Imagining LatinX Intimacies. Edward A. Chamberlain
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of “spatial praxis that are bound up in the multiform relations of desire, identity, migration, and representation.”[8] Like Martínez’s research, Imagining Latinx Intimacies is interested in the spatial praxis of Latinx queers because it is seen as a worthwhile process for realizing dreams of creating a more egalitarian and inclusive queer world. That being said, this queer realization is an ongoing and piecemeal process taking shape in fits and starts as Latinx queers are generating a rather diverse set of cultural formations across time and space.
Formative Contexts: The Concepts and Histories of Queer Latinx Spaces
During the 1990s, for example, there were a limited number of public spaces that resonated with queerness and foreshadowed the existence of a larger queer world. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner speak to this world in their 1998 essay “Sex in Public,” where they theorize: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies.”[9] Like Berlant and Warner, I contend the queer world can take manifold forms, even as some queerly physical spaces such as bars and clubs are not inclusive to all folks because of marginalization that is classist and racist. In light of such displacements, Latinx queers also took to commenting on socio-spatial experiences through representation. Scholar Mary Pat Brady offers key perspective on Chicana representations of spatial experience by illuminating how spaces are made and transformed through human actions.[10] In the pages that follow, I extend the spatial praxis of Mary Pat Brady and Ernesto Javier Martínez by illuminating how a set of queer Latinx creative forms function as a notable set of “spaces” for bringing underrepresented voices into dialogue. This dialogue concerns the challenges of being queer and Latinx in a national space—the United States—where bias against queer, brown, and migrant people was inculcated in the 1990s.
The process of changing that phenomenon requires new ways of thinking about US spatial experience. Hence, this book conceptualizes “space” as being predicated on US realities, such as familial contexts, while also extending beyond such confines. These spaces materialize as imaginary scenes like those that are found in the fiction, memoirs, poetry, and visual art that convey stories of finding closeness and strength in spaces that allow for people to foster an alternative sense of family and community. Although these spatial experiences occur in several forms, I concur with Richard T. Rodríguez who suggests that many Latinx spaces hold potential to “supply a sense of familia because of the ways in which they foster a sense of Latino/a queer belonging.”[11] Feelings of familia (or family) can manifest in several spatialized forms, thus guiding figures such as those in the art and writing. Alternatively, to be rejected by one’s family or community can lead to displacement, which can be a crushing blow that affects how people envision their futures, lives, and potentials. These unsavory circumstances of unbelonging gained greater attention through an increase in media stories about such experiences during the 1990s and early 2000s—an era that came to be known as the Age of AIDS.[12] As the media presented stories about human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), the public began to learn more about queers, but not everyone empathized. A coterie of politicians and leaders continued to emit antigay and anti-immigrant rhetoric, casting Latinx and LGBTQ peoples as threats to the United States.
More often than not, community leaders and pundits have linked the spread of illness to the presence of groups that are perceived as outsiders such as migrants, people of color, and LGBTQ communities.[13] Similarly, dominant cultures repeatedly have accused Latinx and queer communities of being the purveyors of immoral ideas, thereby associating brown and Latinx bodies with contagion, physical dangers, and varying forms of impurity.[14] In a relevant study, the scholar Hiram Pérez explains, “A national unconscious seizes on the brown body as a site onto which it can project the ‘unnatural’ sex act it disavows.”[15] This projection took several forms in the Age of AIDS and made life exceedingly arduous, if not excruciating for many queer Latinx communities and people of color who departed from ingrained gender norms. This equating of brown bodies with the undesirable is visible in the US government’s ban on immigrants with HIV/AIDS—a ban that was imposed by callous officials in 1987 all along US borders. This ban produced even more mechanisms for stigmatizing people in the already vexed political processes of crossing borders and immigration. Over the course of its history, the United States has taken a varied approach to migration and immigration, although in recent decades the state’s power has been used repeatedly to detain, displace, and keep out LGBTQ peoples from multiple countries. In these tense contexts, racism and homophobia collide because as Sandra K. Soto explains, “race and sexuality are not self-contained, discrete categories.”[16] These two elements of human experience exhibit considerable overlaps that manifest in the form of racialized sexuality and double marginalization, where people are discriminated against in two forms such as racist and homophobic abuses. These discriminations have occurred through events and policies that are local, state-based, as well as national. As a consequence, artists and critics upbraided US policymakers for allowing such marginalization to occur and, in the process, have called on the public to step away from worn-out puritanical values, white supremacy, and xenophobia.
Researching such struggles from the Age of AIDS often remains a challenge because of a heap of social factors like the silence and taboos that routinely accompany sexuality and sexually transmitted infections. Just as the critic and poet Anzaldúa suggests in the epigraph at the start of this introduction, Latinx peoples routinely struggle with “coming out” as being LGBTQ in their homes because of the possibility of being cast out.[17] It is this horrifying possibility—this heart-wrenching feeling—that is most discomforting because the family sphere is believed to be a source of support when the world rejects people for being Other. This is not to suggest all Chicanx and Latinx families harbor such antigay attitudes because, in fact, a sizable proportion of families have proven accepting.[18] Yet for those facing rejection, this experience is exacerbated by the fact that Latinx peoples also face discrimination in courts of law, employment, stores, and public spaces where the dominant white cultures hold sway. Similar problems were brought to light in Anzaldúa’s collection of writings Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which intervenes in these matters by linking personal experience to history. Anzaldúa’s creative and critical thought about borderlands and otherness remain relevant presently as the world watches millions of people being displaced to varying degrees by community violence, civil war, and the aftermath of national policies including those of the US federal government.[19]
Imagining Latinx Intimacies expands on the creative and critical work of Anzaldúa by showing how her theories can open new ways of understanding cultural artifacts, personal writing, and related forms of visual culture.[20] Anzaldúa’s insights lend an idiom for explaining social and sexual dynamics of displacement and spaces where communities and officials have created what the writer Adrienne Rich has called “compulsory heterosexuality.”[21] Within many heterocentric homes, moral constraints have been the unsavory seeds that fostered the creation of alternative spaces—sites and locales that the scholar José Esteban Muñoz views as vital social “outposts” of a queer world in the making.[22] For peoples who feel that they have no place to go, alternative social spaces such as queer-friendly community groups can grant life-sustaining opportunities for connection, organizing, healing, and self-expression. Much as the artists in this book will attest, much can be done with a small amount of space. As viewers see in the short film Small City, Big Change by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, which is explored in the next chapter, meaningful change can be fostered by bringing together queer peoples of a small city for the larger public good.[23] Whether it is a small city’s gatherings or a short film’s story, such social spaces enable participants to imagine hospitable spaces that are free of bias and exclusion. Even though popular queer social spaces like Castro Street in San Francisco and Christopher Street in New York City are hailed as significant queer spaces because of their high concentrations of LGBTQ businesses and denizens, these spaces continue to be perceived as welcoming only people who fit the mainstream media’s sanitized vision of sexual minorities: cisgender gay white men. To make a more equitable and inclusive set of spaces for queer people of color, a more egalitarian