldn't take any more, she threatened to call her uncle, the comandante, if her mother's coats didn't appear. But all of las locas looked at her skeptically, knowing she'd never do so for fear her honorable family would catch her red-handed. La Astaburuaga, la Zañartu, and a few other arrivistes, in solidarity, left indignantly vowing never to set foot in that plebian place again. And while they waited in the street for a taxi to whisk them from that dust bowl, the music came back on full blast in la Palma's shack, the pelvises went back to grinding, and "Mambo N° 8" announced the start of the drag show. Then, just as suddenly, the music cut out again and everyone shouted in unison: They stole your mink, girl. Ration out that mink.

The first sunrise of '73 was a faded chiffon draped over the open mouths of the colizas sleeping sprawled across la Palma's house. Cigarette ashes everywhere, below the trellis, trampled garlands. Soft groaning and strings of words came from the disheveled beds. Glasses, half-full, swayed with the rhythm of lovemaking, quiet giggling recalled the stolen minks. And that gap of light entering through the windows, that light floating like smoke through the wide-open door. As if the house were a skull illuminated from outside. As if las locas slept soundly in a five-skull hotel. As if the bone house erected in the center of the table were an altar to the coming future, an omen, the New Year horoscope winking black tears in the wax of the candles, at the point of snuffing out, the point of extinguishing the last spark lighting up the little paper flag crowning the shrine.

Since then, the years have fallen like trees in the demolition of a forest, burying the national party. The coup d'état came and its snowstorm of bullets made las locas stampede from the UNCTAD's flowery patios, never to dance there again. They looked for other spots, gathering in the shopping malls recently inaugurated by the dictatorship. The parties continued, more private, quieter, with fewer guests, the rule abiders subdued by the crypt of the curfew. Some of the clubs stayed open because the military regime never repressed the gay scene like in Argentina or Brazil. Maybe well-off homosexuality was never a subversive enough problem to upset their tidy morality. Maybe there were too many locas on the right supporting the regime. Perhaps the odor of dead bodies was quieted by the French perfume of the maricas from fancy neighborhoods. Regardless, the mortuary stench of the dictatorship was outdone by AIDS, which made its debut in the '80s.

The only thing left of that abridged emancipation is the UNCTAD, that big cement elephant which for many years housed the military. Then democracy went about reclaiming its plazas and patios from which the sculptures donated by Unidad Popular artists had been removed. Also its enormous auditoriums and conference rooms, where today they hold forums and seminars on queers, AIDS, utopias, and tolerance.

The only thing left of that party is a photo, washed-out cardboard in which the faraway coliza faces are exposed to the gaze of the present. The photo isn't good, but the sexual militancy that defined the group assaults you. Framed in the distance, their mouths are extinguished laughs, echoes of gestures frozen by the flash of a final toast. Retorts, sayings, smiles, and sneers, jokes hanging from their lips about to fall, irony about to drop in the venom of their kisses. The photo isn't good, it's blurry, but the joke of being out of focus dispels forever the stability of memory. The photo is blurry, perhaps because of the ruined tulle of AIDS, veiling the double disappearance of almost all of las locas. The shadow is a delicate cellophane bandage lassoing the waist of la Pilola Alessandri, who is propping her queen-ass-hip up on the right side of the table. She purchased the epidemic in Nueva York and was the first to wear it, an exclusive brand name, the trendiest way for gays to die. The latest funeral fashion that slimmed you like no diet could. Leaving you thin and pale as a model from Vogue, as slender and chic as the sigh of an orchid. AIDS cinched her body and she died so gaunt, so gathered, so slender and beautiful in the aristocratic economy of tight-fisted death.

The photo isn't good, you can't tell if it's black and white or if the color's fled to a tropical paradise. You can't see the blushes on las locas or on the plastic mantel's droopy roses: they were washed out in the rain and the floods, while the photo hung from a nail in la Palma's shack. It's difficult to decipher its chromatics, to imagine the colors in the shirts dampened by cold winter frosts. Just a halo of humid yellow livens up the photo. Just these wet tracks burning across the paper, buckets of rain in the sepia stain across la Palma's chest. Piercing her, pinning her like an insect in the butterfly garden of working-class AIDS. It stung her in Brazil, after she'd sold the chicken stand in La Vega, saying she couldn't take the soldiers anymore, she was going to shimmy on the sands of Ipanema. Why else is one a loca, if not to live in a carnival and samba through one's days? Besides with the dollar at 39 pesos, the carioca piñata was close enough to hit. She'd give her life to be queen for a night. And so she left, proclaiming in the airport, imitating the rich girls: you are what you spend.

And AIDS was generous with la Palma, who went, frankly, on a walkabout, rolling around with every hungry lost soul who asked her for sex. You could almost say she was served it on a platter passed down the horny streets of Copacabana until everyone was sated. La Palma slurped up the Kaposi serum to the very last drop, stuffing herself on her own death without a second thought. Burning with fever, she returned to the sand, sharing her infectious confetti with the slackers, panhandlers, and lepers she met in the palm shade of her Black Orpheus. The virus, drunk on samba and orgies, swelling her face like a clear balloon, like a condom inflated by the huffing and puffing of her compassionate anus. Her philanthropic anus setting off tambourines and kettledrums in the ardor of her AIDS-filled diarrhea. As if it were a party, a samba school for dying in sequins lost in the tomb of the favelas, in free-floating African perfume, wetting the pavement jet black on Atlántida, on la calle de Rio, always willing to sin and settle up in flesh for the pleasures of her delirium.

La Palma came home and died happy in unbearable agony. She bade her farewells while listening to the music of Ney Matogrosso, murmuring her saudades before parting. We'll see each other at another party, she said sadly, looking at the photo nailed to the boards of her misery. And before closing her eyes, she could see herself so young, almost a blushing virgin raising her glass and a handful of bones that summer of '73. She looked so beautiful in the mirror of the photo, wrapped in la Pilola's white mink, she looked so chic in the pearly halo of its fur, making the bony hand of Death stay while she looked at herself. She made Death wait, as she held onto one more minute of life, one more minute of reveling in her enfurred narcissus. Then she closed her eyelids and she let go and floated in the silk of memory.

The photo isn't good, snapped in a hurry to catch the mess of locas circling the table, almost all of them cloudy from striking a pose too quickly in their crazy desire for transcendence. It looks like the last supper of coliza apostles, where the only thing in focus is the pyramid of bones in the center of the table. It looks like a Biblical fresco, a watercolor of Maundy Thursday in which you can practically smell the wine carafe la Chumilou is holding like a Chilean holy chalice. She's put herself in the center, assuming the place of Christ minus the halo. Standing on tippy-toe in the twenty centimeters of her high heels, la Chumilou, flaunting her travesti glam. La Pilola's black mink just slipping down the whiteness of her shoulders, an animal embrace warming her fragile heart, the delicate sigh of the local virgin. All tucked in like a rosebud cupped by the sepals of the mink. Something of a film-still in the way she's offering her cheek to receive a kiss. Just a kiss, la Chumilou seems to say to the camera snatching her features. Just a kiss of flash to hail her with shine, to leave her dazzled by the lightening of her own reflection. It's a lying mirror, the alter-image of a real proletariat diva burdened with obtaining the kilo of bread and tomatoes for her family's breakfast. Ready to fight every sodomite hooker on the corner, ready to defend her turf. La Chumilou was fierce, the other travestis said. La Chumilou was ready to knife someone who might steal a client. And she was the favorite, the most sought-after, the singular comfort of bored husbands who got hard on the smell of horny maricón. So the AIDS stinger chose her as the bait for its miracle fishing. Because she sucked off everyone, because she was always hungry, insatiable for fucking under a moon made of money. A sweet tooth, she didn't notice there were no condoms left in her purse. There were so many bills, so much money, so many dollars that gringo paid her. So much make up, electric razors, and depilatory wax. So many dresses and new shoes, she could toss last season's pumps. So much bread, eggs, and pasta to bring home. There were so many dreams squeezed into that wad of dollars. So many little brothers with open mouths that haunted her night after night. So many decayed molars in the mouth of her mother, who had no money for the dentist, and who waited for la Chumi in an insomniac dawn wracked with pain. There were so many debts, so many school fees, so much to pay for, because she wasn't indulgent, the other colas said. La Chumilou made do with little, hardly any American clothing, a cheap blouse, a skirt, a tatty scrap of clothing her mother touched up, sewing on a bit of lace here, a bit of sparkle, dressing up la Chumi's work uniform. Telling her to be careful, not to have sex with just anyone, not to forget to wear the condoms she bought herself, suffering the shame of asking for them at the pharmacy around the corner. But that night there wasn't one condom left, and the impatient gringo, ready to mount her, was offering a green fan of dollars. So la Chumi closed her eyes and, stretching out her hand, caught hold of the wad of bills. Her luck couldn't be so bad that just this once, just this one time in many, many years of selling live flesh, the shadow would hit her. And that's how la Chumi, without wanting it, crossed the tapestry-lined arcade of the plague, sinking slowly in the viscous waters, claiming a one-way ticket on its sinister boat. An inevitable kidnapping, she said. Besides, I've lived a lot, my twenty-five years have been long ones, death comes to me, and I take it like a vacation. Just bury me dressed as a woman. In my work clothes, my silver pumps, and black wig. In my lucky red satin dress. No jewels, diamonds, or emeralds, I leave them to my mama so she can fix her teeth. The farm and the houses on the coast are for my little brothers, who deserve a real future. And to las colas travestis, I leave the fifty-room mansion the Sheikh gave me. So they can start a retirement home for the elders. I don't want anyone to grieve, no weeping, none of those floral wreaths drunkenly bought at the last minute in some flower shop. Even worse, those cheap evergreen wreaths that never dry out as if one were never done dying. At the most, put a bowing orchid on my chest, sprinkled with rainwater, and buy some big electric altar candles. Let there be candles. Many candles. Hundreds of candles on the floor, on all sides, descending the stairs, sparkling on la calle San Camilo, on la calle Maipú, la calle Vivaceta, and on La Sota de Talca. As many candles as in a blackout, as many as the disappeared. Many little flames splashing wet light on the poorest part of the city. Sequins of fire on our rainy streets. So many, like pearls slipped from a necklace, thousands of candles like coins from a broken piggy bank. So many candles like stars pulled out of cleavage. So many, like sparks from a crown to illuminate my absence. I need that warm glow to look as if I've just fallen asleep. Still a bit rosy after the bat kiss of death. Almost unreal in the flickering halo of candles, almost sublime submerged below crystal. I want them to say: la Chumi looks like she's sleeping, like sleeping beauty, a virgin serene and intact, scars erased by the miracle of death. No trace of the sickness, no hematomas, no pustules, no bags under my eyes. I want a no makeup look, although they'll have to do my whole face. Like la Ingrid Bergman in Anastasia, like la Betty Davis in Jezebel, just a sleeping kid really, waiting for something to happen. And here's hoping I die before daybreak, maybe when we're returning to the palace after dancing all night. No masses, no priests, no boring sermons. No poor little cola, forgive him Father for entering your holy kingdom. No crying, no fainting, no dramatic goodbyes. Let me go satisfied, generously, nothing outstanding. I don't need their sad speeches or the kisses love denied me . . . I don't even need their love. Look at me as I go, I am crossing the foam. Look at me for the last time, enviously, because I'm not coming back. Luckily, I'm not coming back. I feel silk drenched in death covering my eyes, and, in my final moment, I was happy. Don't take anything from me now, because I never had anything. And even that I lost.

La Chumilou died the same day democracy arrived, her humble funeral procession intersected with the crowds celebrating the triumph of the NO vote on la Alameda. It was difficult to cut through that mass of painted kids waving the NO flag with its little rainbow, shouting, chanting ecstatically, hugging las locas who accompanied la Chumi's funeral procession. And for a moment, mourning was mistaken for happiness, sadness for carnival. As if death paused its carriage to dance the last cueca. As if you could still hear, if faint, la Chumi's voice as she learned of the victory. Give my regards to democracy. And it seemed democracy returned her regards in the hundreds of shirtless kids who climbed the hearse, hopping onto its roof, hanging from its windows, shaking cans of spray paint and scrawling the vehicle with graffiti, Goodbye Tyranny. Hasta nunca Pinochet. Death to the Jackal. Like that, in front of the horrified eyes of la Chumi's mother, the hearse became an allegory flanked by a rebellious second-line which accompanied the funeral for several blocks. After which the funeral procession continued its mournful march, its pachyderm's trot through the deserted streets to the cemetery. Among the floral wreaths, someone hung a banner of the rainbow victorious. A white banner shot across with colors that accompanied la Chumi to her winter garden.

Maybe the photo from la Palma's party is the only vestige of that era of social utopia, when las locas felt the palpitations of their future emancipation. Weaving through the crowds, they took part in the euphoria. Those on the right, as much as those on Allende's left, beat saucepans, stepping into view from their place of public anonymity with timid assertions, whispers which would become the speeches of the "minor" story in the struggle for legalization.

Of the group in the photo, almost no one is still alive. The pallid yellow of the paper is a faded sun, deathly skin illuminates the daguerreotype. All the faces look flecked with purulent drizzle. The dirtiness of the flies painted beauty marks on cheeks later painted with tumors. All the smiles chirping from the balcony are handkerchiefs waving goodbye from an invisible prow. Before the millennial boat docked in 2000, before the legalization of Chilean "homosexuality," before the gay militancy of the '90s, before that masculine à la mode was enforced like a Salvation Army uniform, before democracy's neoliberalism sanctioned gay marriage. Long before these privileges, the photo of las locas from that New Year's glints like something shiny in a sunken world. When the obscene crystal of their laughter was still subversive, scrambling gender expectations. In the faded image, you can measure the vast distance, years of dictatorship virulently straightening out their gestures. You can see the metamorphosis of queerness at the turn of the century; the death of la loca covered in AIDS sores, but her final blow coming from the imported gay standard, so trendy, so penetrating in its salesmanship: the new macho gay. The photo bids goodbye to the century of radiant plumage, to las locas still not straightened out, still folkloric in their illicit glamour. They look like an archaic frieze before the invasion of the gay Patrón. Where the native territory still hadn't received the contagion of the plague like a re-colonization through bodily fluids. The photo shows a smiling merry-go-round, a dance of laughing sparrows so young, just teenagers with their dislocated way of putting the world back together. A new tribe defining their rites. Other deliriums baroquely enriching the discourse of Latin American queerness. Back then, the Chilean maricada weaved the future, daydreaming about their emancipation, arms linked with other social causes. The "homosexual man" or "mister gay," a construction of narcissistic prowess, didn't fit the undernourished reflection of las locas. Those bodies, those muscles, those biceps arriving in foreign magazines, were a First World Olympus, pure gym class, a bodybuilding regime in ecstasy over its own reflection. A neo-blond conquest catching fire with the social climbing jet set, las locas Malinches, the princesses who copied New York style and brought it to this backyard of the world. Along with that walking cast of Superman, in the aseptic packaging of his white skin, so hygienic, reeking with capitalist charm. Very different from the lackluster skin tones of the local geography. Inside that Apollo, under his smooth marble, came the immune deficiency syndrome, a traveler, a tourist who planned to just pass through Chile, and the sweet wine of our blood made him stay.

Surely, the common finale la Palma, la Pilola Alessandri, and la Chumilou shared, proved AIDS was a propagandist free of class prejudice. A lethal generosity stretching out its hand, doling out its secret supply. As if to say: There's enough for everybody, don't crowd. It won't run out, don't worry. There's plenty of passion and agony to come, until they find a cure.

Maybe the little stories and the epics never run parallel, minor destinies continue to be regulated by the politics of a market always stalking any fugitive. And on this ultra-controlled map of Modernism, they detect fissures and repair them with the same cement, the same mixture of corpses and dreams lying beneath the scaffolding of the neoliberal pyramid. Maybe the last light in the eyes of la Palma, la Pilola Alessandri, and la Chumilou was desire. Or rather three desires still searching for the minks lost at that party. Because nobody ever found out where la Pilola's chic furs landed. They vanished into the summer night air like a stolen dream keeps constructing its story beyond nostalgia. Especially during the seropositive winter of las locas, when the white cotton of the epidemic turned their feet to ice.

La Regine of Aluminios El Mono
Who knew the plague was a firefly drifting through Santiago's suburban slums, a dangerous star replacing the numb alley lights. The dying half-light barely enough to see the squalor of rags, cardboard, and fruit peels around which worked the high heels of la Regine. La loca stumbled half-drunk, half-nauseous from the AZT that cost a fortune. And that's getting it contraband, half-price under the counter. Sacred AZT, the gasoline to keep the party on the fourth floor kicking a little longer. La Regine's palace was always in full swing, lit by the living red of the neon sign for Aluminios El Mono. As if it were a movie from the '50s, where the window's always flooding with light flashing between kisses, painting each caress with its florescence. Or rather, slapping a price tag on every touch with its capitalist propaganda. And although the tenement house quaked during earthquakes, and its piss-sprayed walls suffered from wear, la Regine lived the rest of her stigma, "Como si fuera esta noche la última vez." As if at any moment the '50s movie would end with a wave from the girl in the window. And only the neon of Aluminios El Mono would be left shimmering on-screen to tell her story.

The whole Barrio Mapocho knew and loved la Regine's walk when purse in hand, she wiggled between the stalls at La Vega Central. Just across the sweaty street, sweaty as the chests of the dockers yelling at her: Regine, I'm horny. Regine, tonight's the night. Salve Regina, squeezing the fruit in her little snail hand, laughing and chatting to the women with tits big as melons saying: You're so skinny, Regine. What diet are you on? Where's your ass? Here take these oranges to make some juice and rest. Don't work so hard, the men will still be there, they won't die out. But la Regine knew it wasn't from dieting and it wasn't the men; she was the one dying with every giggle, with every joke she catcalled back, flirtily biting an apricot. She was the one fading, like the color of the cherries hanging from her ears. She was the one drifting away with the scent of sweet cinnamon mingled with the oregano on the pizza her man liked.

That's her, la Regine, queen of seafood stalls and fish made iridescent by her travesti siren charm. What can I get for you, princess? The men asked, hands full of scales. Wouldn't you like this red conger? Look how juicy. You don't want a few shellfish, good for a hangover? Or a few pink barnacles for the little monkey from Aluminios El Mono? You could hear music coming from the fourth floor until daybreak. It was Palmenia Pizarro with her cruel little waltz, that famous, "En vano quieres matar mi orgullo. No has visto ni verás llanto en mis ojos," whispered la Regine hooked to her military man, singing to him softly, whispering the song in his ears, tan from his buzzcut, mark of his low rank, but they said he had a big bayonet. "Y dicen que le hace pero no le hace, tan chiquitito y quiere casarse" to la loca because she shines you like a trophy. Not even his mother had his underpants so white. Bleaching, scrubbing, she got the smell of feet out of the kid, who now looked pretty and fresh when the military gave him leave. When he'd go out for ice cream with la Regine in the suffocating La Vega afternoon.

He was the only one who kept visiting her after the dictatorship fell. The only skinny buzzcut la Regine claimed as an official lover, after having gone through the troop's entire roster. Through rows of conscripts who entered her anus at a lively march. And left lightly brushed by the stricken flag of AIDS.

Truckloads of men unloaded their boiling gunpowder in the palace of Aluminios El Mono. Night after night, there was spillage for all; casserole à la asshole at daybreak for the horny troops. At all hours, at midnight, at dawn, when the curfew was a glass bell over the city, when a shout would break the bell to smithereens and bullets would rain down on the residents. When that same shout splattered the crystal with blood. The red from the fourth floor was the only lighthouse for the patrols tired of beating people to repression's drumbeat. So the lieutenant in charge sent a buzzcut to la Regine's to ask if they might pay a visit, if the kids could come and rest a bit, that they'd bring a bottle of pisco, she shouldn't go to any trouble. But la Regine took the trouble. Making a soup from scratch, a wake-the-dead, as they called the hot broths she made for the soldiers. With plenty of onion and garlic, to make their cocks stand up. After which, they'd each march to a room with a loca. Everybody except Sergio, that Southern buzzcut, black as seaweed. But he'd play hard to get, saying he was tired, he wanted to sleep, that he'd rather stay in the stairwell, cold as shit, teeth chattering against teeth, before he'd buttfuck a maricón.

He was the only one who didn't drink pisco, he smoked and smoked with fury, chewing the smoke, filling the whole place with smoke to blot out the erotica lining la Regine's sofas. As if he didn't want to see, as if he wanted to veil the Sistine Chapel of Sodomy with smoke. As if he wanted to avoid the temptation of pink asses swallowing bayonets. Because Sergio never wanted to be in the military, he hated the army and was there because he had to be. Maybe that's why he said again and again that he was tired, wouldn't they please fuck off, these locas grabbing him, asking, But why are you sad? What happened? Would a blow job help? They wouldn't leave him be, waggling their asses, following him everywhere; until la Regine shouted for them to leave him alone. If he didn't want it, he didn't want it. Forget about him. There's a bevy of buzzcuts to take your pleasure with, stop bothering that poor kid. I'm not so poor, replied Sergio looking at her squarely. I have a conscience. And what's that, pretty boy? La Regine, hands on her hips, with her Chinese dressing robe open revealing a flat nipple. I have feelings. But this is the house of feelings, corazón. You don't understand. And what is it I'd need to understand, huh? The things going on. What things? As I see it, everything's fine. I'm fine as hell. You don't find me pretty? La Regine kneaded her shaved nipple. I'm talking about other things. What things, come, tell me. Sergio's voice choked and he couldn't respond, dodging la Regine's piercing look. Tell me then, what are you afraid of? What happened to you? Tell me, I'm as silent as a tomb.

Come here, said Sergio, pulling her toward the window, to the windowsill red with neon from Aluminios El Mono. Santiago had gone missing in a sea of asphalt. In the distance, the sparkle of fires declared an end to the night's protest. Explosions, gunshots, and barking broke the lead weight air. You don't see that? asked Sergio pointing with his eyes toward a horizon sleepless from the drum roll of shooting. Sounds pretty, said la Regine sadly, we could dance to it. But I'm not wearing heels, and I only dance in heels. Wait a sec, I'll be right back. And she disappeared the same moment a bomb cut the power, and everything went black. In the house, las locas shouted Viva Chile, tying themselves into horny knots with the men, protectors of the patria. Everything's ok, everything's ok, shouted the lieutenant, petting the smooth back of a young loca. The terrorists, my lieutenant, won't let us fu . . . , excuse me, live in peace.

When the laughing died down, Sergio went back to looking at the city, more impenetrable now in the swamp of the blackout. The window had lost its glowing frame, and the extinguished neon left only the skeleton of the logo's monkey imprinted on the tragic sky. The howl of an ambulance made him jump at the same moment he saw a yellow light traveling down the hallway. A candle making a halo around the made-up face of la Regine wearing black thigh-highs and spike heels. Now we dance, she whispered in his ear, sticking the tip of her tongue into its waxy wrinkles. Sergio let her lick to drown out the drums of gunpowder, let her suck to stop the screams of women grabbing for their men as he pushed them to the vans with the butt of his gun. And he let la Regine push at him with her hot saliva to not hear the moaning of the ripping nylon on the nightshirts of the women he separated from their families. Now, the tip of her tongue moved across his temple and her hand found his virile flesh. He removed her hand brusquely, but he let la Regine's tongue tickle his cheek. Because it was like the tongue of a dog that cleans the night's wounds, its abyss of corpses, still alive, licking the hands stiff from the gun. That warm tongue was a wet towel lullabying the tense muscles of the chin. A domestic animal massaging his marble cheekbone, where a single tear slithered. Only one drop falling from his cramped heart. A single bead that clouded his vision and wound slowly down his face until it met her tongue which swallowed it. As if la Regine had drunk his shame, without talking, without saying a word, without even making a sound, her gossipy tongue kept tracing Sergio's sad face. Like a paintbrush she drew his mouth torn by bitterness. His mouth tight, he let her paint with her bird of saliva. That salty paintbrush kissing his eyes and his forehead. And when he was calm, la Regine peeled herself from Sergio's body with a damp look, avoiding his eyes, which in the dark continued to shine. That's enough, she said to him after a moment, making space between them. Now we talk.

Nobody knew what Sergio said to la Regine that night, but nobody came to interrupt them. Patrols kept arriving to relax in the palace of Aluminios El Mono until dawn, which found them all naked, tied up in cum soaked sheets, each wrapped around una loca. The pale morning light entered through the curtains evaporating the petals of the orgy. Cigarette butts and half-drunk glasses everywhere. Everywhere fragments of bodies poking out of the sodomite mess. An arm wrapped around a stomach, a leg disappearing over the abyss of the bedside. A brown torso with the scribble of a loca spilling across the chest. Some glutes peeking out from the sheets' drapery and dripping with the troop's proletarian serum. An open hand that had dropped a noisemaker to grab something and, empty and lifeless, retained the gesture. Pairs of legs braided together, rubbing the sandpaper of their hair in a dirty mambo. Body parts and cadavers glued to the fuzzy canvas of sheets. Cadavers with painted mouths wrapped around their executioners. Still panting, still stretching out a hand to catch the deflated cannon in the ejaculated war. Still alive, incomplete, floating beyond the window floating into the city's tubercular haze which dawned on the brown smoke of the protest.

They were the party's dead, bags of skin wrung out by the spasms of climax. Limbs in repose that jolted to life at the sun's first rays worriedly asking the time. Searching for their uniforms, camouflage shirts and pants mixed up with spike heels and panties, a gun crowned with a blonde wig. They came to their senses, cleaning out the helmets used as ashtrays. Here and there and to the window, the crude cotton underpants the motherland supplied. They fought to find their own, identifying them by the color of the pubes. There was a redhead from the north, a Mapuche from Arucanía, an albino with reddish eyes who never found his sunglasses, and ran through the rooms shaking his limp and enormous baton. In the shuffle the sergeant asked about Sergio. They said he was sleeping in the truck. In the truck? Yes, downstairs, in the truck, answered la Regine opening her legs so a skinny and inexperienced kid could pull out. But Sergio and you . . . ? Sergio and I are friends, that's all. You aren't going to stay for breakfast? And la Regine went into the kitchen to boil water, leaving the sergeant with his question hanging.

Long after the end of the dictatorship, the lieutenant and the troop would come to understand the platonic love between Sergio and la Regine. When the cramps and cold fevers of colitis gave them a positive vantage on the epidemic. By then, Madame Regine was already under the earth, planted like a fruit tree, she received the respects of the entire neighborhood of La Vega on the silver day of her funeral. That day all of the stalls were empty, and a snowfall of petals fell from the fourth floor when the dockers carried down the coffin. La Regine was so heavy, the poor thing swelled up, and we had to solder the box so it wouldn't drip, said the grandmas. But the dirty teardrops fell all the same and remained on the stairs and street a long time after. Purple stains that the people circled with candles as if they were dark miracles. Nothing else was discovered of Sergio, he was with her until her last day, when la Regine asked they leave the two of them alone for an hour. Outside, las locas, plastered against the door, tried to listen, but nada. Not a sigh, not a peep. Not even the creaking of the cot. Until several months after the burial, when a loca cleaning found the dry condom with Sergio's semen, and she went to bury it at la Regine's grave.

She was the first one struck by the mystery in San Camilo. Around here, almost all the travestis are infected, but the clients come anyway, it seems they like it more, that's why they want it without a condom.

She called herself Madonna, she used to have another name. But when she saw the gringa on TV she fell in love, went half-crazy imitating her, copying her gestures, her smile, her way of moving. La Madonna had a Mapuche face, she was from Temuco, that's why we teased her, we called her Madonna Peñi, Madonna Curilagüe, Madonna Pitrufquén. But she didn't get mad, perhaps that's why she dyed her hair blonde, blonde almost white. But the mystery had already weakened her hair. The peroxide burned her roots, and her brush filled up with hair. Her hair fell out in locks. We said she looked like a mangy dog, but she never wore a wig. Not even the gorgeous platinum one we gave her for Easter, which cost us a fortune, all of the travestis scraping our coins together for months, peso by peso, to buy it downtown. Just so la linda could go back to work and pull out of her depression. But, proud, she thanked us with tears in her eyes, and, holding the wig to her heart, said stars couldn't accept such gifts.

Before the mystery, she had the most beautiful hair, the bitch, she washed it every day and would sit in the doorway brushing it dry. We'd say to her: Get inside girl, the patrol's coming, but she didn't care. She was never afraid of the pigs. She'd be cocky whenever they'd stop her, shouting that she was an artist and not a murderer like them. So they gave it to her hard, beating her until she was crumpled on the pavement, and la loca didn't shut up, she kept shouting at them until their van was out of sight. They'd leave her soft as pounded quince, bruises covering her back, her sides, her face. Giant welts she couldn't cover with makeup. But she'd laugh. They hit me because they love me, she'd say with those pearly whites which later fell out one by one. After that, she didn't want to laugh anymore, she gave herself to drink, she'd drink everything until she was sprawled out drunk. It was hard to watch.

Without hair, without teeth, she wasn't the same Madonna who'd make us all laugh when the clients didn't come. We'd spend nights in the doorway, cold as shit, telling jokes. And she'd imitate la Madonna in her sliver of a skirt, really an oversized turtleneck. A ribbed turtleneck, made of wool and lamé, the kind sold in secondhand shops with American clothes. She'd hike it up with a belt into a chic miniskirt. She was so creative, la loca, she could make a dress from a rag. When she got silicone put in she switched to V-necks. The clients went crazy whenever she'd put her tits on a car's windshield. And she sounded just like the real Madonna saying: Mister, lovmi plis.

She knew all of the songs without having any idea what they said. Repeating the English phrases like a parrot, adding her own illiterate charm. And she didn't really need to know what the blonde's shrieking meant. Her cherry mouth modulated the tuyú, the miplís, the rimernber lovmi, just fine. Closing your eyes, she was Madonna, and you didn't need much imagination to see her as an almost perfect Mapuche copy. Thousands of clippings of the star wallpapered her room. A thousand Madonna body parts constellated la loca's heavens. A whole world of newspaper pages and glossy papers covered the cracks, papering over the mold with Monroe winks and kisses, over the fingers with blood wiped on the wall, the marks of that violent rouge covered with snippets of the singer's jet-set entourage. Like that, a thousand Madonnas orbiting the fly-clouded light yellowing the room, endless reiterations of the same image, in all shapes, in all sizes, at all ages; the star continually reincarnated in the velvet fanaticism of the coliza gaze. Until the end, when she couldn't get up, when AIDS had laid her out on the mattress reeking of bed. The only thing she asked for as she made her goodbyes was to listen to a Madonna cassette and for us to put a photo of the star on her chest.

translated from the Spanish by Montana Ray

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The Night of the Minks (La Unidad Popular's Last Fiesta)Santiago swayed with earthquakes and the political upheavals that would fracture the young Unidad Popular. In the air, an ominous fog thick with the smell of gunpowder and the rattle of pots, rich señoras

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Resisting Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans Rights and Equalities

Catherine Jean Nash (Author), Kath Browne (Author)

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/heteroactivism-9781786996473/

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Around the world, LGBTQ+ activists have won an unprecedented series of political victories, from marriage equality to increased representation in government. But this success has sparked a backlash. While there has been much scrutiny of the role of the Christian right in opposing LGBTQ+ equality in the US, the backlash goes far beyond these traditional elements, and also extends beyond the US to countries including the UK, Ireland and Canada.

In this book, Nash and Brown consider the rise of the new 'heteroactivism', showing how social media and new sources of funding have reinvigorated the opponents of LGBTQ+ rights. They also show how the rhetoric and tactics of this new generation of heteroactivists differs from that of their predecessors, exploiting notions of 'parental rights' and freedom of speech to assert heteronormative values in spaces ranging from schools to workplaces. They also reveal the increasingly transnational nature of anti- LGBTQ+ activism, with growing links between heteroactivists in the US, UK and beyond.

Heteroactivism: An Introduction
1. Same-Sex Marriage: Supporting 'Heterosexual Families'
2. Schools: Challenging the Inclusion of LGBT Lives and Families
3. Trans: Resisting Gender Ideologies and Trans Equalities
4. Freedom of Speech: Creating Space to Contest LGBT Equalities
5. Public Inclusions: Claiming the Place of Heteroactivism
Conclusion

Published

29 Oct 2020

Format

Ebook (PDF)

Edition

1st

Extent

360

ISBN

9781786996473

Imprint

Zed Books

Illustrations

2 b/w illustrations

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

'Emphasizing transnational networks and activisms, Catherine Jean Nash and Kath Browne provide a fascinating guide to the new heteroactivism in countries where many students of anti-LGBTQ backlash assume we have won.

Cynthia Burack, The Ohio State University

'What an excellent read this is! The authors provide a wealth of insight into heteroactivism in localised contexts, avoiding simplistic religion-related explanations. Critically aware of epistemological geopolitics, this is the book we all should reward ourselves to read.

Dr Roberto Kulpa, Co-editor of De-Centring Western Sexualities: Central and Eastern European Perspectives.

Rather than follow the scholarship path of non-normative, queer and LGBTIQ+ lives, identities and communities, this book puts organised heteroactivist people, groups, spaces and places at the centre of enquiry. An original and crucial intervention for scholars and activists interested in the shifting and highly charged debates about equality, freedoms, and human rights, that provides new understandings of the way in which societies, space, place and activism are reworked through resistances to LGBTIQ+ legislative, political and social equalities.

Lynda Johnston, University of Waikato

'Nash and Browne's pioneering analysis exposes the existence and expansion of resistances against gender and sexual equalities in 'progressive nations'. As an analytical category, Heteroactivism investigates the desire to establish heteronormativities as the bedrock of the Occident. The book is an essential contribution to debates about sexual politics.

Stefanie Boulila, Lucerne University

'This chilling and original study offers a timely analysis of contemporary resistances to LGBT equalities across three national English-speaking settings. Attentive to nuance and geopolitical specificity, it shows how growing opposition to LGBT equalities cannot simply be understood as homo or transphobia. Instead, heteroactivists claim that state-sponsored LGBT inclusion in the 21st is a threat to democracy, free speech and Christian heteronormativity. A welcome contribution to the urgently needed and growing field of research on contemporary anti-gender movements, this book provides concepts, methods and questions of relevance beyond the English-speaking global North.

Ulrika Dahl, Uppsala University

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Around the world, LGBTQ+ activists have won an unprecedented series of political victories, from marriage equality to increased representation in government. But this success has sparked a backlash. While there has been much scrutiny of the role of the Christian right in opposing LGBTQ+ equality in the US, the backlash goes far beyond these traditional elements, and also extends beyond the US to countries including the UK, Ireland and Canada.

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"Always smart, frequently funny, and sometimes-always tastefully, I assure you-gut-wrenchingly moving, Grace Lavery's Please Miss is brilliant from start to finish. It's a howling tale of trans life, addiction, sex, love, loss, and this maddening and delightful meat out of which we are made. Packed as it is with delicious fabulation and sticky detail, the book makes a profound statement about not only what it means to be trans, but also what it means to be meaty, enfleshed, sexed, throbbing with desire, reeling from loss, ragged, loved and pleasured, carved and sutured, and, above all, struggling to find words for any and all of it. What a book! And have I mentioned it's an absolute delight to read?"-Gabriel Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University

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"Always smart, frequently funny, and sometimes-always tastefully, I assure you-gut-wrenchingly moving, Grace Lavery's Please Miss is brilliant from start to finish. It's a howling tale of trans life, addiction, sex, love, loss, and this maddening and delightful meat out of which we are made.

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https://www.arup.com/perspectives/publications/research/section/queering-public-space

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Despite the emergence of queer enclaves in many cities across the world, there is an urgent need to rethink public spaces so we can create more inclusive, welcoming and hospitable environments for all members of our communities.

Queering Public Space, a collaboration between Arup and the University of Westminster, explores the relationship between queer communities and public spaces. We ask: what are the key characteristics that contribute to queering public space? How do we protect what remains of queer memory in our cities? And how do we move beyond the gayborhood towards creating public spaces for all?

Through our approach we explore how LGBTQ+ people can feel safer and included in urban public spaces, to establish a set of recommendations that help address this deficiency.

By addressing these recommendations and designing in diversity, public spaces will be more accessible to all marginalised and disempowered groups, creating inclusive and welcoming spaces for all.

In addition to the report, we have presented some of the the report's findings in a supporting video.

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Arup and The University of Westminster have published a new report exploring the relationship between queer communities and public spaces.

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Jack Halberstam

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https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295749754/underflows/

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Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice

PUBLISHED: April 2022

SUBJECT LISTING: Environmental Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Science and Technology Studies

BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: 312 Pages, 6 x 9 in, 11 b&w illus.

SERIES: Feminist Technosciences

ISBN: 9780295749754

Imprint: University of Washington Press

Description

Authors & Contributors

Advance Praise

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Rivers host vibrant multispecies communities in their waters and along their banks, and, according to queer-trans-feminist river scientist Cleo Wölfle Hazar...

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Samora la Perdida at Playa del Amor, where she says that she was able to explore her inner divine feminine self with the help of friends she met in Zipolite. Credit... Lisette Poole for The New York Times

Mexico Dispatch

The town of Zipolite has become an oasis for the queer community. But as its popularity has surged, some worry that the town's spirit is beginning to vanish.

Samora la Perdida at Playa del Amor, where she says that she was able to explore her inner divine feminine self with the help of friends she met in Zipolite. Credit... Lisette Poole for The New York Times

ZIPOLITE, Mexico - When the sun starts to slip toward the ocean in this idyllic beach town on Mexico's Pacific Coast, a quiet migration begins. Groups of people, most of them gay men, many of them naked, amble down the beach toward a soaring rocky outcrop.

They climb a winding staircase, over the ragged cliff and down to a hidden cove known as Playa del Amor, or beach of love. As the sun becomes an orange orb, the sky turns to lilac, and the many naked bodies, Black and bronze, curvy and chiseled, are brushed in gold. When it finally dips into the water, the crowd erupts in applause.

"Playa del Amor at sunset, the first time I saw it I truly felt like crying," said Roberto Jerr, 32, who has been visiting Zipolite for five years. "It's a space where you can be very free."

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Roberto Jerr said the nudism at Zipolite allows for a deep sense of freedom. "To me it is beautiful to be able to go to the beach and not put anything on."

For decades, this former fishing village turned hippie hangout has been an oasis for the queer community, which is drawn to its golden beaches, countercultural vibe and a practice of nudism that embraces bodies of all different shapes.

But as its popularity has grown, attracting increasing numbers of gay and straight visitors, the town is starting to transform: Foreigners are snatching up land, hotels are multiplying, influencers are flocking to the beach and many residents and visitors now fear that what once made Zipolite magical could be lost for good.

"Everyone in the community should visit a place where they can feel comfortable, where they can feel free, like Zipolite," said Mr. Jerr, who is gay. "But on the other hand, there's also this other part, this ultramass tourism that starts to leave places without resources."

Once a community of farmers and fishermen, Zipolite became a popular destination for European hippies and backpackers starting in 1970, when many came to the beaches of Oaxaca state for an exceptionally clear view of a solar eclipse. Hippie tourism gave the town a bohemian spirit - it's one of Mexico's few nude beaches - that also began attracting queer people, who were welcomed by most residents. In February, Zipolite elected the first openly gay person to head the town council.

Such tolerant attitudes are rare outside of big cities in Mexico, where conservative Catholic values persist. Despite gay marriage being legalized in more than half the country, homophobic and transphobic violence is common. Between 2016 and 2020, some 440 lesbian, gay and transgender people were killed across the country, according to Letra Ese, an advocacy group in Mexico City.

David Montes Bernal, 33, grew up a few hours from Zipolite in a conservative community where machismo and homophobia were entrenched. When he was about 9, the town priest performed what he called "practically an exorcism" to force the homosexuality out of him.

"That's when I realized that it was a hostile place," Mr. Bernal said.

In Zipolite, he has found a place where he can be comfortable in his sexuality and secure in his body.

"I felt a kind of hope," Mr. Bernal said of his first visit in 2014. "Finally it seems like now there's a place where we can be whoever we want."

As word of this openness has spread, the town's L.G.B.T.Q. population has surged: gay bars and hotels have multiplied, rainbow flags are commonplace.

But, as accepting as many locals are, some feel that Zipolite's identity as a laid-back town that welcomes anyone from Mexican families to Canadian retirees is being eroded, that it is transforming into a gay party town.

Miguel Ángel Ziga Aragón, a local resident who is gay himself and goes by "La Chavelona," has watched the local economy boom, not just because of gay tourism but from a surge in tourism generally. While once hosting mostly rustic cabins and hammocks along the beach, Zipolite's tourism scene has become what he calls "more V.I.P.": Beachfront suites now go for as much as $500 a night.

The growth in tourism in Zipolite reflects a statewide trend in Oaxaca: From 2017 to 2019, income from the hotel industry rose by more than a third to nearly $240 million. In the same period, the number of tourists visiting hotels in the coastal region that includes Zipolite grew by almost 40 percent to about 330,000 people, according to government figures.

"It's a change that's good for the economy, but not so good for the community," Mr. Ziga Aragón said.

Along with an identity crisis, many fear an environmental one. Mangroves have been built over; the wildlife is disappearing. Residents complain of a lack of running water, which could be worsened by greater development.

While most residents agree that more planning is needed, some say the transformation is inevitable.

"It's the life cycle of every tourist destination," said Elyel Aquino Méndez, who runs a gay travel agency. "You have to take advantage of the opportunity."

But others fear that Zipolite could go the way of many Mexican beach towns that have become thriving resorts, like the popular gay destination of Puerto Vallarta or, more recently, Tulum. Once a bohemian paradise, the Caribbean beach of Tulum has become a lucrative real estate market filled with luxury hotels, celebrity influencers and, increasingly, violence.

Pouria Farsani, 33, who lives in Stockholm, enjoyed the combination of beautiful nature and fun partying when he first visited Tulum in 2018, but by the time he went back last September found that it felt "like a party-colonized part of Mexico."

Mr. Farsani heard about Zipolite from some Mexican friends and visited for the first time in January 2021 - he was enchanted.

"When I've seen other gay scenes, it's been very stereotypical," he said. "What was going on here was people of all body shapes, ages, socioeconomic status, all of us could gather here."

The body positivity in Zipolite is partly what makes the nudist beach special to many, gay or straight: For Mr. Farsani, who has alopecia, a hair-loss condition, it was particularly profound.

"I'm very happy with my body, but I'm not the Ken-doll type," he said. "It scares people in Europe, while here my alopecia is nothing more than it makes me stand out a little more."

Still, as Zipolite's popularity has grown, its hippie vibe is shifting. Bars are louder, restaurants are becoming swankier. The L.G.B.T.Q. tourism is changing too, becoming increasingly Americanized, less diverse.

Ivanna Camarena, a transgender woman, spent six months in Zipolite last year and met only a handful of other transgender people. "The bodies were very athletic and very masculine," she said of the people she saw on the beach in her first few months there.

She recalled going to a nudist party that was almost exclusively gay men. "When I got there it was like 'Wow what is a trans woman doing here?' Like, they were weirded out."

Among the noticeable shifts is what has happened at Playa del Amor, which once hosted bonfires and guitar playing and now often has laser lights and D.J.s playing house music. People used to chat across different social groups; now, the beach has become more segregated into cliques.

The sex scene has evolved too. While visitors, including straight couples, have engaged in sex on the beach after dark for decades, in recent years it has become more brazen, with dance parties sometimes morphing into group sex in the shadows.

"Every time it's more hedonistic, more hedonistic, more hedonistic," said Ignacio Rubio Carriquiriborde, a sociology professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University who has studied Zipolite for years. "Now there's more a dynamic of constant partying."

Many residents have grown uncomfortable, and the town council recently voted to enforce a 9 p.m. beach curfew to curb such activities.

"One thing is freedom and another thing is debauchery," Mr. Ziga Aragón said. "You can have sex with whoever you want, but in private."

For others, the concern is more environmental. Miguel Ángel López Méndez runs a small hotel near Playa del Amor, and says that revelers often leave the beach a mess. Once, while diving off the cove, he recalled seeing condoms floating "like jellyfish."

"Everyone is free to do whatever they want with their body," he said. "The problem is that there's no awareness."

For some gay men, the open sexuality of Playa del Amor is part of its power.

"From when you're a kid, you're forbidden from so many things: 'Don't be like that,' 'Don't say this,' 'Don't do that,'" said Mr. Bernal, who lives in the nearby town of Puerto Ángel. "Suddenly, with sex being an act of catharsis, so many things are liberated."

Still, Mr. Bernal also worries for the future of the town, where tourism is booming, natural resources are scarce, and so many foreigners are buying up properties that the price of land has become largely unaffordable for locals.

"Everyone comes here on vacation to consume something," he said. "A piece of the beach, a piece of your body, a piece of the party, a piece of nature."

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This Beach in Mexico Is an L.G.B.T.Q. Haven. But Can It Last?

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Mexico Dispatch The town of Zipolite has become an oasis for the queer community. But as its popularity has surged, some worry that the town's spirit is beginning to vanish. Samora la Perdida at Playa del Amor, where she says that she was able to explore her inner divine feminine self with the help of friends she met in Zipolite.

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https://t.co/V1FqJj3NLU

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Nailsea, Somerset.A man in a green smock stands at the top of a huge mountain of apples, raking them down towards the bottom of the pile. We then see variou...

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Jack Halberstam