Lola von Miramar

Aravind Adyanthaya in Michigan

2012-01-17T06:10:00.000-08:00

Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya at the University of Michigan,Ann Arbor, this week! Performance and talk, Thursday, 6pm, G634 Haven Hall.Workshop, Friday, 1-5pm, requires preregistration: contact Larry La Fountain.

Thursday, January 19.The Latina/o Studies Program invites you to a performance by Puerto Ricanartist Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya: "TRANSLATION/TRADUCCIÓN" withpost-performance discussion. "TRANSLATION/TRADUCCIÓN" is an episodefrom Adyanthaya's piece "Prometheus Bound," a re-envisioning ofAeschylus' work. In this episode, Prometheus meets Io, a "cow-vaca woman". The performance resembles a song, itslyrics ramifying through verbal and written scores, the rhythm of phonetics andthe typing carrying it through. Body movements are often drawn from Latinopopular singers and dancers, trying to explore the iconographic context oftranslation specific to the artist (a Puerto Rican living between the islandand the mainland). What begins as Spanglish transforms into yet anotheridiosyncratic sign system. Theepisode questions cultural images and specificity. It dramatizes different registers of language preciselythrough this encounter with, Io, a maiden with the horns of an ox, a monster ("monstrua"),the other (foreign, creature, mutant, paradoxically the self) and in the untranslatablein it. The performance will be followed by a discussion about "escrituraacto" and about Adyanthaya's work with Casa Cruz de la Luna, a grass rootsexperimental company based in the historical town of San Germán, Puerto Rico. A short clip from "The Marquis deSade is Afraid of the Sea", a project expanding escritura acto to agroup/ensemble practice will be shown. This presentation, which took place at a public square in Mayagüez,Puerto Rico will also serve as a springboard to talk about the differentdynamics and politics involved in the occupation of public spaces. Cosponsoredby Arts at Michigan/Course Connections, the Center for World PerformanceStudies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Romance Languages andLiteratures, and the School of Art and Design. Free and open to the public. 6pm,G634 Haven Hall.

Friday, January 20."Escritura Acto" Workshop with Puerto Rican artist Aravind EnriqueAdyanthaya. (4 hours, limited capacity, please contact Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes to pre-register.) "Escritura acto" is a form oftheatrical poetics that explores the staging of the act of writing. Its settingis based on letting the spectators view the contents of what is written througha video projection of the document as it is being produced in thecomputer. This mode ofrepresentation examines relationships between the writer and the written, themedium and the message, the audience/spectators and oral and writtenperceptions. It also works toperformatively explore notions of language hybridization and belonging indifferent cultural contexts. Automatic writing and contact improvisationprinciples will also be presented in the context of escritura acto. Some of theexercises will take the form of brief unipersonal and group pieces performed bythe participants. Participants canwork in any language they choose. To register please contact Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes. 1:00-5:00pm, G634 Haven Hall.

ALIEN ALIEN - SAMBACA

2012-01-14T23:24:00.000-08:00

Here's a video with the DJs (Rodion & Hugo Sanchez):

ROCCODISCO & SLOWMOTION
present

Rodion & Hugo Sanchez in

ALIEN ALIEN
Black Guru Ep
File under: Disco voodo / Dark tropical / Urban primivitism

ALIEN ALIEN is the shadowy side project of Hugo Sanchez and Rodion (Gomma, Eskimo, Bang Gang) who
have distilled for us two stone cold cuts of percussive, rolling disco for the dance-floor backed up
with remixes from Horse Meat Disco's Severino and The Heels of Love.
Black Guru is all about shaking cowbells and a synth line that is somewhat reminiscent of the Tom
Tom Club. However a creepy vocal line and neon lasers take the track to a whole different
stratosphere, where all the colours and creeds of the galaxy throw down as one for some fists in the
air future-disco action. Severino's LDB-NYC mix breaks things down to a less frantic pace, but makes
up for the change in energy with some seriously heavyweight bass and classic house piano stabs.
Flip the record over and it's all about the cosmic flex of Sambaca. Low and sleazy with a speaker
troubling low-end, this hypnotic workout takes you on a journey through oceans and forests , beaches
and jungles where shaking tambourines and rattling drums envelop a vocal that brings to mind classic
Northern Exposure mixes of old. Finally The Heels of Love take Sambaca and add just a touch more
urgency with bubbling synth swooshes, extra drums and a bass so thick you could chew on it for
hours. One for those more intense moments on the dance-floor.
As LIEN ALIEN, Hugo Sanchez & Rodion together in Rome they gave life to the ROCCODISCO label.
Their cosmopop anthem ROYGBIV, an obscure BOARDS OF CANADA cover, has been featured in the first
ROCCODISCO split release, in Summer 2008. Their TAPE OXYDE number, released on the Honey Sound
System label (San Francisco) and then on the Glasgow's SOLARDISCO, topped many disco and house
charts and has been featured in a Hercules and Love Affair mix for Mixmag. The new BLACK GURU ep is
out on berliner Slow Motion label on yinyls and on Roccodisco in digital format.

Catalogue: ROCCO04
Release Date: may 2011
Release Format: Digital / Vinyl
Vynil: SLOWMOTION / Intergroove Distribution (Berlin)
Digital Distribution: GROOVEATTACK (Cologne)
Artwork: Tso http://tso.superfluo.biz/

Track listing:
Sambaca
Black Guru
Sambaca (The Heels Of Love remix)
Black Guru (Severino - Horse Meat Disco remix)

Early feedback:
“Forget Ghaddafi! THIS is the b.o.m.b.” (Munk)
“I couldn't listen to it all the way through because I started hallucinating”
(Haules Baules)
“Bomba” (Claudio Coccoluto)

http://soundcloud.com/roccodisco/alien-alien-sambaca-heels-of

Gay New York Symposium

2012-01-09T18:37:00.000-08:00

I will be speaking at the Gay New York and the Arts of the 20th Century Symposium (February 11, 2012) at the Museum of the City of New York.http://www.mcny.org/ Hope you can all come! Promises to be fun.

Delicious coquito!

2012-01-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

A new episode of the ever popular Cooking with Drag Queens: How to Make Coquito! With the glamorous Lola von Miramar and her friends Saltina Obama Bouvier and Daphne Dumount! Brought to you by the Feast of Fun.

Christeene Is Incredibe

2011-12-29T23:02:00.001-08:00

CHRISTEENE "African Mayonnaise" from PJ Raval on Vimeo.

Blue Fingernail Drag Party, Monday Oct 31, 5-9pm, WORK Gallery Ann Arbor

2011-10-23T20:57:00.000-07:00

(Photo by Fausto Fernós, http://feastoffun.com/)

Mark your calendars!

Exhibit,reading and performance by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (Latina/o Studies, AC,Romance Languages) and Mary Beth Carolan (MFA candidate, School of Art andDesign):

Scary Aunt Mary and Lola von Miramar

Blue Fingernail Drag Party

Monday, October 31, 2011

Work Gallery, 5-9pm

Performance: 7pm

306 State Street, Ann Arbor, MI

Wear your drag finest!

Men and Women Monsters Welcome

FREE

Delightful blue candy will be served

Call for Nominations for GLQ Caucus Awards

2011-10-02T08:23:00.000-07:00

DearColleague:

TheGL/Q Caucus of the MLA invites nominations for each of our three annual awards:

THEMICHAEL LYNCH SERVICE AWARD

Thisaward serves not only to honor a GLBT academic activist every year, but also,in Eve Sedgwick's words, "to publicize and celebrate—and as widely aspossible—the range, the forms, the energy, and the history of queer activism byacademics." Michael Lynch wanted to honor those whose activism is academicin context but not limited to work for the Caucus or Division. This activismmight consist of activities including (but not limited to) direct service to,or administrative advocacy on behalf of, LGBTQ students; action that results innon-discrimination clauses in contracts; working to establish domestic partnerbenefits, awareness of transgender issues in housing and health services, orother LGBT-friendly campus policies; facilitating connections between campusand LGBT community activists; or other forms of campus, public, or mediaactivism. Lynch also wanted the award to offer a way that, in Eve Sedgwick'swords, "the achievements and struggles of each of the generations oflesbian/gay scholars who are currently active could become more visible to theothers."

Nominationsfor this award, including a summary of the nominee’s qualifications, may besubmitted to Committee Chair Scarlet Bowen at Scarlet.Bowen@Colorado.EDU

nolater than November 1, 2011.

THEALAN BRAY MEMORIAL BOOK AWARD

Namedin honor of a scholar whose two landmark books have been profoundly influentialin gay and lesbian studies, the Bray Award will be given to the best book inlesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer studies in literature andcultural studies, all broadly construed.

Eligibility:all books must bear a 2010 copyright date.

Deadline:all books must be received by November 1, 2011.

Tonominate your own book, contact your editor and have him or her email CommitteeChair Richard T. Rodriguez at rtrodrig@illinois.edu

Tonominate someone else's book, contact the author with this info (or, ifnecessary, email the nomination to Richard T. Rodriguez). Direct contact from an editor ispreferred.

THE CROMPTON-NOLL AWARD

TheCrompton-Noll Award for best essay in lesbian, gay, queer studies in the modernlanguages/literatures pays tribute to Louis Crompton, who passed away in 2009,and Dolores Noll (Kent State University), two early scholar/activists whohelped found the gay and lesbian caucus of the MLA. The award recognizes theimportant work of lesbian, gay, and queer studies in the modern languages andthe history that has helped make this current work possible.

Essayspublished between July 1, 2010 and June 30, 2011 may be submitted by emailattachment to Committee Chair Kenneth B. Kidd at kbkidd@ufl.edu no later thanNovember 1, 2011.

PLEASECIRCULATE WIDELY.

Winnerswill be announced at the GL/Q Caucus cash bar during the MLA Convention inSeattle.

Ihope to see you there!

Lourdes

LourdesTorres, President, GL/Q Caucus

ltorres@depaul.edu

Larry La Fountain at Taller Puertorriqueño (Philadelphia)

2011-09-26T22:43:00.000-07:00

Upcoming Event at Taller Puertorriqueño in Philadelphia:
Saturday, October 1st, 2011/ 24th Annual Feria del Libro y las Artesanías.An all afternoon event this year featuring guest writer, Dr. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes to present Uñas Pintadas de Azul/Blue Fingernails.These 14 short stories represent a Latin American poetic journey, asensory pilgrimage through the pains and pleasures of Diasporic,cosmopolitan gay and lesbian Puerto Rican identities in a postmodern,ever-shifting world. Artisans from Puerto Rico, local artisans, music,storytelling for children, workshops for the whole family and more./Unatarde de literatura y artesanías con talleres y cuentos para niños,música y bailes. 1 - 5 p.m. Books and Crafts Store /Tienda.*
*Sponsorship opportunities available!
*This is a Free Event
*Free parking at the Municipal Parking Lot at the corner of 5th & Huntingdon

Run Karis Run - Cazwell, "Tonight" (2010)

2011-09-23T22:18:00.000-07:00

Lola von Miramar is a little obsessed with Cazwell's 2010 video "Tonight," featuring Karis in a Run Lola Run role. Here's the fantastic video:

First of all, it took Lola like forever to realize that Karis is a boy! A Mexican-born one who performs in drag in Mexican Lucha Libre Burlesque Reviews for Cinco de Mayo, that is! OMG. And then, of course, you have Cazwell sampling Shannon's 1984 song "Give Me Tonight"!

(Many of you might be more familiar with Shannon's "Let the Music Play", a classic of Latin freestyle--see video here.)

So by now we have a girl who is actually a Mexican boy making out with Cazwell in a scene of grand domesticity and then running madly through New York City after they have this horrible fight, and Cazwell tells us "I'm gonna write you a love song", and that "you're gonna fall in love with me," all with his white boy banjee realness, meanwhile Karis keeps running (conjuring images of homeless, runaway trans youth), Shannon's song keeps playing, the camera keeps going crazy, the editing has us looking everywhere in its Run, Karis, Run sequences, running through the space of relationships and emotions, through masculinity and femininity, through musical styles and genres, historical periods and influences, and through the upside-down cityscape of construction scaffolding, train platforms (Grand Central Station) and other sites. The juxtaposition of Latin freestyle--which came about as an electronic dance music alternative to 70s disco--to Cazwell's mellow pop rap draws us in, the frenzy of the imagery is reproduced in the music and then exploded with the rapper's all-out jump into more straighforward hip hop rhyming: Cazwell as a queer homothug Massachusetts-born channeling of Detroit's own Eminem. Puerto Rican freestyle meets queer rap (also known as homo hop) in NY. All of this graced with the surreal presence of trans celebrity extraordinaire Amanda Lepore, who suddenly appears in the video as if a Playboy bunny stepping out of a cake. Cazwell's rap shifts the romantic tone of the song to a frustrated account of failed exchanges. But Shannon's backup chorus lyrics always overlay, rescuing the possibility of love. THIS VIDEO'S JUST TOO MUCH! I LOVE IT! Hope you like it too.

la novelabingo - 7 octubre 2011

2011-09-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

La Junta de Directores

y la Directora Ejecutiva

del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña

le invitan a la presentación de

la novelabingo

Manuel Ramos Otero.

La presentación estará a cargo

del crítico literario Rubén Ríos Ávila

y la escritora Ana Lydia Vega.

Viernes 7 de octubre de 2011

7:00pm

Patio interior Sur

Antiguo Asilo de Beneficencia

(sede del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña)

Viejo San Juan

Dani Umpi (entrevista en Corpóreo vol. III - 2011)

2011-09-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

Learn Spanish by Making Cocktails

2011-09-14T22:51:00.000-07:00

Country Queen, City Queen (with the Feast of Fun)

2011-09-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

Listen to this fab Feast of Fun podcast in which Larry La Fountain chats away with the fabulous Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion about national and international lesbian and gay migration to large cities and about the uber-controversial Puerto Rican politician Roberto Arango (of recent sex-scandal infamy) and the cross-dressing Mexican-American boxer Oscar de la Hoya! (FOF #1433, posted September 2, 2011)

Lola von Miramar Takes Over the World

2011-09-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

Curious about what Miss Lola von Miramar has been upto lately? Listen to this fabulous interview on the Feast of Fun podcast! Sure to make you smile and laugh. With Larry La Fountain, Fausto Fernós, and Marc Felion, recorded in Ann Arbor, Michigan! (FOF #1431, posted August 25, 2011)

My Girl Maluca Sings My Song "Lola"

2011-08-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

Ah yes!!! Maluca from the Bronx dedicates this song to me and to all the Lolas of the world! Thanks to the divine Eduardo Boleyn Velázquez que me mandó está canción!!! See more info on Fader, including the juicy tidbit about Jenny Shimizu. Here's a link to the song. Maluca has an amazing techno beat! Ay, every day there are just more and more Lola songs!!! So flattering. OK enough blogging, gotta get to work!

Esquina Periferia de Eduardo Alegría

2011-08-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

Por Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Especial para En Rojo (publicado en Claridad en San Juan, Puerto Rico, 9-15 junio 2011).

Bienvenidos al extraño mundo de Esquina Periferia, maravilloso espectáculo de Eduardo Alegría que se presentó en el Teatro Coribantes de Hato Rey del 13 al 28 de mayo de 2011. El célebre performero, más conocido como cantante del grupo de rock Superaquello, y su talentosísimo elenco deleitaron a los miembros del público y sin dudas también desconcertaron a unos cuantos a quienes todo les pareció “bien raro” y demasiado experimental. Ese es el gran reto de hacer arte alternativo, arriesgado, diferente, que rompe la norma, agita y provoca.

La obra tiene dos partes. En el primer acto conocemos al trío FEOQUEDIGAMOS, en directo desde el Salón Bajo Las Estrellas, localizado en el lobby del bastante deteriorado Hotel Puercoespín; su principal fanático es Máximo (interpretado magistralmente por Yamil Collazo), quien nunca habla y anda con una pequeña luz fluorescente y extraños desechos de plástico atados a la cabeza. El trío musical lo componen la pequeña Eddie (la brillante Isel Rodríguez), la más parlanchina Bromelia Ginseng (Eduardo Alegría vestido con una falda larga de terciopelo color rojo vino) y la “oveja negra” (Harry Rag), quien toca la guitarra. Los acompaña Bimbo, “el de las galletitas” (Joel Rodríguez Vargas), quien maneja sonidos desde su computadora portátil. Eddie y Bromelia cantan siete temas, entrelazados con pequeños discursos y comentarios de Alegría quien nos va contando los detalles del local y luego sufre náuseas y hasta vómitos tras beber aceite de oliva, “el trago oficial del Hotel Puercoespín”. Las canciones incluyen el pegajoso tema “Un Cuarto Más Pequeño”, el brillante “El Bolero Embotellado” por Ivy Andino y Omar Silva y “Armando”, reescritura de la canción “Te Recuerdo Amanda” del célebre chileno Víctor Jara. En la versión de Alegría, Armando espera por su compañero y amante, el obrero Manuel, quien desaparece de la fábrica y perece en la sierra. Alegría y Rodríguez cantan valiéndose de una variedad de estilos musicales, incluyendo rock y armonizaciones más parecidas al bel canto. El primer acto de la obra concluye con la transformación de Alegría en mesero mientras encarna a Stevie Nicks y canta la frase “yo sirvo”, con todos los múltiples significados que esas dos palabras pueden tener.

El segundo acto de Esquina periferia se titula Bus Boy Love y trata sobre el tedio laboral y el romance entre dos meseros latinoamericanos, el mexicano Abelardo (Yamil Collazo) y el boricua Junior (Alegría), quienes trabajan con la rubia Heather (Isel Rodríguez) en el desolado LIMBO Latin Restaurant, localizado “en algún Nueva York de la mente”. (Vale recordar que Bus Boy Love se estrenó en 1997 en Performance Space 122 cuando Alegría todavía vivía en esa ciudad; como ha señalado Gilberto Blasini, gran parte de la obra temprana de Alegría explora la temática del inmigrante puertorriqueño gay en Nueva York.) A diferencia del acto anterior, en este predomina el baile al compás de temas de la agrupación chilena Los Ángeles Negros. También aparecen dos figuras misteriosas, las increíbles Viveca Vázquez y Teresa Hernández (los ángeles negros de la pieza), quienes intervienen de maneras extrañas, interaccionando eróticamente entre ellas mismas y los varones. Aquí, Abelardo es el que provoca emociones profundas en Junior; apenas logran hablarse a pesar de que ambos son bilingües. Más común es que se espíen o crucen por casualidad durante sus descansos, fumando cigarrillos fuera del restaurante. Son las miradas las que delatan sus pasiones y acompañan patatús y ataques de nervios llenos de extraordinarias contorsiones, brincos, lamentos guturales y hasta lágrimas. El reducido diálogo apenas nos da las claves básicas para entender que se trata de inmigrantes de distintas nacionalidades, ambos desubicados en Nueva York; el trauma físico que presenciamos (el devenir o convertirse en animal, sin lenguaje) nos habla de las limitaciones de las palabras y de la intensidad de la represión sexual en este espacio ajeno. Afortunadamente, los dos logran superar sus inhibiciones y presenciamos el desarrollo y la disolución de su relación amorosa, una marcada tanto por la ternura como por el sexo y la violencia.

Alegría trabaja el cruce entre lo opaco y lo tangible, donde la simpleza de ciertos gestos (por ejemplo, la muy transparente gestualidad de Abelardo al cruzar la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos) se mezcla con letras de canciones que no tienen mucho sentido o inclusive, con la pérdida de la palabra y la gestualidad a veces aterradora, otras hilarante de figuras mágicas como aquellas representadas por Vázquez y Hernández. La puertorriqueñidad aquí es un sabroso e irónico fracaso liberador (como apunta Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas), entrecruzado tanto por lo latinoamericano como por lo estadounidense. Alegría apela a los sentimientos más intensos y a las emociones más desgarradoras en un cruce de la tragicomedia personal y nacional. La obra es a su vez, como ha señalado Bernat Tort, profundamente queer, pues lleva el acto del travestismo y la pasión homosexual (tanto de hombres como mujeres) a extremos de lo indecible e impronunciable, es decir, al mismísimo meollo de la existencia humana.

El autor es profesor asociado en la Universidad de Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Enlaces adicionales

* Sylvia Bofill, "Cuando el silencio suena", Diálogo Digital, 15 agosto 2011.

* Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, "Translocas: Migración, homosexualidad y travestismo en el performance puertorriqueño reciente", e-misférica 8.1 (2011).

Videos promocionales

Fotogalería

Puerto Rican Studies for a New Century (Oct. 29, 2011), NYC

2011-08-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

Save The Date! October 29, 2011. First PRSA Annual Meeting and One-Day Colloquium: Puerto Rican Studies for a New Century: Challenges, Prospects, Possibilities. Featured Speakers: Edna Acosta Belén, University of Albany, SUNY; Juan Flores, NYU; Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Event Location: Hunter College (CUNY) Assembly Hall W615, East 68th St and Lexington Ave, NYC.

Performing in Ypsi on August 12

2011-08-08T08:10:00.001-07:00

Especially Good - Jono Mi Lo - Steve Kenney - Lola von Miramar. Rock/Electronica Concert. Dance Party with Monsieur Carlos Souffront. Ecclectic poetry. Drag and Gender illusionism. Friday August 12, 9:00 pm. Woodruff's Bar, 36 East Cross Street, Depot Town, Ypsilanti, Michigan. See event page on Facebook.

Blair, Black Queer Conscience of Detroit - A Tribute

2011-07-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

David Blair (better known simply as Blair) passed away on July 23, 2011, as reported in MetroTimes and Between The Lines. (For a full obituary see Remembering D. Blair.)

This is his personal blurb from his MySpace page:

I'm a black, queer writer and musician. I went to South Africa and on a a few tours including a six month independent tour of the U.S. I grew up in New Jersey. I live in Detroit. I'm interested in every kind of music. It just has to move me. Always been interested in doing a lot of different styles. I feel I'm ready to dive deeper. I've written a one man show called Burying the Evidence. You can check one of the blogs for a description of it. Come see it sometime. I'm working on a book. I've been published in Black Rennaissance Noire (NYU Press) by Quincy Troupe and some newspapers and journals over the last few months. My dad looked like Chuck Berry, played like Hank Williams. My mom cleaned white folk's houses. She raised five children. On her own. I inherited all sorts of ghosts from both of them. Sometimes I can fly.

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/blairmusic

IndieFeed: Performance: Blair - "Chrysler" (podcast)

Blair Singer/Poet from Alex Franck on Vimeo.

Blair - "Detroit" (performance at SH\aut\ Cabaret in Ann Arbor)

TEDxDetroit - D Blair - 10/21/09 - "Detroit (While I Was Away)"

Blair puts Emily Dickinson's "Farewell" to Music at Detroit's Institute of Arts from Erik Proulx on Vimeo.

Blair, you were not supposed to go away so soon. You will be enormously missed!

Lola von Miramar - To Cuba With Love

2011-06-21T23:03:00.000-07:00

The fabulous Lola von Miramar performs Cuban-inspired Puerto Rican classics with a gay twist at The Phoenix in New York City on June 15th, 2011 as part of ¡Live from Cuba!: Roxy la Rusa and Friends (performance and book-signing). Includes readings of poems and stories by Lola Rodríguez de Tió, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes ("De un pajaro las dos alas"). Bilingual (English/Spanish), with subtitles (captions and some translations).

Performance was curated by Charlie Vázquez. Video by Arthur Aviles. Captions by Larry La Fountain (Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes).

dios en el Playgirl de noviembre

2011-05-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

(Víctor Alicea interpreta a La Tongo.)

Publicado: lunes, 16 de mayo de 2011

Larry La Fountain-Stokes/Especial para En Rojo (Periódico Claridad, Puerto Rico)

El puertorriqueño Abniel Marat siempre ha sido un dramaturgo y poeta audaz, atrevido y polémico, como bien sugiere el provocador título de su drama dios en el Playgirl de noviembre. Entre sus metas: cuestionar la moral dominante; desacralizar lo sacro; proponer una política que valide los movimientos sociales de izquierda sin descartar la diferencia sexual. Esto también queda extremadamente claro en su célebre libro Poemas de un homosexual revolucionario de 1985, recientemente reeditado como parte de su obra completa por la Editorial Tiempo Nuevo.

dios en el Playgirl de noviembre es una obra de 1981 (corrección: de 1983) que se presentó del 29 de abril al 9 de mayo de 2011 en el Teatro Victoria Espinosa de Santurce como parte del 52 Festival de Teatro Puertorriqueño del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Producida por Teatro Uno y dirigida por Mariana Quiles Fabián, contó con la destacada actuación de Cristina Sesto y Víctor Alicea. La calidad literaria del texto y la pasión de los actores fueron los elementos más llamativos de la representación.

Esta obra consiste de cinco monólogos, cada uno marcado por la experiencia del dolor y por la meditación sobre el significado de la muerte. En el primero, Cristina Sesto hace del Padre Isander, un ser torturado de cincuenta años que se encuentra ante el lecho de muerte de su madre, a quien no le administrará los ritos de extrema unción como venganza por el sufrimiento que él siente que su madre le ha causado. Isander es un hombre amargado, desagradable, que culpa a su madre por su represión sexual. Se aprovecha del estado decaído de su progenitora para contarle de sus primeras experiencias sexuales. Sesto lo representa de manera magistral.

El segundo monólogo es del Padre Miguel, compañero de seminario de Isander, en el momento que espera su fusilamiento a manos del ejército nicaragüense, quienes lo torturan debido a su apoyo a las causas revolucionarias. Víctor Alicea presenta el monólogo de rodillas, sus brazos en forma de cruz y su rostro y pecho cubiertos de sangre. La escena funciona para recordarnos la terrible violencia sufrida en Centroamérica durante los años 70 y 80, como resultado de sus guerras civiles.

El ciego es el tercer personaje que conocemos. Interpretado por Sesto, el pobre mendigo ciego nos cuenta su historia de vida tras crecer en La Perla. Lo acompañamos en el hospital donde acaba de recibir un transplante de córneas que le pertenecieron a un rico americano fallecido, dueño de farmacéuticas. El ciego odia su nuevo sentido de la vista, pues siente que el mundo es igual de malo o incluso hasta peor ahora que lo puede ver todo.

(Cristina Sesto hace del Tío Abniel.)

El cuarto personaje es posiblemente el más tierno y el más brillantemente ejecutado. Se trata del tío Abniel, un anciano payaso al borde de la muerte que le habla a su muñeca Petrushka. Sesto lo interpreta bellísimamente, vestida de arlequín, guindando elevada sobre las sogas que cruzan el escenario formando un tipo de telaraña. El tío Abniel habla de su sobrino Isander quien no lo visita y de la enfermera que no lo oye.

Por último tenemos el monólogo más conocido y famoso de esta obra, el de La Tongo, interpretado con gran chispa por Víctor Alicea. Se trata de una travesti del Viejo San Juan que comparte sus experiencias con el público. Alicea tiene muchísima gracia y candor y se luce en su representación de una canción de Iris Chacón. Bromea con el público e inyecta un fuerte elemento de comedia a una obra más marcada por el pathos. Descubrimos al final que nos habla desde la ultratumba, ya que un vecino pentecostal le ha pegado fuego a su casa, quemándola viva. El monólogo presenta un discurso de vindicación de la identidad sexual gay y afirma su puertorriqueñidad. Desafortunadamente en cierto momento empezó a sonar panfletario, de otra época, falto de la intensidad de los otros monólogos. En medio del acto, el actor también procede a desvestirse, quitándose los elementos de vestuario y la peluca de su personaje travesti. Este “develar el ser” le quita toda gracia al personaje y no contribuye a la efectividad de la obra.

dios en el Playgirl de noviembre es un interesante reflejo de su época. Los textos son de gran lirismo y emotividad política y vivencial, si bien ya no corresponden del todo a nuestro momento actual. La puesta en escena tuvo algunos elementos cuestionables, tales como las grabaciones de poemas con voz del propio dramaturgo, la escenografía de telaraña que no se aprovecha del todo y los extraños movimientos de danza moderna o butoh interpretados por los dos actores. Estos elementos menores no impidieron que se apreciara la obra en su totalidad.

El autor es profesor asociado en la Universidad de Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dani Umpi: Escritor y artista uruguayo (Video y Transcripción)

2011-03-06T10:33:00.000-08:00

Dani Umpi - Escritor y artista uruguayo from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

El divertidísimo cantante y novelista Dani Umpi nació en 1974 en Tacuarembó, ciudad de 50,000 habitantes al norte del Uruguay, localizada más cerca de Brasil que de Montevideo. Ha lanzado dos discos (Perfecto en 2005 y Dramática en 2009) y tres novelas. La primera, Aún soltera (2003), fue publicada por Eloísa Cartonera, una editorial argentina que trabaja con cartón reciclado de la calle, que luego usa para hacer libros artesanales de bajo costo; luego fue reeditada por Mansalva. La película basada en su segunda novela, Miss Tacuarembó (de 2004), salió en Uruguay en 2010 con la actriz Natalia Oreiro. Su tercer libro, Sólo te quiero como amigo (2006), trata sobre la vida amorosa de un chico gay. Umpi canta ataviado de innúmeras vestimentas altamente creativas. Ha tenido conciertos en diversos países latinoamericanos incluyendo Argentina, Brasil, Costa Rica y México. También ha participado en eventos literarios en Alemania y Estados Unidos. Entrevisté a Dani Umpi para el Portal en Español de la Universidad de Michigan en 2008. Aquí ofrezco una transcripción editada.

Larry La Fountain: Dani, ¿nos podrías hablar sobre tus libros?

Dani Umpi: El primero fue Aún soltera, que es en el proyecto Eloísa Cartonera de cartoneros y escritores de Argentina. En plena crisis sacaron este proyecto social y editorial que a mí me interesó un montón. Me ofrecieron estar ahí y presenté esa novela que gustó mucho y gracias a ella y también gracias a un premio que recibí se editó Miss Tacuarembó. Después saqué una tercer novela.

Larry: Tú eres un hombre gay pero tus primeras dos novelas tienen como protagonistas a mujeres extraordinarias.

Dani: Sí. Sólo en la tercera es un chico que es gay casualmente. Siempre me interesaron las heroínas, aunque son bastante losers.

Larry: ¿Tú dices losers en el sentido de que a veces cometen crímenes y no tienen relaciones amorosas?

Dani: Claro, tienen algo de perdedoras. Siempre opero dentro de un sistema bastante adolescente. Las dos chicas en la primer novela, (una) es una adolescente que pierde su diario íntimo y se va a vivir a un balneario y ahí se encuentra con una profesora de inglés y se hacen amigas. Es algo intergeneracional. La segunda, Miss Tacuarembó, es una historia de una chica que trabaja en una perfumería como promotora y sabe mucho de perfumes. Es el pensamiento de ella todo el tiempo. Cuando era pequeña quería ser la reina del pueblo de ella que es Tacuarembó que es donde yo nací. La historia se cuenta cuando ella es niña y adolescente y cuando es un poco más grande que está viviendo sola.

Larry: Uruguay es un país pequeño que está entre dos países enormes: Brasil, donde se habla portugués, y Argentina, donde tú también has tenido mucho éxito. ¿Qué quiere decir ser uruguayo en ese contexto?

Dani: Siempre se están preguntando sobre la identidad y cuáles son los símbolos que te agrupan como país. Siempre está la referencia fuerte de Argentina, que tiene mucha influencia en los medios, en todo, que a veces no es tan negativa. Uruguay siempre tiene esa cosa de ser visto como algo muy gris. Cuando viene un extranjero a Montevideo dice "¡Ah, qué linda ciudad!" y los propios montevideanos dicen "Ah, sí, pero es muy gris". Está bueno porque es algo que se reinventa todo el tiempo, hay mucho espacio. Todo eso que a veces parece que te oprime en realidad también puede ser tomado como una oportunidad para hacer cosas. A veces los propios uruguayos dicen "Ah, en Uruguay no hay nada, no se puede hacer nada" y yo creo que eso también es un motor para hacer cosas.

Larry: Ese sentimiento gris de desencanto se siente mucho en los personajes de tus novelas y en las canciones: ese deseo de encontrar un espacio en un mundo que no es perfecto. ¿Qué es para ti el amor?

Dani: A mí me interesan mucho los discursos que surgen del amor. Las tres novelas están muy basadas en mis amigas y en los discursos de ellas, lo que me cuentan por teléfono. Siempre digo que mis amigas no es que me inspiran sino que a veces les copio textualmente. Les robo todo lo que me cuentan por teléfono porque me gustan las palabras, cómo se arma el discurso afectivo. La vida afectiva siempre está en un primer nivel en lo que habla la gente. Vos ves que la gente tiene problemas económicos, de salud, pero los problemas afectivos siempre ocupan más lugar, tienen un discurso mucho más ambiguo, más rico. Esa redundancia que tiene tantos matices a mí me interesa.

Larry: Dani, tus canciones (en el disco Perfecto) son sobre hombres a quienes el cantante adora u odia. ¿Qué es ser gay para ti? ¿Y cómo se relacionan estas canciones a ese amor?

Dani: Las canciones tienen eso de rencor que me interesa mucho, como las canciones que yo escuchaba cuando era pequeño en la radio. Esa cosa del desamor, más estereotipado pero dentro de un imaginario gay aunque no necesariamente. Tiene esa lógica de los cantantes que a mí me interesan, de estrellas tipo Camilo Sesto, Raphael, pero llevado a otro contexto que tiene que ver más conmigo. Las canciones son a hombres pero está basado en el amor y la fascinación, sin pensar mucho que es una cosa gay, sin tener esa consciencia de que eso forma parte de una historia y de un contexto más grande. Sólo dicen sentimientos personalizados, que a veces puede ser gay, a veces no. Hay muchas chicas que dicen que se identifican. A mí no me gusta que se identifiquen porque son muy rencorosas las canciones. No necesariamente habla de un sentimiento gay, pero está hecho desde un lugar gay.

Larry: Las canciones son electropop y tienen una sensibilidad muy contemporánea, con puntos de contacto con grupos como Miranda! o Belanova, pero con letras que a veces son rencorosas. Es una paradoja interesante.

Dani: Ahí entra de vuelta lo de mis amigas. Siempre digo que es un disco de discoteca, que tiene un espíritu frívolo y muy mundano y para bailar, como de pista de baile. No hecho para discotecas sino dentro de la discoteca. Ahí también yo uso mucho a mis amigas porque las canciones son como cosas que te cuentan mientras están bailando. Tienen mucho de eso, de confesión de amigas en una discoteca.

Larry: ¿Y ahora estás trabajando en un disco acústico?

Dani: Sí. Lo opuesto. Nada que ver. Es con un guitarrista llamado Adrián Soiza que es uruguayo. Y son todo versiones de canciones que nos gustan, sólo guitarra y voz. No son canciones mías. (El disco salió en 2009 y se llama Dramática.)

Larry: Algunas de tus canciones las cantas en portugués, por ejemplo sobre Elke Maravilha; algunas las cantas en inglés...

Dani: Elke Maravilha es un personaje muy mediático en Brasil de la televisión. Cuando yo iba a Brasil no entendía portugués mucho pese a que vivía cerca. Iba con mis padres a la frontera a comprar cosas de contrabando. Y cuando íbamos a comer, comíamos en un lugar que se llama El acuario, que era buenísimo. Y ahí había una televisión. Yo me acuerdo que era pequeño y miraba los programas brasileiros y me gustaba porque no entendía lo que hablaban y tampoco entendía la lógica de los juegos. No entendía nada pero me seducía mucho. Y había un personaje dentro de esa maraña de fascinación que era Elke Maravilha que era como una tipa con una personalidad muy fuerte que yo continuamente veía en la tele y no sabía lo que era. No sabía si era mujer, si era un travesti, si era gay y estaba fascinado de eso que no conocía. (Mi) canción se llama "Vira Elke Maravilha" que habla de una fantasía de un chico que va a bailar y conoce a otro chico y cuando pasan las doce de la noche él se transforma en Elke Maravilha.

Larry: Dani, eres novelista, músico y performero, porque haces intervenciones performativas y te vistes con ropa inusual.

Dani: Yo siempre opero desde un personaje. No es que esté todo el tiempo. Cuando voy al escenario, ahí sí, me visto y me gusta cambiar. Tanto a mí como a los que me acompañan nos sucede eso de que nos aburrimos en seguida de lo que hacemos. Cambiamos mucho y usamos mucha ropa. No tiene mucha lógica, es muy caprichoso. Es un espacio de libertad. A veces tengo una estética más infantil, como que voy cambiando.

Larry: ¿Cómo llegaste a la música?

Dani: Fue muy casual porque de pequeño yo no tenía la fantasía de ser cantante. Pensaba que iba a ser escritor o artista plástico. Fue una especie de juego de amigos para una obra. De repente descubrí un universo donde me sentía muy cómodo que era la música y la escena. Como no tenía la fantasía tampoco podía prever ni imaginarme cómo iba a ser mi vida como cantante. Está bueno, porque a medida que voy haciendo cosas, voy aprendiendo y me voy maravillando con mis propias cosas.

Larry: ¿Fuiste a Montevideo para estudiar?

Dani: Sí. En Uruguay se da mucho eso. Es una experiencia que es muy enriquecedora. Es una pseudo maduración, una pseudo independencia donde tus padres te siguen mandando tartas por encomienda. De hecho, a veces siento que estoy estancado en eso, no puedo salir de esa mentalidad de estudiante del interior.

Larry: ¿Ser gay era algo que era más fácil en Montevideo, lejos de la familia?

Dani: En Tacuarembó yo era cualquier cosa. No era que era gay. Tampoco puedo decir que era bisexual. Era chico. Todo me parecía que estaba bien. No tenía ese tipo de reflexiones sobre la sexualidad. Todo eso vino después, cuando ya estaba en Montevideo. Cuando estaba en Tacuarembó tenía novias y la vez me gustaba un chico y a la vez me gustaba la novia.

Larry: Tu canción "Dark Room" es sobre un cuarto oscuro y conocer a otro hombre sin saber quién es.

Dani: Sí. La canción toma una obra de Roberto Jacoby que se llama "Darkroom", que es una especie de dark room más "artístico". Es una obra donde cada uno entraba con una cámara a un dark room y filmaba cosas que pasaban ahí. Y a la vez con la experiencia de un dark room común y corriente de una discoteca donde el personaje entra pero con esa intención de encontrar algo que vaya más allá del encuentro furtivo. Hablo un poco de esa experiencia, de alguien que no sabe mucho de las reglas del juego y proyecta un poco más.

Larry: Una de las cosas más llamativas son tus colaboraciones. Hay muchos artistas invitados, tocas con otros músicos...

Dani: Es porque soy muy inseguro. Y como era el primer disco, me apoyé en muchos amigos. Tenía la posibilidad también de pedirle a gente que yo admiraba mucho para poder cantar y al ser solista me daba esa posibilidad. Incluso en el segundo disco que voy a hacer, también me gusta hacer cosas con diferentes artistas.

Larry: ¡Pero tu inseguridad es extraordinaria! ¡Produce unos cruces y unas mezclas fascinantes!

Dani: Es la posibilidad que te brinda encontrar ese tipo de lugar que no está dentro de un género. No me gusta mucho la música de género. Entonces podés combinarte con otra gente, compartir escena con otros artistas. No sólo en el disco, sino también cuando canto en recitales en Uruguay, donde no hay tanta tradición electropop. Es buenísimo porque puedo cantar con roqueros. Y eso es algo que te nutre. En otros lugares no. Por ejemplo, cuando voy a Chile que hay una escena electropop así fuerte, no tengo esa posibilidad.

Larry: Entonces el que Montevideo sea más pequeño de alguna manera...

Dani: ¡Es buenísimo!

Larry: Te quiero preguntar más sobre Sólo te quiero como amigo...

Dani: Es la última novela. Es muy linda, a mí me gustó. Tuvo buenas críticas. Esta fue diferente en la manera en que la escribí porque para la otra era más estructurado. En esta fue algo muy libre. Empecé a escribir sabiendo lo que iba a suceder. Fui escribiéndola como de continuo. Es el pensamiento de un chico que lo deja su pareja y tiene que rearmar su vida. Igual la pareja es gay pero también ocurre en heterosexuales. Me parece que hay un sentimiento que se da igual. De hecho, en la novela lo que a mí me interesaba y también lo que se percibió es que los personajes gay nunca tienen conflictos con su sexualidad ni con su contexto. Está totalmente aceptado. Por eso digo que los personajes son gay como si fueran rubios o altos o bajos. No hay una reflexión sobre eso. Está centrado en la vida afectiva.

Larry: ¿Tienes inspiraciones literarias o autores que te inspiren?

Dani: Hay un escritor argentino que me encanta que es César Aira, que es mi escritor preferido. De acá (de los Estados Unidos), leo mucho bestseller. Hay un libro de autoayuda que se llama Las mujeres que aman demasiado de Robin Norwood que a mí me marcó mucho. Me interesa mucho eso de los casos clínicos como si fueran historias. Es un género que yo defiendo mucho y que me inspira mucho. Me ayuda a hacer el retrato del personaje. Está muy bien porque es un cruce entre psicología y literatura.

Faggots of Río Piedras, Unite(d)!

2011-02-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

And so it happened that one day a faggot stood in front of a tower. Ah, what a faggot! He did not prance or fly. Nor did he sprout feathers. He couldn’t. He would have loved to scale the tower like Spiderman or Superman but he was afraid after hearing the news about the Broadway musical in which all of the actors flew and fell on the ground as if injured birds, defeathered, poorly flown our flying superhero. The faggot was not a superhero, as much as he’d like. What a dream! A superhuman faggot, as if a Nietzchean, Foucaultian, Derridian, Simone de Bouvoirian, Rosario Ferreian, Talia Cuervian, Manuel Ramos Oterian, Mayra Santos Febrian, Angel Lozadian thing, confusedly and contradictorily Martin Luther King Junioran, Mahatma Gandhian, Malcolm Xian, just like saying: you are mine. You on this Saint Valentine’s Day, day of lovers, you who are standing there, so handsome, so solidary, so close to the tower, so close to the featherless faggot, so ready to fly over the tower, to reclaim it, paint it, manhandle it, respect it, plant it, love it, kiss it, so phallic the tower, but not for that reason less majestic, democratic or Socratic. It was quite a tower. Not exactly made of ivory. It fancied itself to be a journal and who knows, perhaps it was. Ah, what a paper tower, full of papers, with bells, and do we ever love bells, those of us that are this way! Well, let me not over-generalize. So lovely the bells, so preferable to alarms and police batons, to the mute sound of the baton strike that hits a student, that sound of wood that does not fit nor should fit in the tower or in the ears of the faggot, that sound so contrary to the slogans and screams and demands and placards that the faggot prefers when they are just and necessary. Was the tower made to hear the sound of wood hitting students or of plastic turned into handcuffs tying wrists or of tear gas that makes us all cry? What does the tower think of the horse turned savage weapon to trample on and intimidate students and staff and faculty? The tower has seen everything including the blood of death. How many faggots have gone by the tower, through the tower, down its hallways and stairs? How many policemen has it seen, how many students? Is this my tower? The faggot likes it. The faggot has tower fever, a craving, a hunger and thirst. Perhaps the faggot thinks she is Spanish, or is it Moorish? Mozarabic? Visigoth? Egyptian like the pyramids, Egyptian and Pharaonic like the democratic multitudes that overthrew the great dictator. Architect or architectonic, with the enthusiasm of an engineer, or is it for architects and engineers on this day of love? The faggot does not like the tower bathed in blood or dressed in the red of violence. The faggot does not like police that injure students with their batons or ex-presidents that are among the living dead or incompetent and antihuman vice-chancellors or Boards of Trustees that clamor for the return of the days of Rome, of Christian martyrs and slaves sacrificed to the great lion. The faggot is a teacher, what faggot isn’t? The faggot is a teacher of life and that is why she teaches, oh, how she teaches and teaches and talks and talks nonstop, cleaning, shining and bringing splendor, pushing and begging and crying, for one has to cry and scream and sing and dance, especially with tambourines and congas and the palms of one’s hands, clapping them to make them ring. Ah what a tower. Ah what loves. Ah what a faggot. Love each other, my dear companions. Thou shall be loved and are loved back, this tower is love. This campus is love. This faggot is love. And it shall come, the day shall come when the police are love and the presidency and chancellorship and the regents are for love. Mirror of love, tower of love, faggot of love.

(Speech read at the Sit-in/Stand-up/Reading by Puerto Rican authors in front of the Tower of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, Monday, February 14th, 2011. Event organized by Melanie Pérez Ortiz and Rafa Acevedo.)

Photo by Ivan Chaar-Lopez, 14 February 2011, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.

¡Maricones de Río Piedras, uníos!

2011-02-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

Hay que ver que un día se paró un maricón en frente de una torre. ¡Ay qué maricón! No voló. No echo plumas. No podía. Escalar la torre quiso cual Spiderman o Superman pero estaba con miedo con eso de las noticias sobre el musical de Broadway en el que todos los actores salían volando y caían al piso cuales aves heridas, desplumadas, mal volado el superhéroe volador. El maricón no era superhéroe, ya quisiera. ¡Qué sueño! Pato superhombre, una cosa nietzcheana, foucaultiana, derridiana, simonedebouvoiriana, rosarioferriana, taliacuerviana, manuelramosoteriana, mayrasantosfebriana, angelozadiana, confusa y contradictoriamente martinlutherkingjuniorana, mahatmagandhiana y malcolmexiana, así como de decir: tú eres mío. Tú en este día de San Valentín, en este día de los enamorados, tú que estás ahí parado, tan guapo, tan solidario, tan cerca de la torre, tan cerca del maricón sin plumas, tan listo para volar sobre la torre, para reclamarla, pintarla, manosearla, respetarla, plantarla, amarla, besarla, tan fálica la torre, pero no por ello menos majestuosa, democrática o socrática. Era una torre de lo más aquel. No era exactamente de marfil. Se creía revista y quién sabe, tal vez lo era. Ay qué torre de papel, llena de papeles, con campanas, tanto que nos gustan las campanas a todas nosotras que somos así. Bueno, déjame no generalizar. Tan lindas las campanas, tan preferibles a las sirenas y al macanazo, a ese sonido mudo del golpe de la macana, ese sonido de madera que no cabe ni debería caber en la torre ni en las orejas de la loca, ese sonido tan opuesto al de las consignas y gritos y reclamos y pancartas que tanto prefiere la loca cuando son justas y necesarias. ¿Fue hecha la torre para oír el sonido de la madera que golpea o del plástico vuelto esposas o de las bombas lacrimógenas? ¿Qué cree la torre del caballo vuelto arma salvaje para pisotear e intimidar a estudiantes y trabajadores y profesores? La torre lo ha visto todo, hasta sangre de muerte. ¿Cuánto maricón no habrá pasado por la torre, en la torre, entre sus pasillos y escaleras? Cuanto policía no habrá visto, cuanto estudiante. ¿Será ésta mi torre? A la loca le gusta. La loca tiene fiebre de torre, antojo, hambre y sed. Española se creerá la loca, ¿o es morisca? ¿Mozárabe? ¿Visigoda? Egipcia como las pirámides, egipcia y faraónica como las multitudes democráticas que lograron la salida del gran dictador. Arquitecta o arquitectónica, con afán de ingeniera ¿o será de ingenieros y arquitectos en este día del amor? A la loca no le gusta la torre bañada en sangre ni vestida del rojo de la violencia. A la loca no le gusta la policía que macanea estudiantes ni ex-presidentes muertos en vida ni rectoras incompetentes y antihumanas ni juntas de síndicos que reclaman por los días de Roma, de mártires cristianos y esclavos tirados al gran león. La loca es maestra, ¿qué loca no lo es? La loca es maestra de la vida y por eso la loca educa, ay, cómo educa, enseña y enseña y habla y habla a más no poder, limpia y pule y da resplandor, empuja y suplica y llora, porque hay que llorar y gritar y cantar y bailar, especialmente con panderos y congas y palmas de carne y hueso, chocando las manos para hacerlas sonar. Ay qué torre. Ay qué amores. Ay qué loca. Amaos y amaas, mis queridos y queridas compañeros y compañeras. Amados y amadas serán y son, esta torre es amor. Este recinto es amor. Esta loca es amor. Y ya vendrá, ya vendrá el día en que la policía será amor y la presidencia y rectoría y junta de síndicos serán para el amor. Espejo de amor, torre de amor, maricón de amor.

(Texto leído en el Sit-in/Stand-up/Lectura de escritores y escritoras del país frente a la Torre de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, el lunes 14 de febrero de 2011. Convocaron Melanie Pérez Ortiz y Rafa Acevedo.)

Foto por Ivan Chaar-Lopez, 14 febrero 2011, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico.

Sobre platanutres y los libros de la década

2011-01-10T20:10:00.000-08:00

Cómo ustedes saben, yo soy Lola von Miramar y hoy les voy a hablar de cocina y de literatura. Más específicamente, les voy a hablar de los libros puertorriqueños “que dejaron huellas” en la primera década del siglo veintiuno según la insigne crítica literaria del periódico El Nuevo Día, Carmen Dolores Hernández. También voy a hablar de cómo hacer platanutres y tal vez si me da tiempo hasta exploro el tema del mofongo. Carmen Dolores Hernández sabe de libros y Lola von Miramar sabe de plátanos fritos. Y a mí no hay nada que me guste más que la fritura.

¿Por dónde comenzar? No puede ser fácil freír un libro porque el papel tiene la tendencia de absorber mucha grasa. ¿Qué ayuda? La temperatura tiene que estar bien alta, pero no demasiado. Me han dicho que el aceite de maíz es bueno, aunque el de soya también, y hasta el de maní. Hay todo un debate sobre si se debe freír con aceite de oliva porque tiene un punto de humo más bajo que otros aceites, pero dicen que su valor nutricional justifica y hasta le puede dar un gusto especial al libro. El otro problema es que el papel es un material altamente combustible, tú no haces más que pegarle un fósforo y ya te cogió candela. ¿Alguien tiene un fósforo o un lighter que me preste?

(Para ver más fotos de la fritura de un libro presione aquí.)

(Imagen de Carmen Dolores Hernández -de blanco y negro- y Magali García Ramis.)

Lola conoce a Carmen Dolores Hernández desde que Lola era niña, por eso a Lola le ha partido el alma ver cómo Carmen Dolores excluye a ciertos escritores. Por supuesto, muchos dirán ¿y qué? ¿Qué importa lo que diga Carmen Dolores Hernández? Lola hasta tiene amistades universitarias que dicen que ellas ni leen lo que escribe esa señora. El problema es que Carmen Dolores Hernández es la única crítica literaria con trabajo en el periódico más importante del País. Y Lola no puede estar cocinando el día entero. Y de todos modos, no hay nada como un periódico viejo para absorber la grasa y envolver las cáscaras de plátano verde en la cocina. Porque de cocina yo sí sé.

Queridas amigas: como sabrán, Lola se ha vuelto famosa en el mundillo cibernético por su video educativo de cómo freír tostones con tacas, lo hizo con Saltina Bouvier y Daphne Dumount en Chicago y cómo han hecho reír a la gente esas tres, dime tú, quién se lo iba a imaginar que una cocina llena de dragas podía ser tan graciosa, pero lo que pasa es que ellas están muy bien integradas: una pelirroja, otra morena y una rubia, ¡adivinen cual soy yo! Y cómo gozan Lola, Saltina y Daphne porque ellas no sólo improvisan con sus zapatos cuando no encuentran la tostonera, ellas se lo comen todo. Y esos tostones quedaron bien buenos porque dime tú que cuando empezaron a aplastar los plátanos aquello parecía que querían hace mangú de lo mucho que le dieron a la masa, pero no, rápido metieron aquello en el sartén de nuevo y salieron unos tostones bien, bien crunchy que bajaron bien suave porque tenían adobo y estaban mojaditos con mayoketchup. Y como todas sabemos, todo lo mojado baja mejor.

Pues los tostones son un fenómeno internacional o al menos hemisférico porque se dan en toda América Latina, hasta tienen sus propios nombres, les dicen patacón pisao en Colombia y Ecuador y Panamá y plátano a puñetazos en otras partes. El libro aplastao también es más práctico y ocupa menos espacio porque dime tú, si el libro está todo abierto y se le salen todas las páginas pues no lo puedes poner en el estante con la misma facilidad. Pero los libros no están hechos para estar en los estantes, están hechos para tener vida propia y correr por el mundo felices.

¿Pero cómo puede una estar feliz cuando le ignoran los libros? Yo solo puedo empanizar cierta cantidad de libros al día y venderlos como si fueran un bistec de pollo o de res antes de que la gente se empiece a dar cuenta y a quejarse porque les tengo que confesar un secreto, los libros no son tiernos, al menos no al paladar y la gente se da cuenta cuando le dan gato por liebre o iguana por pollo, aunque me han dicho que en los restaurantes chinos de Carolina ahora están sirviendo pepper chicken hecho con gallina de palo y mi amiga Karina me acaba de contar que se comió una empanadilla de doce pulgadas rellena de cocodrilo en el barrio Pozuelo en Guayama. Yo nunca he probado ni ardilla ni iguana ni cocodrilo, me muero por comerlos, ya comí avestruz y me supo a vaca.

Hablando de avestruces, no puede ser fácil ser un niño en Puerto Rico y de la noche a la mañana amanecer siendo pato, como la cucaracha de Kafka. Dicho sea de paso, aquí no estamos hablando de comer insectos, que es la nueva moda, al menos según el New York Times. Aquí de lo que estamos hablando es de que los patos vuelan y se parten y los cazan. Ponme tú a un pato puertorriqueño en un libro y vamos a ver cuán lejos llega. Yo no estoy hablando de un pato frito que tú lo metes en la guía de teléfono a ver si las páginas te absorben la grasa. Lola de lo que te está hablando es de los patos que hablan, no los de Disney sino los que viven por allá, por los Niuyores. Porque aquí parece que ahora está bien ser pato si se vive aquí y se habla de Santurce o del novio en la Ciudad de México que se quiere volver Tina Modotti, pero no del pato que se embarra de mierda o del que le debe media vida a las tarjetas de crédito y se va a morir de sida. Y valga aclarar que estamos hablando de la lista de “Los libros boricuas del 2010” de Carmen Dolores Hernández, porque entre los “Libros que dejaron huellas en la década” no hay un solo libro de patos, ni siquiera la pionerísima antología Los otros cuerpos: Antología de temática gay, lésbica y queer desde Puerto Rico y su diáspora (2007).

Hablando de patos, yo no sé si a los patos les gustan los platanutres pero me imagino que sí porque los patos comen de todo. Y a todas estas todavía no les he dado la receta.

Coge un plátano verde y me lo pelas y me lo cortas en rebanadas bien, bien finitas y yo me imagino que las puedes poner a remojar en agua y sal igual que los tostones, pues entonces calientas el aceite hasta que esté bien calientito pero antes de que bote humo y entonces me metes los plátanos ahí (pero sin el agua) y se cocinan bien rápido y cuando salgan, les pones sal o adobo mientras todavía están calientes.

¡Ya sé! Aquí lo que hay que hacer es libros de platanutres porque entonces la gente se los come y antes de que los cague puede que les saque cierto provecho. Un libro tan bello como Uñas pintadas de azul de un íntimo amigo mío, con unos cuentos tan bonitos de nenes puertorriqueños que se pintan las uñas en Nueva York y que luego se convierten en cyborgs en São Paulo y que se van a volar con otros pájaros en La Habana. ¿O qué me dices tú de Queer Ricans, el primer libro que documenta la producción cultural puertorriqueña gay y lésbica en la isla y la diáspora? A los platanutres les dicen chifles también y en Perú se los comen. Tal vez habría que imprimir los libros sobre planchas de plátanos y así quedarían bien atractivos.

Pero en realidad, yo creo que lo que habría que hacer es un mofongo de libros porque todo lo majado sabe mejor y así se le puede meter chicharrón de cerdo y mucho, mucho ajo. Quién sabe, si Uñas pintadas de azul y Queer Ricans tuvieran más especies y grasa y condimento tal vez ya hubieran aparecido en El Nuevo Día. Y Lola estaría muy feliz.

Pero colorín colorado este cuento no se ha acabado porque esto no es un cuento de hadas y dadas las circunstancias en toda honestidad yo creo que lo que verdaderamente corresponde es comerse los libros bien empapados de aceite de oliva y ajo. No en balde me han dicho estofona toda la vida, que viene de estofar, que quiere decir llenarse de libros. Pues ahora a volver esos sueños realidad. ¡A comer libros! dice Lola, arrancando las mejores partes, metiéndoselas a la boca y masticando y tragando hasta vomitar. ¡No hay nada como el canibalismo de palabras y la regurgitación de papel! Nada como ser ignorada.

Doce cuentos paralelos de Isabel Quílez

2010-12-17T08:41:00.000-08:00

Una cazadora de elefantes. Mujeres que van al astrólogo, al santero, al doctor del amor. La mujer de las trenzas púbicas, estrella de un circo local. Estas y muchas otras mujeres pueblan los muy divertidos Doce cuentos paralelos de Isabel Quílez (también conocida como Isabel Abislaimán e Isabel Cadenas, sus apellidos de casada). En su nuevo libro, la autora cubano-puertorriqueña (nacida en Cuba pero radicada en Puerto Rico desde principios de los años 60) nos ofrece una ventana a la sensibilidad de toda una gama de mujeres caribeñas: sensuales, seguras de sí mismas, a veces frágiles, curiosas, empresariales. Los cuentos oscilan desde relatos de corte realista (por ejemplo, la descripción de los improperios físicos de un ex-presidente caribeño que discretamente pellizca a la narradora de “Los presidentes”, dejándole un doloroso moretón en la nalga que ella esconde de su marido) hasta los más fantásticos, en que fantasmas de hombres visitan a mujeres y les hacen el amor. Inspirada por los cuentos de Gabriel García Márquez mientras participaba de un taller literario liderado por Sylvia Domenech, Quílez se da a la tarea de escribir relatos cortos, sintéticos, pero llenos de vida y sorpresa. La autora ofrece muchos detalles biográficos en las solapas y la introducción del libro, lo cual nos permite ir atando cabos y desentrañar las posibles referencias autobiográficas, particularmente aquellas relacionadas a una infancia en Cuba y los Estados Unidos y su vida adulta en San Juan. Uno de los relatos más emotivos es “Los gusanos”, una alegoría sobre insectos ahogados en un jardín que rápidamente se convierte en un comentario político sobre el destierro y el rechazo de la revolución cubana por los que se oponen al régimen. Como comenta Mayra Santos-Febres en la contraportada, “Los cuentos paralelos de Isabel Quílez exhiben un gran manejo de la forma y una imaginación osada y fértil. Son cuentos de quien se inicia en el oficio, pero con paso firme y prometedor. Se nota que Isabel Quílez se ha tomado en serio el oficio de escribir y que lo hace con disciplina, dedicación y, a la vez, con toda la intención de seguir produciendo buena literatura”. Recomiendo estos maravillosos cuentos y espero con anhelo futuras entregas de la talentosa escritora novel.

Call for Contributions: Collection in Memory of Rane Arroyo

2010-12-09T11:50:00.000-08:00

Volume Editor: Betsy Sandlin (Sewanee, University of the South)

Submissions of any genre are invited for an edited collection in memory of poet and playwright Rane Arroyo (1954-2010). His 11 books of poetry, collection of short stories, and numerous plays and performances blazed new trails in Puerto Rican / American literature in their blending of so-called “high” and “low” cultures, their frank reflections on homosexuality, ethnicity, and social class, and their experimentation and self-reflexivity. Rane won numerous accolades during his lifetime and was respected and loved by many, particularly those students and authors whom he influenced and inspired.

Rane was unafraid to push and blur boundaries, and this collection seeks to honor him and his courage by doing the same. To that end, I welcome any sort of contribution in any genre and from any perspective that you feel appropriate to the occasion and to the memory of Rane Arroyo. This may include, but is certainly not limited to, “traditional” (or not-so-traditional) literary criticism, poems or other creative works, personal essays, reflections on teaching Rane’s work, and more.

Essays of literary criticism should be approximately 6,000-8,000 words in length, including end notes and a list of works cited that follows the norms of the Modern Language Association. Other submissions may be in any format. Please feel free to include images, especially if you own them and can grant copyright permission. Images of Rane are certainly welcomed, as are any other images that might be pertinent to your submission.

Interest in submitting should be expressed via email to Betsy A. Sandlin , Ph.D. Associate Professor, Sewanee: The University of the South, 735 University Avenue, Sewanee, TN 37383, no later than March 31, 2011. Please indicate what you plan to submit and, if appropriate, a title and brief abstract. Final submissions will be due no later than May 31, 2011. Contact Betsy A. Sandlin at bsandlin@sewanee.edu with questions.

Cooking with Drag Queens: How to Make Tostones!

2010-11-16T12:04:00.000-08:00

The long awaited Feast of Fun tostones video is finally here! Hope you have fun! ¡Ojalá que lo disfruten!

If you just can't get enough, here is my "Behind the Scenes" video:

And how to forget our zany "How to Make Tostones" preview video!

La Literatura Latina III (Santa Cruz, California)

2010-11-06T00:33:00.000-07:00

¡Saludos desde California! I am thoroughly enjoying my visit to Santa Cruz, where I am participating in the Latino Literature/La literatura latina III Bilingual Conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yesterday I read on a panel with Helena María Viramontes and Manuel Muñoz. ¡Muchísimas gracias a Kirsten Silva Gruesz y a tod@s l@s organizadores de este magnífico evento!

Puerto Rican Literature of Migration

2010-10-13T14:58:00.000-07:00

Puerto Rican Literature of Migration
Panelists: Yolanda Martinez San Miguel, Laura Lomas, Vanessa Pérez Rosario
Moderator: Arnaldo Cruz Malavé
Tues., Oct. 26, 2010 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Centro Conference Room East Bldg. 1442
Hunter College (corner 68th & Lexington Avenue)
New York City, NY
Directions: 6 Train to 68th Street
R.S.V.P.: Rosalie Roman or call 212.772.5714

In Solidarity with MSA President Chris Armstrong

2010-09-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

I oppose the harassment that Chris Armstrong, the elected student leader of the University of Michigan Student Assembly, is being subjected to by a state official.

I fully subscribe to the University of Michigan statement of support on his behalf.

I applaud Anderson Cooper's reporting on this topic and his open confrontation of Chris Armstrong's harasser.

Support Chris Armstrong by signing an online petition here. Let Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox know that Michigan Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell's behavior is unacceptable.

Also, please consider donating to the Spectrum Center, the University of Michigan's LGBT Student Center on campus. You can give by accessing an electronic donation link on the Spectrum Center home page. No amount is too small.

You can also give to the Spectrum Center's DOUBLE THE IMPACT Campaign at:
http://www.crowdrise.com/spectrumcenter

Lola Does Saugatuck, Michigan, with the Feast of Fun!

2010-08-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

Lola von Miramar had the most wonderful time with her friends Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion of the Feast of Fun last weekend in Saugatuck, Michigan! Listen to this podcast in which we talk about our exploits, particularly our experience attending a cabaret show by the extraordinary Miss Coco Peru! (See my review here.)

Here's a photo of me with the lovely Miss Coco!

For more photos go here!

We also recorded some videos:

Greetings from Saugatuck

Monarch Butterfly Feeding from a Flower

Larry Is Mad at Himself

Lola lee "Uñas pintadas de azul"

2010-08-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

Panel in Los Angeles on August 6!

2010-07-20T08:14:00.001-07:00

(Click on image to see larger view.)

Please join us at this panel at the annual conference of the Association for Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) on Friday, August 6, at 9:45 am! The 2010 conference will be held at the Hyatt Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles, CA.

Eating Patacones in Ecuador!

2010-07-18T11:22:00.001-07:00

Lola von Miramar has the most delightful friends!!!! Maxi and Beto indulge in delicious patacones inspired by Lola's video "Behind the Scenes on 'How to Make Tostones,'" which Lola filmed with her fabulous friends Saltina (Fausto Fernós) and Daphne Dumont (Marc Felion) of the Feast of Fun podcast!

("How to Make Tostones" is still in postproduction but promises to be on YouTube by the end of the summer!)

Maxi and Beto are engaged and just announced their plans to marry in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where gay marriage is now legal. ¡Qué vivan Max y Beto! ¡Qué viva la Argentina! ¡Y qué vivan los tostones!

Love,

Your always adoring Lola von Miramar
Mistress of the Tostones Universe

How To Do Drag!

2010-07-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

Lola von Miramar's dear friends Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion of the Feast of Fun podcast introduced Lola to the oh so fabulous Blanche Babcock, a real mistress of the art of drag! Blanche has wonderful videos on YouTube as well as a lovely blog. The video above offers an introduction explaining some of the basic products you will need. Make sure to see other videos by Blanche such as one on how to apply foundation and contour (the first of a three-part series) and one titled "How to Do Drag Makeup on the Cheap."

While searching on the web for advice, Lola von Miramar came upon the fantastic videos of Janet from Janet's Closet! Janet's cross-dressing emporium is located in Wyandotte, Michigan, in the Detroit metro area, and shares the building with a car engine shop! Hear Janet explain her philosophy about female transformation and give basic tips for makeup! This is the first of a nine-part series (although parts three and four seem to be missing). She carries out a transformation of the Puerto Rican model Jasmine!

Lola has learned so much with Blanche and Janet! There are also many other wonderful YouTube tutorials such as the one by the very lovely British girl Nic (pixiwoo on YouTube) of FashionFace.tv:

Lola says: Go have fun with drag!

Claridad Queer o LGBT (En Rojo)

2010-06-30T21:16:00.001-07:00

Como muchos sabrán, el suplemento En Rojo del semanario puertorriqueño Claridad del 24 al 30 de junio de 2010 estuvo dedicado al tema de lo LGBT o queer en Puerto Rico.

Ya quitaron los artículos, aquí están los enlaces. Les recomiendo que descarguen los artículos, cuentos y poemas como PDF ya que Claridad no mantiene estos enlaces de manera permanente.

* Alida Millán Ferrer, "Convivir" (mensaje de la editora de En Rojo)

* Jorge Irizarry, "Somos parte del escenario" (mensaje del editor de este En Rojo)

* Lilliana Ramos Collado, "¿Arte queer? Ahora lo ves… ¡y ahora también lo ves!"

* Rubén Ríos Avila, "La lucha LHBTT: de las identidades a las ciudadanías"

* Salvador Vidal Ortiz, "Sebastián y su corporealidad" (entrevista con Sebastián Colón)

* Mickey Negrón, "Testimonio: El año que viene vuelvo a marchar y me llevo un casco"

* Rafah Acevedo, "NO tolero a los gays"

* Jorge Irizarry, "Durmiendo con el enemigo"

* Ángel Antonio Ruiz, "Transqüiar: el vacío de la identidad absoluta y la reafirmación de la existencia"

* Mercedes Garriga, "Nietzche y la deconstrucción de la moralidad"

* Luis Negrón, "Mucho más de lo que se piensa: Nuevo cine queer puertorriqueño"

* Luis Negrón, "Por Guayama" (cuento)

* Aixa Ardín, "Me gusta cuando el pan"

* Rubén Rolando Solla, "Puro teatro"

* Rubén Rolando Solla, "Calambre"

Como sabrán, el número también produjo debates feroces. Aquí un ejemplo:

* Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, "El EnRojo Queer, y las dificultades del apalabramiento"

* Lilliana Ramos Collado, "EnRojo Queer: Las inclusiones y las exclusiones siempre son políticas"

* Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia, "Volver sobre lo negativo"

¡Qué Viva África! (con Shakira y Freshlyground)

2010-06-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

Lola took a little moment today to watch Shakira and Freshlyground performing "Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)," the official song of the 2010 World Cup, which is being held in South Africa. It is a very moving song and they perform it very well, although it is a little disappointing to realize that the song opens with a military metaphor (which they soon forget). Please also enjoy the live recording at the FIFA Celebration Concert!

¡Hoy Lola se conmovió mucho al oír "Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)", la canción de la Copa Mundial 2010 interpretada por Shakira y Freshlyground! (Eso antes de que se diera cuenta de que es una metáfora militar que se invoca al principio, aunque por suerte se abandona pronto.) La copa se celebra en Sur África este año por primera vez. ¡Disfruten de la versión en vivo también!

These are the lyrics:

You're a good soldier
Choosing your battles
Pick yourself up
And dust yourself off
And back in the saddle

You're on the frontline
Everyone's watching
You know it's serious
We're getting closer
This isn't over

The pressure is on
You feel it
But you've got it all
Believe it

When you fall get up
Oh oh...
And if you fall get up
Oh oh...

Tsamina mina
Zangalewa
Cuz this is Africa

Tsamina mina eh eh
Waka Waka eh eh

Tsamina mina zangalewa
Anawa aa
This time for Africa

Listen to your god
This is our motto
Your time to shine
Dont wait in line
Y vamos por Todo

People are raising
Their Expectations
Go on and feed them
This is your moment
No hesitations

Today's your day
I feel it
You paved the way
Believe it

If you get down
Get up Oh oh...
When you get down
Get up eh eh...

Tsamina mina zangalewa
Anawa aa
This time for Africa

Tsamina mina eh eh
Waka Waka eh eh

Tsamina mina zangalewa
Anawa aa

Tsamina mina eh eh
Waka Waka eh eh
Tsamina mina zangalewa
This time for Africa

Shakira Waka Waka lyrics found on http://www.directlyrics.com.com/shakira-waka-waka-lyrics.html

Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets! (featuring Sarah Vaughan)

2010-06-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

You're absolutely right that Lola's gonna get whatever she wants!

Lola's divine friend Katie sent her this fabulous rendition by Gypsy Somerset (Jenna McDaniel) of the classic "Whatever Lola Wants" as sung by the oh so fabulous diva Sarah Vaughan. (Jenna is lip syncing Vaughan.) The song is from the 1955 musical play Damn Yankees and also appeared in the film made from the play. It is based on the infamous and delightful Lola Montez.

Gypsy Somerset's black and white version (with a bleached out performer) is a little unusual (almost ghostly!) and made Lola want to see more of the real Sarah Vaughan. In this clip, "Sassy" (Vaughan) sings "Perdido" (a fascinatingly bizarre Mexican-themed song that sounds a lot like Carmen Miranda's "Paducah" from Busby Berkeley's The Gang's All Here), engaging in her own little bit of tropicalization:

Next is a very nice video with clips of Vaughan singing "Sometimes I'm Happy," "They All Laughed," and a most wonderful rendition of "Maria" from West Side Story (Lola just loves how Sarah glistens from perspiration while singing "Maria" and also manages to look absolutely regal!):

Finally, here's an interesting tango trance remix by DjMp3:

Enjoy!

Eternally yours,

The Divine Lola von Miramar

Literatura LGBT puertorriqueña (Los Otros Cuerpos)

2010-06-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

Queridas amigas:

Las invito a que disfruten de este video blog en el que Lola von Miramar habla sobre la pionera antología puertorriqueña LGBT Los Otros Cuerpos (2007) y lee pasajes de los importantísimos escritores Manuel Ramos Otero (1948-1990) y Rane Arroyo (1954-2010).

Please join Lola von Miramar as she talks about the pioneering Puerto Rican LGBT anthology Los Otros Cuerpos (2007) and reads passages by the very important writers Manuel Ramos Otero (1948-1990) and Rane Arroyo (1954-2010). VIDEO IN SPANISH.

¡Ojalá que les guste! Hope you enjoy it!

La antología se consigue en la Librería Isla de Río Piedras y aquí.

Con el cariño de siempre y deseándoles muy feliz Gay Pride en Nueva York y Chicago,

Su servidora Lola von Miramar

VIDEO: Chuchi the Clown Es Cosa Mala!

2010-06-23T22:39:00.000-07:00

Chuchi the Clown is the extraordinary creation of the very talented and multifaceted Charlie Vázquez, who is the author of the recently published novel Contraband and who also maintains a very informative blog. Charlie also hosts the PANIC sex-radical literary reading series every month at Nowhere, one of New York City’s funkiest gay bars! Check Chuchi out!

In Creo que "ese" es bien...tu sabe..., Charlie channels his paranoid exiled Cuban grandfather, who is convinced that everyone is a communist and working for the FBI. He screams at his friend Beba, who seems to be hard of hearing, and talks about how the local French in the neighborhood and the Guardian Angels are all communists. He then curses having picked up the phone. Or something like that!

In a previous video (El Dali Lama) Chuchi rambles on about the Dalai Lama and Jesus, claiming that the latter really looks very Spanish and thus must be Latino!

Bravo for Charlie Vázquez!

VIDEO: Yay for Ricky Martin! Lola loves him!

2010-06-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

People en Español dedicated its July 2010 cover to Ricky Martin and his beautiful boys Valentino and Matteo. (Full article here.)

La revista People en Español le dedicó su portada de julio de 2010 a Ricky Martin y a sus bellos hijos Valentino y Matteo. (Ver artículo aquí.)

¡Lola está fascinada con Ricky Martin! Pero eso no es una sorpresa...

Hope you enjoy mi video blog!!!!

Los adora,

Lola von Miramar de Martin

Behind the Scenes with Lola!

2010-06-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

Filmmaking is fun! And exhausting! But Lola loves it!

El domingo participé en el rodaje de un video en Chicago, con mis amigas Saltina (Fausto Fernós) y Daphne Dumont (Marc Felion) del Feast of Fun. ¡Hicimos tostones (que en Colombia se llaman patacones)! Aquí comparto algunas de mis experiencias. ¡Estén atentas al lanzamiento de nuestro video "How to Make Tostones (Fried Green Plantains)" esta semana!

Las adora,

Lola von Miramar

Lola, L-O-L-A Lola, Lo Lo Lo Lo Lola! (The Kinks)

2010-06-22T09:36:00.000-07:00

My fabulous friend La Sandrella just send me this wonderful song which captures my spirit in oh so many ways. Hope you enjoy it!

Yours always,

La Lola von Miramar!

Lola-The Kinks-Original Lyrics:

I met her in a club down in old Soho
Where you drink champagne and it tastes like cherry cola c.o.l.a. cola

She walked up to me and she asked me to dance
I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice
she said Lola L.o.l.a. Lola
La La La La Lola

Verse 2:

Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy,
But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine
oh my Lola, la-la la-la Lola
Well, I'm not dumb, but I can't understand
Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man
oh my Lola, la-la la-la Lola
La-la la-la Lola

Well we drank champagne and danced all night
under electric candlelight
She picked me up and sat me on her knees
said little boy, won't you come home with me ?

Verse 3:

Well, I'm not the world's most passionate guy,
But when I looked in her eyes, well, I almost fell for my Lola
la-la la-la Lola,
La-la la-la Lola
Lola, la-la la-la Lola
la-la la-la Lola

I pushed her away
I walked to the door
I felt to the floor,
I got down on my knees
well I looked at her and she at me.

Verse 4:

That's the way, that I want it to stay
And I always wanted it to be that way for my Lola
la-la la-la Lola,
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls,
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola
la-la la-la Lola

Well, I left home just a week before
and I'd never ever kissed a woman before
But Lola smiled and took me by the hand
Said good boy gonna make you a man !"

Verse 5:

Well, I'm not the world's most muscular man,
But I know what I am I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola
la-la la-la Lola,

Lola, la-la la-la Lo-la, la-la la-la Lo-la, Lola, la-la la-la Lo-la, (repeat and fade )

A Tostones Teaser with Lola

2010-06-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

Lola von Miramar and her dear friends Saltina (Fausto Fernós) and Daphne Dumont (Marc Felion) of the Feast of Fun podcast teach you how to make tostones! (Short video teaser, also includes coverage of the Chicago Puerto Rican Day Parade!)

Speaking of parades, here are some images of Lola's friend Larry in Chicago!

(With Fausto and Marc)

(With Ramón Rivera-Servera)

Lola von Miramar vs. Saltina: Who's the Best Lady Vera Parker?

2010-06-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

The hilarious Fausto Fernós of the Feast of Fun podcast challenges Lola von Miramar to an impersonation challenge: who can do a better version of the incarcerated Chicago drag queen Lady Vera Parker???? May the best queen win!!!

Lola Teaches You How to Say "Hello!" in Spanish!

2010-06-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

¡Vivo y en directo desde Chicago, Illinois! Una pequeña clase de español para nuestras buenas amigas. ¡Muchas gracias a Fausto Fernós del Feast of Fun!!!

¡Lola, Rubia de América!

2010-06-16T19:12:00.000-07:00

A sign of things to come!

Video by Christian Hale, hair by Charo of 32nd St (NYC).

Your eternally devoted,

Lola von Miramar!

Para todos todo! Huelga + Paro!

2010-05-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

Para todos todo! Huelga + Paro! from Carlos Marcial on Vimeo.

Tremendo video por Carlos Marcial Torres, que escribe lo siguiente:

El 18 de mayo de 2010 se convocó a un paro general en apoyo a los reclamos de los estudiantes en huelga de la UPR. Luego de varias manifestaciones en distintos centro gubernamentales de trabajo muchas personas se movilizaron al frente de los portones de la UPR en Rio Piedras para demostrar el apoyo masivo que tienen los estudiantes.

¡El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!
!Vivan Los Estudiantes!
¡Viva la Universidad Pública!
!Viva Puerto Rico Libre!

Rane Arroyo, In Memoriam (1954-2010)

2010-05-09T14:09:00.000-07:00

The great Puerto Rican poet Rane Arroyo died on Friday morning (3:40 am) in Toledo, Ohio. His long-term partner Glenn Sheldon was at his side. I wrote the following about Rane for the Heath Anthology and have updated it:

Rane Arroyo b. 1954 - d. 2010

Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican migrant parents, Rane Ramón Arroyo was a prize-winning poet and playwright that also lived in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A self-professed gay writer, he was also a literary critic and performance artist, and directed the University of Toledo’s Creative Writing program. Arroyo’s work is marked by his references to Caribbean and Latino life in the Midwest (particularly in Chicago), by his consistent engagement with canonical literary figures of American and English modernism as well as with Latin American and Spanish poets, and by his exploration of his own personal experiences, including his longstanding relationship with the poet Glenn Sheldon, his affection for his cat Diva, and his awareness of his own process of aging.

Arroyo’s self-reflexive poetry often focused on the inner conscience of a poetic persona, a gay Puerto Rican bard who feels out of place in the world and who is constantly struggling to grapple with what it means to be a poet marked by racial, sexual, and linguistic difference. In this universe, poetry is construed as the space where memory comes together, the space for the appreciation of that which surrounds the individual, a way to come to terms with the world and to reflect about politics, news, racial relations, immigrant experience, and quite markedly, with what it means to be an American.

At the core of Arroyo’s universe is his family and the Puerto Rican traditions (dance, music, food, the Spanish language) and social experiences (factory work, poverty, migration) that characterize them. There is a recurrent set of characters that reappear throughout Arroyo’s four books; these include Mami, Papi, Aunt Sylvia, Uncle “Rachel” (the transvestite uncle), as well as his many cousins. The poems often express intimate (and evolving) relationships with these individuals, highlighting issues of masculinity and gender in relation to the father and uncle, of tradition and assimilation in relation to his mother, and of youth and coming of age with the cousins.

One of the most striking features of Arroyo’s poetry is his play with traditional forms (what appear to be rigid stanza sequences, often couplets and tercets, and set-length verses) employed to give shape to strongly prosaic content; the verses constantly make use of enjambment. Arroyo’s poetry is marked by the variety of topics it covers in a most colloquial way, wandering from considerations of Latino popular and mass culture (Andy García, Antonio Banderas, Ricky Ricardo, Rita Moreno and West Side Story, Speedy González, Taco Bell), to revisionist historic dialogues with Christopher Columbus and conquistadors such as Juan Ponce de León, to profound analysis about the specific environs of a particular neighborhood or serious critiques of racism or of the effects of drug trafficking and drug addiction. It is a poetry that tries to reconcile geographic specificity (his own love of Chicago, his parents’ Puerto Rico) with cosmopolitanism (a learned engagement with the Western tradition and extensive travels throughout the world). There is a clear attempt to address dominant conceptions of Latinos in the United States, engaging with damaging stereotypes as well as with issues specific to Mexican-Americans/Chicanos, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans.

The strong literary bend of his work is established by constant mentions of and dialogues with poets such as William Carlos Williams (whose mother was Puerto Rican), Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Diane Williams, and Seamus Heaney, as well as Latin American or Hispanic greats such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda. In fact, the poet’s careful attention to form and literary language as writerly phenomena bring him closer to Víctor Hernández Cruz than to other US Puerto Rican poets.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

PRIMARY WORKS
Columbus’s Orphan, 1993; The Singing Shark, 1996; Pale Ramón, 1998; Home Movies of Narcissus, 2002; The Portable Famine, 2005; How To Name A Hurricane, 2005; The Roswell Poems, 2008; Same-Sex Séances, 2008; The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems, 2008; The Sky's Weight, 2009.

Ooooooooooh Yes!!! SuperTrannyHeaven!

2010-04-22T08:13:00.000-07:00

Lola von Miramar está encantandísima con este video de su hermana Heaven (con Markaholic)! No dejen de suscribirse al canal SuperTrannyHeaven de YouTube!

Género y Sexualidad en Latinoamérica y el Caribe (sobre Julia de Burgos)

2010-04-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

¡Me encanta este video de mi clase de español (invierno 2008) en que discutimos a la poeta puertorriqueña Julia de Burgos!

I love this video of my Winter 2008 Gender and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean Spanish class in which we discuss the work of the feminist Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos! Thanks to my wonderful students and to Vivianne Schnitzer of the Univ. of Michigan Communications Office for videotaping the class.

Professor Profile: Larry LaFountain-Stokes

2010-04-20T18:28:00.000-07:00

April 20, 2010 - 12:25am
By: Darryn Fitzgerald
The Michigan Daily. Direct link to article here.

For Associate Prof. Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes, using both English and Spanish in his classes is not just part of his job — it’s part of who he is.

Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, LaFountain-Stokes grew up with an English-speaking father and a mother who spoke both English and Spanish. LaFountain-Stokes was raised using both languages and he attended bilingual schools for twelve years.

LaFountain-Stokes has taught at the University since 2003. He holds a joint appointment in the Latino Studies, American Culture, and Spanish departments and he said his work in these departments allows him to incorporate both English and Spanish into his teaching.

“Teaching in Spanish is a very integral part of what I do,” LaFountain-Stokes said. “If I don’t teach in Spanish I get depressed because I really enjoy the language.”

The courses he has taught at the University cover a variety of topics including LGBT studies, queer Hispanic culture and Latino and Caribbean literature, theater, performance and film.

The controversial nature of some of LaFountain-Stokes’ courses, like those on LGBT issues and feminism, can make teaching more challenging, but he said it also makes his job more interesting.

“It makes it more satisfying for me to be able to talk about socially complex issues in the classroom,” he said.

Before coming to the University, LaFountain-Stokes attended Harvard University. During his time there he studied abroad at the University of São Paulo in Brazil where he lived for a year and half. He said his time away from Harvard “put things into perspective.”

“Living abroad was much more challenging.” LaFountain-Stokes said. “Going to a private school in the U.S. where the library had books and there weren’t strikes, and where you could walk to class and there was no hyper-inflation, it made it very easy.”

Following his studies in Cambridge and São Paulo, LaFountain-Stokes went on to earn Master’s and Doctorate degrees in Spanish from Columbia University in New York.

After his time at Columbia, LaFountain-Stokes began teaching at Ohio State University where he worked as an assistant professor from 1998 to 1999. He then went on to teach at Rutgers from 1999 to 2003.

In addition to his work in the classroom, LaFountain-Stokes is also the author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora, as well as a recipient of numerous awards and scholastic fellowships including the Woodrow Wilson Award.

Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails at McNally Jackson Bookstore in NYC (July 2009)

2010-04-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

Video by Yumma Arroyo, music by Draco. Thanks to Javier Molea, curator of the Spanish-language readings at McNally Jackson!

Larry La Fountain Unplugged: Entrevista/Interview

2010-04-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Cultura Queer: Puertoriqueños en la Diaspora from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

Queer Culture Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

Entrevista/Interview: Larry La Fountain (iTunes U) (video)

2010-03-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

Los invito a que vean esta entrevista en español en la que hablo sobre mi trabajo, Queer Ricans, y la homosexualidad en Puerto Rico. Hago una breve mención de Ricky Martin. ¡Entrevista grabada en enero! (Enlace lleva al iTunes U de la Universidad de Michigan para descargar el video, que es de 29:56 minutos.)

I invite you to see this interview in English in which I talk about my work, Queer Ricans, and homosexuality in Puerto Rico! Very à propos of Ricky Martin! (Free downloadable video on University of Michigan iTunes U, 22:19 minutes).

--
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes
Associate Professor of Latino/Latina Studies, American Culture, and Spanish
Program in American Culture, Latina/o Studies Program, and Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
University of Michigan
3700 Haven Hall (American Culture)
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (Minnesota, 2009)
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/L/la%20fountain-stokes_queer.html

Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (Bilingual Press, 2009)
http://www.asu.edu/brp/newandforthcoming/Bluefingernails.html

Un día histórico para Ricky Martin

2010-03-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

Out at CHM – Queer Latinos: Art and Change

2010-03-23T20:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Content.aspx?audioID=40715

Listen to a fascinating exploration of Chicago’s long standing and diverse queer Latino community. Scholars Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Lourdes Torres share their insights on the intersection of art and political change over the last twenty-five years.

Recorded Thursday, March 04, 2010 at Chicago History Museum.

Lady Gaga and Beyoncé go Thelma and Louise on Us!

2010-03-12T20:04:00.000-08:00

'Out at CHM' Looks at Queer Latinos

2010-03-10T21:16:00.000-08:00

Article published in Windy City Times
by Yasmin Nair
2010-03-10
Photos by Tracy Baim

The Chicago History Museum's Out at CHM series hosted its first Latina/o event March 4. Titled "Queer Latinos: Art and Change," the program showcased the work of two researchers, Lourdes Torres and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes who presented on their Chicago-based work in the Latino/a community. They were introduced by Ramon Rivera-Servera, an assistant professor in the department of performance studies at Northwestern University.

Torres is a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and the director of the Center for Latino Research at DePaul University, and a board member of Amigas Latinas, a local organization for Latina lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning women. Torres' presentation was on Amigas and on its predecessor group, LLENA. She said that the impetus behind her work was to "document the efforts of Latina lesbians to define their identity in public spaces" as they worked to "negotiate national and ethnic identities and the diverse political histories" of members.

LLENA began in 1988 and lasted till 1992. Chicago, in 1980, was not a friendly space for Latina lesbians, who saw a lack of public spaces. In November 1988, more than 30 such lesbians gathered for a meeting to discuss ways to remedy the situation, and this gave birth to Llena. The name was an acronym for "Latina lesbians en nuestro ambiente" or "Latina lesbians in our space." "Llena" in Spanish also means "full." According to one member, LLENA was to convey the sense that the women felt "perfect in our own space [ with ] a sense of completeness." The group met every other Friday at Horizons, now Howard Brown Health Center.

Llena consisted of a mixture of all social classes, including professors and undocumented women, and the ages ranged from their 20s to their 60s. The bilingual meetings were described as chaotic and intense, and lasted as long as four hours. According to members, they always felt unwelcome at Horizons, where the staff were mostly white gay men who made them feel out of place. They were not allowed in if they came early and had to stand waiting outside in the cold. Eventually, José López, executive director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, offered them that space and Llena moved its meetings there.

The group began putting out a bilingual newsletter, Lesbiana, in 1990. Torres said that its politics fit with the general trend towards a Third World feminist movement. According to Torres, LLENA's politics were coalitional and intersectional; one of its main co-sponsored events was the immensely popular International Women's Day Dance. The group eventually disbanded in 1992, but by then it had made its mark in establishing the need and the hunger for a public space for Latina lesbians, paving the way for Amigas.

By the 1990s, Chicago was a more welcoming place for Latinas and there was a proliferation of organizations and events for women of color. These included Affinity ( for African-American lesbians ) and the WACT ( Women of All Colors Together ) potlucks. Evette Cardona was among the co-founders of the latter, and she would become one of the co-founders of Amigas Latinas in 1995.

Torres pointed out that Amigas, which continues to this day, is unique for being one of the few that has sustained itself for more than a decade where most do not survive beyond two years. The group is currently a non-profit with over 300 members. Among the reasons for its success is that Amigas has become a leading educator and advocate for Latina lesbian issues and is explicit about the fact that Latinas are not a monolithic group; it addresses the needs of youth, older women and families. In that it echoes the words of a LLENA newsletter: "We must work towards an inclusive community as well as a pluralistic feminism."

La Fountain-Stokes, an associate professor of Latina/o studies, American Culture and Spanish at the University of Michigan, spoke about five queer Latina/o artists and writers based in Chicago: writer Achy Obejas, poet Rane Arroyo, director Rose Troche, Teatro Luna co-founder Coya Paz and performance artist Fausto Fernós, of Feast of Fun. La Fountain-Stokes presented biographical sketches all five, showing how each recorded and negotiated complex issues of self and cultural identification as Latina/o in a city that is multiethnic and often strewn with tensions around race and ethnicity. Troche is most famous for her 1994 breakout hit film Go Fish, about a multiethnic group of lesbians living in the then-not-yet-completely gentrified Wicker Park. According to La Fountain-Stokes, Troche made a film that cannot be easily read as Latina unless viewers notice subtle references to her Puerto Rican heritage. He pointed out that most biographies and media pieces on the filmmaker downplay her ethnic identity. Quoting the scholar Lisa Henderson, he said that the film instead portrays a "modest lesbian utopia."

The question-and-answer session evoked praise and additional bits of ongoing Chicago Latina/o history. Cardona added that ALMA (the Association of Latino Men for Action) had been instrumental in helping to form Amigas. She also pointed to the existence of contemporary Latina/o groups like Dulce Palabras, a queer spoken-word ensemble.

La nación en vaivén - libro nuevo de Jorge Duany

2010-03-10T20:36:00.001-08:00

(Presionar sobre imagen para ver versión más grande.)

¡Lola von Miramar se complace en anunciar la publicación del libro más reciente de su amigo Jorge Duany! ¡Felicidades, Jorge! La nación en vaivén: identidad, migración y cultura popular en Puerto Rico (San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2010) recopila columnas que este antropólogo y profesor de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, recinto de Río Piedras, ha publicado en la prensa puertorriqueña, especialmente en El Nuevo Día.

Yo lo voy a leer.
Yo lo voy a usar.
Yo se lo recomiendo.

Lola von Miramar

You Belong With Me - Same-sex crush version

2010-03-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

¡Lola está contenta con este video! Versión gay de la canción de Taylor Swift "You Belong With Me".

Video original:

¿Qué falta en la versión gay de la Universidad de Rochester? ¡El beso!

Chicago History Museum features Latino Arts & Activism

2010-03-09T18:37:00.000-08:00

Article in Gay Chicago Magazine.
Written by Amy Wooten
March 11-17, 2010 issue, Chicago News.
Also available here.

CHICAGO – Those working to highlight the contributions Latinos have made to Chicago’s GLBT community say there is a long way to go before this segment of the community is fully accepted and recognized.

Chicago History Museum’s March 4 OUT at CHM presentation, “Queer Latinos: Art and Change,” explored the contributions made by local Latino activists and artists, from the organizing done by Amigas Latinas to the work created by local authors and podcasters.

Several participants in the evening’s program highlighted the need for the OUT at CHM event. After all, the contributions of queer Latinos are often overlooked. Moderator and Northwestern professor Ramon Rivera-Servera said that the accounts of GLBT history “hardly ever” recognize Latino activism, especially work done in the Midwest.

Presenters Lourdes Torres and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes are at the forefront of documenting Latino GLBT activists and artists.

Torres, a DePaul professor and author, presented her research of two Chicago Latina lesbian organizations, Llena and Amigas Latinas. Torres said her work with Amigas Latinas over the past 10 years inspired her to document that history, especially because many accounts of Chicago’s GLBT history – even recent ones – overlook the work done by Latina lesbians.

Torres explored the history of the now defunct Llena, as well as Amigas Latinas, to discover their work and identify these organizations as an important part of queer history.

During her presentation, Torres explained the organization’s successes and the barriers they faced. For example, Llena, which started in 1988 and disbanded in 1992, started in the ‘80s, when there were no welcoming spaces for Latina lesbians. The group first met at Horizons, now known as Center on Halsted. After some time, the group found a space in their own neighborhood, because “members started to feel uncomfortable at Horizons,” Torres explained. If members showed up early, white, male Horizon employees would force them to wait outside in the cold and were rude to them, she added. Later, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center welcomed Llena. This was an early push for a lesbian presence in a largely heterosexual space. Later efforts included the creation of an annual, inclusive women’s dance.

While Llena eventually disbanded, Amigas Latinas, which began in 1995, built upon Llena’s expansive vision. “It clearly made its mark and paved the way for Amigas Latinas in the mid-‘90s,” Torres said.

With the ’90s came a more welcoming climate. The ’90s saw the birth of several organizations for women of color, such as Affinity and Women of All Colors/Cultures Together (WACT). But while many groups began during this time period, Amigas Latinas is one of the few Latina organizations in the U.S. to sustain itself over a decade. This success, Torres explained, in part because the organization is willing to meet the changing needs of the community it serves. For example, despite some opposition, Amigas Latinas created transgender programming and events.

They developed into a non-profit by “responding to a changing reality and needs of the community,” Torres added.

Like Torres, Fountain-Stokes’ work revolves around the important contributions made by queer Latinos. His research focuses on the roles played by GLBT Latino artists, such as author Achy Obejas, film director Rose Troche and Feast of Fun podcaster Fausto Fernos.

While there are many individuals who have made artistic contributions to the GLBT community, not all of their efforts are recognized, Fountain-Stokes explained. For example, Troche directed the 1994 independent lesbian film “Go Fish.” The movie was a wild success, but the recognition Troche received by the mainstream gay community came at a price. Fountain-Stokes explained that in discussions of the film and interviews with Troche, her Puerto Rican heritage was often overlooked.

“Rose Troche’s Puerto Rican-ness is often not acknowledged,” Fountain-Stokes said. Some of this is partially because people are unaware that one of the film’s main characters is Puerto Rican or that the Chicago neighborhood the film is set in—Wicker Park—was home to a multicultural lesbian community in the mid-‘90s. However, while the film isn’t easily seen as Latina, it is still important to document, he said.

During a Q&A segment, one participant asked if visibility is still a large barrier for Latino organizations. According to both Torres and Fountain-Stokes, unfortunately, there is still a lot of work to do in this area.

“We still have to make more of a presence and insist on our acceptance in the community,” Torres said.

Out at Chicago History Museum: Thursday March 4

2010-03-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

Chicago History Museum: Out at CHM 2010

Queer Latinos: Art and Change
Thursday, March 4
Cocktails at 5:30 p.m.; program at 6:30 p.m.

Join us for a fascinating exploration of Chicago’s long standing and diverse queer Latino community. Scholars Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Lourdes Torres share their insights on the intersection of art and political change over the last twenty-five years.

Cost:
$12; $10 members and students.

To purchase tickets click here.

Pancho Casas - Romance del arcano sin nombre

2010-03-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

La señorita Lola von Miramar se complace en compartir este bello y desconcertante video, premonición de bruja de su amiga Francisco Casas (Yegua del Apocalipsis), presentación de su libro Romance del arcano sin nombre en Santiago de Chile en febrero de 2010, antes del horripilante terremoto. Acompañemos, pues, a la Pancha en su desplazamiento verbal y físico por la geografía de Santiago.

"¿Cuántos pájaros murieron durante la avalancha?"

"Cayó la roca."

"Muerte que nos transforma."

"Si se calla el cantor, muere la rosa."

Los adora,

Lola von Miramar

Review of Queer Ricans in E-misférica 6.2

2010-02-27T11:28:00.000-08:00

Larry La Fountain-Stokes’ Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora
Isel Rodríguez | Arizona State University

Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora. By Larry La Fountain-Stokes. Minneapolis. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009; 242 pp.; $22.50 paper.

As the travel of Puerto Ricans and other immigrants around the globe becomes more fluid, the bonds and borders of place and culture also widen. Changing geographies, life experiences, socio-economic and generational factors, among other things, take part in the more or less visible performance of migrating cultural identities. According to Larry La Fountain-Stokes, queer migration has usually been viewed as a minor, if not marginal issue in the general scope of migratory flows. In Queer Ricans La Fountain-Stokes takes up queerness as one of the principal instigators of Puerto Rican migration, intricately analyzing how this cultural marker is (de)articulated by LGBT writers and artists of different diasporic generations and locations within the U.S.

Culturally engrained issues of homophobia must be unpacked not only in Puerto Rican and other Latin American cultures presumed to be exceptionally homophobic, but also anywhere LGBT individuals’ sexualities are viewed as “incorrect.” However, as demonstrated by a very recent hate crime committed in Puerto Rico, the classic discourse of machismo characterizing many pan-American cultures fuels generalized exclusions of homosexuality as a “Latin” thing. This is evidenced in the ways Puerto Rican identity has been constructed within a hetero-normative discourse. As La Fountain-Stokes argues, “Openly gay, militant homosexuals and other LGBT individuals are seen as emulating foreign attitudes, posing a menace from the outside, and not necessarily behaving as Puerto Ricans are expected to” (xviii). These views extend to academia within the U.S. where queer studies strives to become a more visible field, and studies on Latino culture seem to divide at times at the point of taboo sexualities. La Fountain-Stokes makes his bold, authoritative voice heard on the topic of queer studies as he converses with and adds to the large discourse on Puerto Rican migration and identity.

In the first three chapters, La Fountain-Stokes chooses to focus on three gay writers of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s: Luis Rafael Sanchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, and Luz María Umpierre. Throughout his analysis, La Fountain-Stokes uses “outness” not only in its most conventional form to describe openly gay sexualities, but also in terms of homosexual individuals’ separation from society. In his analysis of Sanchez’s story “¡Jum!” La Fountain-Stokes delves into the complexities of language that queers, racializes, and pushes the main character’s body “out” of society.

When looking at the writings of Manuel Ramos Otero, La Fountain-Stokes points to “autobiographical fiction” as a literary convention that illuminates the author’s personal experience. The analysis creatively engages with Ramós Otero’s geographic usage and cultural metaphors of islandness as a state of solitude. Most notable in the analysis is the framing of queer Puerto Rican migration as “exile” or “sexile” rather than migration. La Fountain-Stokes examines different “stages” (in the spatial and developmental senses) of the author’s work. Each “stage” shows Ramos Otero’s transitions as a queer Puerto Rican migrant in New York—his relationships in/with the city and the relationships between the queer Diaspora, the island, and other ethnic groups as they are narrated in Ramos Otero’s writings.

In La Fountain-Stokes’ treatment of lesbian subjectivities, Luz María Umpierre is featured as a poignant protagonist in the Latina lesbian movement through her explicit representations of the Latina lesbian body in literature and the assertion of Lesbian literature as part of the larger Latina body-of-literature. In La Fountain-Stokes’ own words, Umpierre’s use of poetry “painfully” and productively “threads [diasporic women’s fragmented bodies] as individuals and as a social group” (90).

In chapter four the author more broadly compares Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s film Brincando el Charco; Rose Troche’s film Go Fish; and performance artist, novelist, and cartoonist Erica López’s Lap Dancing for Mommy and Flaming Iguanas. In this chapter La Fountain-Stokes shows the constant flux of Puerto Rican identity, especially as it constitutes a more or less important marker of a person’s being and relation with sexuality.

The end of the book proposes a new, hyphenated way to perform Ricanness as suggested by dance artist Arthur Avilés—that is, a more distanced form of acknowledgment of such a strongly national imagining. Through his analysis of Avilés and Elizabeth Marrero’s rendition of a queered-Ricanized Wizard of Oz, La Fountain-Stokes offers a “utopic” ending to the staging of queer Puerto Rican migration by considering its many variances.

La Fountain-Stokes’ attention to detail when analyzing the works, particularly the literary ones, is remarkable. The chronological progression of the pieces he looks at, as well as the framing he provides for them, gives the impression of a more graspable Puerto Rican identity in the 60’s and 70’s that begins to dilute thereafter. Queer Ricans adds a much-needed perspective on the performance of Puerto Rican (and Latino) identities in and outside of the U.S. and exposes the cracks of inclusion and exclusion implicit in the construction of these identities.

Isel Rodríguez es académica y artista de teatro y performance. Bajo la tutela de la Dra. Tamara Underiner, del programa de doctorado en Teatro y Performance de las Américas de Arizona State University, actualmente está escribiendo una tesis doctoral sobre el cuerpo como nación a través de performance individual en el contexto de Puerto Rico. Isel tiene una Maestría en Teatro y Educación de New York University y un B.A. de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.

Lola, Christopher, Tom: A Single Man

2010-02-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

Lola von Miramar is not quite sure what to say, seeing the preview to Tom Ford's glorious A Single Man has reminded her of the intensity of the film, its gripping story, the beauty and pathos of a lived life revolving around memories of beauty and sadness.

Miss von Miramar ran into Borders last Wednesday night right after seeing the film at the Michigan Theater and picked up Christopher Isherwood's fascinating eponymous novel, first published in 1964 but set in 1962. It is a fascinating read, quite different from the movie - at times, remarkably angry, particularly about the marginality of homosexuality in 1960s America. Its protagonist narrator offers a most remarkable view of American life from the multiple perspectives of an outsider: as a British foreigner; as a sexual deviant who painfully (cynically, perhaps) suggests parallels between his experience and that of many social outcasts: Blacks, Jews, Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II, the terminally ill; as an intellectual in a philistine world. Mexico and the Spanish language also play a key part in that construction of difference (of that which is not English or American, different linguistically, socially, and geographically), not to mention the imminent destruction of the world feared in the context of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Ford's adaptation is interesting. The film is stunningly beautiful, perhaps less cerebral and much sexier, with an added suicidal plot that does not appear in the book. Julianne Moore transforms her character (Charley, George's best friend), but her portrayal is remarkably faithful to the spirit of the novel. The film is quite simply gripping; one gets very caught up. (The music, which you can listen to on the film website, is also exquisite.) Lola gives it two thumbs up! Go see it and read the novel if you haven't!

(For an insightful review, see Manohla Dargis's piece in the New York Times.)

Mario Montez at Columbia University, March 31

2010-02-17T22:57:00.000-08:00

(Click on image for larger version.)

Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
presents its inaugural Artists at the Center event:
SUPERSTAR! A Tribute to Mario Montez

Wednesday, March 31st

Davis Auditorium, Schapiro Hall
538 West 120th Street
New York, New York 10027

10:00 AM – 5:00 PM, with a reception to follow

Superstar! is a one-day conference celebrating and discussing the career of one of New York's most gifted performers.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1935, Montez moved to New York while still a child. He first appeared on screen in Jack Smith's queer classic Flaming Creatures (1962–63). Later he became Andy Warhol's first drag superstar, starring in more than ten of his films. Montez was also a favorite of underground theater, appearing regularly in Theatre of the Ridiculous productions by Charles Ludlam, Ronald Tavel and John Vaccaro.

For the first time in 30 years, Mr. Montez will return to New York to talk about his work and life. Joining him will be Callie Angell, Douglas Crimp, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Ronald Gregg, Maja Horn, Branden Joseph, Agosto Machado, Ricardo Montez, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Marc Siegel, and Carmelita Tropicana.

Event Sponsors

* Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University
* CC/SEAS Office of Multicultural Affairs, Columbia University
* Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics, New York University
* Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University
* Barnard Center for Research on Women, Barnard College
* Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Columbia University
* Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference, Columbia University
* Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College
* Department of Theatre, Barnard College

Larry La Fountain in Chicago: Feb 26 and March 4

2010-02-17T21:35:00.000-08:00

(Click on image for bigger format.)

UIC Graduate Student Conference of Hispanic Literary and Cultural Studies
February 26 & 27, 2010
University of Illinois, Chicago
1501, 1650, 1750 UH University Hall

Reading by Larry La Fountain (Uñas pintadas de azul): Friday February 26 at 4:00 pm (please note correct time)
Reading will be at Institute for the Humanities Stevenson Hall-Lower Level (UIC)

Cost:
$12; $10 members and students.

To purchase tickets click here.

Queer Cultural Geographies

2010-02-17T20:58:00.000-08:00

The 6th International Latin American Cultural Studies Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, April 1-3, 2010

Sexuality Studies and LGBT Activism in Latin America

The Sixth International Latin American Cultural Studies Conference, to be held at the University of Pittsburgh the first three days of April 2010, will gather a number of people who have been key to activism and academic work on LGBT issues in Latin America. Many of them have organized events in their countries on issues of sexual minorities and LGBT issues; many have published anthologies of queer writing and sexuality studies within their national contexts. Many of our participants have worked intensely at a national as well as at an international context, often at personal risk and in the midst of complex political situations. Their many publications have broadened and deepened our knowledge of sexual cultures throughout Latin America. Events in Caracas, Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, Montevideo, La Paz and other important cities have helped give LGBT communities a public presence, while fostering academic work on LGBT issues. This event, which will include presentations, panel discussions and readings of creative work, will bring their (and others’) experience at the local and national levels to Pittsburgh.

Participants

Tamara Adrián
Moisés Agosto-Rosario
Pedro Artieda
Jorge Bracamonte
Leopoldo Brizuela
Mauro Cabral
Norge Espinosa
Gabriel Giorgi
Adán Griego
Gabriel Guajardo
Laura Gutiérrez
Jesús Jambrina
Gisela Kozak
Virginia Lucas
Carmen Millán de Benavides
Norma Mogrovejo
Alexander Obando
Marcia Ochoa
Julieta Paredes
José Quiroga
José Fernando Serrano
Horacio F. Sívori
Juan Pablo Sutherland

For more information see: http://pitt.edu/~hispconf/queergeo.html

GRRRRRRLLLLFRIEND! Ms. Johnny Weir Rocks on Ice!

2010-02-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

This is just a most delightful ice skating routine by Olympian and reality TV star Johnny Weir, to Miss Lady Gaga no less! Fraulein Lola von Miramar is just loving it!!! You go, Johnny! (Follow her on Twitter! 13,246 people can't be wrong...)

Tato Laviera - Without a Home

2010-02-16T20:50:00.000-08:00

(From Stephanie Alvarez)

For those of you who are familiar with the amazing work of Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera you may or may not know that Tato in recent years has been suffering with diabetes, dialysis, and blindness. I share the sad news that in December he suffered a cerebral problem resulting in him having a shunt placed in his brain. After leaving the hospital he was kicked out of his apartment. With no steady source of income he now finds himself without a home. Please read the following New York Times article on his situation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/nyregion/13poet.html

We are trying to raise approximately $4000 so that he may put a deposit on an apartment, please consider sending a donation, however modest, to help him get back on his feet. In the long term please consider bringing him to your campus to do a reading. I have spoken to his sister and she assures me that he is healthy enough to do readings. If you are interested in having him do a reading he usually requests an honorarium of $2000.

You can send a personal donation to:

Jesus Laviera
c/o Sanchez-Ramos
225 E. 93rd St. Apt. 8 H
NY NY 10128

Thank you, Stephanie Alvarez

--
Dr. Stephanie M. Alvarez
Assistant Professor
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

University of Texas-Pan American
http://sites.google.com/site/cosechavoicesproject/
www.utpa.edu/mas
www.utpa.edu/dept/modlang

Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times

Reading at Ohio State University on Feb 25!

2010-02-14T20:53:00.000-08:00

LASER: Latino & Latin American Studies space for Enrichment and Research
Ohio State University, Columbus
Author Reading:
Larry La Fountain-Stokes
(See original posting here.)

February 25, 2010
3:30 pm to 5:00 pm-- 255 Hagerty Hall

On February 25, from 3:30 to 5pm in 255 Hagerty Hall, the Latino & Latin American Studies space for Enrichment and Research (LASER) presents author Larry La Fountain-Stokes reading from and discussing his short story collection Uñas Pintadas de Azul.

Join us earlier that day, Thursday, February 25, from Noon to 1 pm for a lunchtime discussion with Larry La Fountain-Stokes. 2174 Smith Labs, 174 W 18th Ave.

Read some of Larry La Fountain-Stokes’ work here.

Queer Ricans: los que se quedan y los que “sexilan”

2010-02-14T06:50:00.000-08:00

Blog por Beatriz Ramírez Betances. Ver aquí.

El jueves 11 de febrero fui a la presentación del libro Queer Ricans del profesor, teórico y crítico de estudios Latinos y de género Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Larry, como le decimos los que lo conocemos y todo el que habla con él más de una vez, ya había presentado su libro en varias ciudades universitarias en los Estados Unidos. Esta semana nos tocó a nosotros celebrar la presentación del mismo.

La presentación fue en el Nuyorrican’s Café en el viejo San Juan y la auspició la Librería Mágica de Río Piedras. (Corrección: El evento fue auspiciado por el Colectivo Literario Homoerótica.) El Nuyorrican’s se ha caracterizado en los últimos años por colaborar con su espacio con librerías locales del área metro, como la Tertulia y la misma Librería Mágica. El bar funciona porque, al tener escenario y una isla central, puede moldearse a un ambiente íntimo que se presta tanto para la discusión tipo panel, como para la inclusión de música o baile en la presentación.

Y así fue, el bailarín Norberto Gabriel comenzó la presentación con una interpretación de baile. Su danza conceptual que empezó dinámicamente la tertulia de la noche. En la misma el danzante iba, poco a poco, ampliando su espacio, utilizando cada vez más del escenario, hasta que al final saltaba del mismo y expandía, más allá de la cuarta pared, el área de su arte.

Luego, la Dra. Catherine Marsh Kennerley, de la UPR, leyó el ensayo que el crítico literario Rubén Ríos Ávila había preparado para esa noche. Ríos Ávila no pudo asistir por estar enfermo. El ensayo de Ríos Ávila vincula la propuesta del libro de Larry con movimientos de derechos LGBT en Estados Unidos y con la situación particular puertorriqueña del migrante de la Isla a la metrópolis. En su ensayo, Ríos Ávila narra cómo, a principios de la década del 1990, al ver un grafiti de Queer Nation en Christopher St. en Nueva York, por un momento pensó que se trataba de un movimiento de independentistas boricuas maricones.

Esta confusión momentánea es una forma muy perspicaz de acercar a los que estábamos allí al libro de La Fountain. Éste es un estudio de escritores y artistas puertorriqueños que, por razones de su preferencia sexual o su identificación de género, se exilan de la Isla. También, trata sobre las posibilidades que encuentran puertorriqueños de segunda generación en manejar su identidad queer y cómo sólo la pueden encontrar fuera de la Isla. A este fenómeno, el de una recreación de la comunidad puertorriqueña en la diáspora, bajo el estandarte “queer”, La Fountain le llama el “sexilio”. Entonces, la “confusión” que sintiera Ríos Ávila no fue tal cosa, sino una premonición.

Luego, la Dra. Marsh habló del panel sobre el libro que el conglomerado de estudios de la Mujer y el Género tenían planeado para el día siguiente en la UPR. La Dra. Marsh recalcó el valor intelectual del mismo y cómo éste era una contribución necesaria, tanto para los estudios de género, como para los estudios de la diáspora puertorriqueña.

La Fountain en su libro sobre los escritores Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, las cineastas Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, la artista y escritora Erika López y los bailarines Arthur Avilés y Elizabeth Marrero. En la presentación, La Fountain se enfocó en Manuel Ramos Otero y Luz María Umpierre como ejemplos del corazón de su trabajo. Quiere con su libro que un escritor como Ramos Otero, tan conocido acá, se conozca más en Estado Unidos y que una escritora tan reconocida allá como Luz María Umpierre, sea más conocida acá. Comparó a ambos en cuanto a cómo tratan el tema del “sexilio” en sus escritos y declamó, con mucha intensidad, algunos de sus poemas.

Mientras Larry hablaba y declamaba los poemas de Umpierre y Ramos Otero, el artista gráfico y performero Freddie Mercado hacía teatro imagen detrás de él. De hecho, llegar esa noche al Nuyorrican a ver la presentación del libro era encontrarse primeramente con la figura monstruosa concebida por Mercado: un híbrido de ojos y lenguas, con una faz amenazante, acompañado de su contraparte. Uno era “hipo” y el otro era “cresía” y juntos, bueno, ya saben. El atuendo que tenía Mercado, confeccionado por él como es usual, era una cabeza enorme que le llegaba hasta los muslos, llena de ojos que la rodeaban por todas partes. Por orejas tenía lenguas y donde estaría la boca le salía una larga lengua fálica que coincidía con la parte púbica de Mercado.

Bajo la cabeza del monstruo, llevaba dos pantimedias de malla, una encima de la otra, y ambas con varios agujeros. El cuerpo de Freddie se presta a la androginia y, en esta ocasión, le estaba sacando partido completo durante la lectura de Larry. La colaboración de Larry y Freddie no es nueva. Hace unos años ya que Larry le sigue los pasos a Freddie y ha escrito varios ensayos y artículos sobre su arte y sus instalaciones.

Ver a Freddie Mercado en la presentación del libro de La Fountain me hizo pensar en cómo negocian su espacio y su identidad no sólo los que acuden al “sexilio” sino los que se quedan. La trayectoria de Freddie, a través de los últimos 20 años, ha sido muy productiva, pero muy poco reconocida fuera de unos pocos círculos. Ya es hora de que se le valore más. Es parecido a cómo a Luis Rafael Sánchez, uno de los autores discutidos en Queer Ricans, se le conoce por sus escritos sobre raza e identidad, pero no por los que tratan de género e identidad sexual.

Ya al final, Larry cantó par de canciones del musical “Super Maéva de Oz”, de Arthur Avilés y Elizabeth Marrero. Su interpretación de la canción “Somewhere over the kitchen” nos transportó a todos a ese espacio ideal del Queer Nation Boricua que imaginó unos segundos Rubén Ríos una noche fría de los 1990 en Christopher St.

foto cortesía de University of Minnesota Press.

Literatura "open-minded"

2010-02-12T22:34:00.001-08:00

El libro Queer Ricans estudia historias de inmigrantes homosexuales en Estados Unidos.
Foto: Suministrada

February 12, 2010
Por: Víktor Rodríguez-Velázquez
De: Diálogo (Ver artículo aquí.)
(Artículo publicado en Diálogo Digital.)

El Programa de la Mujer y el Género de la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Río Piedras presentó durante la mañana del viernes, al autor Lawrence La Fontain-Stokes y su libro Queer Ricans; texto que sirve de apertura a polémicas sobre la construcción de identidades homosexuales de puertorriqueños emigrantes a los Estados Unidos.

La actividad, que también contó con el respaldo del Departamento de Estudios Hispánicos de la Universidad, sirvió de encuentro para que estudiantes y profesores aclaran dudas en torno a temas sobre teoría queer, literatura de las minorías y la participación de las universidades en temas de vanguardia como: estudios de género, sexualidad y estudios culturales.

En la discusión también estuvieron presentes las doctoras Catherine Marsh Kenerley y Carmen Luisa González del departamento de Estudios de la Mujer y Género, así como la doctora Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, catedrática asociada del Departamento de Español y Portugués de Dartmouth College en Chicago. (Corrección:Debe decir Universidad de Chicago en Chicago.)

Luego de los saludos protocolares, la actividad dio inicio con una breve explicación acerca de cómo fue construido el texto, desde sus inicios como trabajo de tesis doctoral del profesor La Fountain-Stokes; hasta el momento en que es publicado como parte de la literatura queer.

Según el autor la idea de trabajar con este tema durante los años noventa era algo un poco difícil “por las diversas ideas que guardan las instituciones universitarias cuando se trabajan con estos temas que pueden genera grandes polémicas”.

“Yo pensaba que la publicación de este libro me iba a dejar sin empleo, sin embargo no fue así”, destacó el autor a quien no se le permitió vender su libro dentro de los predios del Recinto de Río Piedras.

No obstante, este tipo de trabas en la difusión de sus investigaciones no desalientan al escritor, pues aún así sus hallazgos e ideas van a imprenta para que- tal vez en sectores más reducidos- se lean.

“Pertenezco a un grupo de personas que nos propusimos cambiar el estudios de la emigración a los Estados Unidos”, senteció el académico.

Por otra parte, el también profesor de estudios latinos del Programa de Cultura Americana de la Universidad de Michigan, describió su experiencia durante el proceso de estructuración de esta investigación como un proceso largo y fascinante, donde pudo desarrollar sus intereses metodológicos de investigación en el tema de la emigración puertorriqueña.

De igual manera, tanto la profesora Marsh Kennerley como la profesora Lugo-Ortiz reconocieron la labor del escritor por ser el primer texto que sirve de apertura hacia una temática de la cultura puertorriqueña gay en los Estados Unidos.

“Queer Ricans es un texto que abre muchos debates y obliga al lector a pensar en una cultura alternativa que es sumamente marginada”, opinó la profesora López-Ortiz.

Asimismo, esta educadora reaccionó muy apenada por el hecho de que se tenga que recurrir a la literatura o el arte para lograr un espacio de negociación donde se pueda hacer un reclamo al Estado para que reconozca esta minoría como parte intrínseca de la ciudadanía.

Embajador de los Queer Ricans

2010-02-12T22:13:00.000-08:00

El libro Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora nació en la tesis doctoral que su autor Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes hizo en la Universidad de Columbia, en Nueva York. (Suministrada)

jueves, 11 de febrero de 2010
Carmen Graciela Díaz / Para Primera Hora (ver artículo aquí)

Navegar por la Internet y buscar su nombre equivale a encontrar diversas entradas que rotulan a Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes como un performero, autor y académico gay puertorriqueño. El adjetivo gay de la mano de su nombre no le incomoda para nada, dice. Por el contrario, es una honra.

“A mucho orgullo siempre me identifico como investigador y autor gay puertorriqueño porque es verdad. Corresponde a mi realidad pero también a mi proyecto político y cultural, que es el de darle más visibilidad al tema, de hablar abiertamente sobre la sexualidad y sobre las intersecciones de diferentes identidades”, expresa La Fountain en su misión de darle visibilidad a realidades como la suya.

Y con su más nueva entrega a los lectores, La Fountain optó por continuar su encomienda y condensar en las páginas de Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press) un compendio de historias personales y de obras creativas que versan sobre cómo la sexualidad matizó sus circunstancias en los Estados Unidos.

El libro y el autor tienen su presentación esta noche -auspiciada por el Colectivo Literario Homoerótica- en el Nuyorican Café, e imprimen su presencia mañana en un conversatorio, auspiciado por el Programa de Estudios de la Mujer y Género de la Facultad de Estudios Generales, en la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras.

Por medio de este texto, La Fountain quiso “explorar la manera en que los artistas puertorriqueños que viven principalmente en los Estados Unidos han documentado el tema de la migración por causas sexuales” porque para el sanjuanero “la sexualidad ha sido un factor importante que ha motivado y afectado la experiencia de los puertorriqueños que migran”.

Queer Ricans es el vehículo que La Fountain utiliza para trazar un relato sociocultural sobre el cual la comunidad puertorriqueña gay, lesbiana, bisexual y transgénero se ha enmarcado en el territorio estadounidense. Así las cosas, el autor discurre sobre la obra y experiencias de diversos escritores, como Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika López, y la danza teatro de Arthur Avilés y Elizabeth Marrero.

“Históricamente, los estudios de la migración puertorriqueña se enfocaban en razones económicas o políticas, [...] pero no discutían cómo el ser homosexual afecta la experiencia del inmigrante puertorriqueña cuando llega a los Estados Unidos”, detalla el catedrático asociado del departamento de Lenguas y Literaturas Romance y del programa de Cultura Americana de la Universidad de Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Conocer para tolerar

La Fountain -quien partió de Puerto Rico en el 1986- ilustra que “la palabra ‘sexilio’ es una combinación de sexo y exilio, [...] que se ha estado usando para hablar de este tipo de emigración; una provocada por la sexualidad del individuo que le causa una serie de angustias, persecución, y entonces decide ir a un lugar distinto para poder vivir su vida”.

¿Significa eso que es más fácil que la población queer parta a desarrollar su arte a los Estados Unidos que en su propia isla? No necesariamente...

En los 60 y 70 era más fácil que los homosexuales y lesbianas hablaran sin tapujos sobre su identidad sexual fuera de la Isla, según La Fountain, pero entiende que dicha discusión en el país ha madurado, aun teniendo en las espaldas una tragedia como el reciente asesinato del joven Jorge Steven López. Aún queda mucho por documentar y narrar, y por eso La Fountain insistió en que su obra y este libro son un puente entre realidades que ameritan difundirse.

“Un poco para que los puertorriqueños en Puerto Rico conozcan más a personas como Luz María Umpierre y Arthur Avilés, y para que personas en los Estados Unidos conozcan más a personas como Luis Rafael Sánchez o Manuel Ramos Otero”, concluye.

Para más detalles sobre la presentación del libro y el conversatorio, llama al 787-764-0000 ext. 2063, o escribe a programageneroupr@gmail.com.

¡No te lo pierdas!

Esta noche, a las 8:00 p.m.

Presentación del libro por el profesor Rubén Ríos Ávila con intervenciones artísticas por el bailarín Norberto Gabriel y el performero Freddie Mercado Velázquez, en Nuyorican Café, en el Viejo San Juan

Mañana, a las 10:00 a.m.

Conversatorio moderado por la Dra. Catherine Marsh Kennerley junto con las doctoras Carmen Luisa González y Agnes Lugo Ortiz, en el Seminario Federico de Onís, Facultad de Humanidades de la Universidad de Puerto Rico en Río Piedras

¡Queer Ricans en San Juan, Puerto Rico!

2010-02-07T16:49:00.000-08:00

Están todas y todos invitadas/os a dos eventos sobre Queer Ricans esta semana:

jueves, 11 de febrero: Presentación de Queer Ricans auspiciada por el Colectivo Literario Homoerótica, con presentación por Rubén Ríos Avila e intervenciones artísticas por el bailarín Norberto Gabriel y el artista y performero Freddie Mercado Velázquez, Nuyorican Café, Calle San Francisco #312 (entrando por el callejón), Viejo San Juan, 7:30 pm.

(Saldrá artículo sobre el libro en el periódico Primera Hora el jueves 11 de febrero.)

viernes, 12 de febrero: Conversatorio con Larry La Fountain-Stokes acerca de su libro Queer Ricans. Con: Carmen Luisa González, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz y Catherine Marsh. Auspicia el Programa de Estudios de la Mujer y Género. Donde: Seminario Federico de Onís de la Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, 10:00 am.

La Teta Asustada (Milk of Sorrow)

2010-02-07T12:39:00.001-08:00

Trailer de la película peruana dirigida por Claudia Llosa sobre una muchacha, Fausta, que tiene LA TETA ASUSTADA, una enfermedad que se trasmite por la leche materna de las mujeres que fueron violadas o maltratadas durante la guerra del terrorismo en el Perú. Nominada para el Oscar por mejor película extranjera. En quechua y español. La protagonista Magaly Solier piensa ir a la ceremonia de los Oscares en traje típico (ver noticia aquí).

Trailer for the Peruvian film MILK OF SORROW, about a young woman who suffers from "frightened tit", an illness transmitted through the maternal milk of women who were raped or abused during the terrorist war in Perú. Nominated for best foreign film Oscar. In Quechua and Spanish.

¡Lola quiere un tatuaje de Polvo de Gallina Negra!

2010-02-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

¡Lola está descolocada y turulata y no es sólo porque acaba de regresar de haber llevado su carrito Gloria Evangelina a que la lavaran! (Los muchachos del car wash eran de lo más monos...) Es que Lola acaba de ver los bellos tatuajes que su amiga del alma Maris Bustamante se hizo en San Francisco, California, con unas acómplices feministas!

Maris es la cofundadora con su cuate Mónica Mayer del colectivo mexicano Polvo de Gallina Negra. Maris lo cuenta todo sobre la experiencia de los tatuajes en su blog Pías para los impíos. ¡También pueden ver el fabuloso video abajo! (¡Está en inglés pero las imágenes hablan por sí solas!)

¡¡¡Lola también quiere ser una miembra honoraria de Polvo de Gallina Negra!!!

Como siempre, las quiere su servidora,

Lola von Miramar

Queer Ricans en la UPR, Río Piedras! (viernes 12 de febrero)

2010-02-05T09:01:00.001-08:00

"Diasporican Legacy" (article published in Gay City News)

2010-02-04T21:30:00.000-08:00

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes rescues one icon, but otherwise lost in translation

Gay City News. Link to article here. (Corrected version here.)

Published: Thursday, January 21, 2010 2:29 PM CST
BY DOUG IRELAND

“I couldn’t stand the repressive atmosphere of Puerto Rico,” the gay writer Manuel Ramos Otero once told an interviewer in explaining his decision to move from the island. “I had realized that New York was a city where I could live without feeling persecuted all the time. In Puerto Rico, I felt too much persecution because of the openness of my sexuality.”

Ramos Otero (1948-1990), considered one of the most significant modern writers in Puerto Rico’s rich century and a half literary history, put his homosexuality at the center of his poetry and fiction. Yet his name is virtually unknown to students of modern gay literature because so little of it has been translated.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, a self-described “gay Puerto Rican scholar, writer, and activist” who teaches Latina/o Studies at the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan, performs a service by rescuing Ramos Otero from this undeserved obscurity in his new book, “Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora.” He devotes nearly a third of his book to Ramos Otero.

La Fountain-Stokes writes that Ramos Otero’s work is even “overlooked in Latin America because of the peripheral status of Puerto Rico, marginalized in the United States because of the author’s racialized, subaltern, or colonial Puerto Ricanness and Spanish-language use; belittled in the Caribbean because of the author’s homosexuality and exile up north; and looked upon with suspicion everywhere because of his openly militant gay liberationist and feminist politics.”

In one cycle of poems entitled “Epitafios” (“Epitaphs”), included in Ramos Otero’s 1985 collection “El libro de la muerte” (“The Book of Death”), the self-exiled island poet has verses dedicated to such gay literary icons as Federico Garcia Lorca, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Constantine Cavafy, and, above all, the great Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, whom La Fountain-Stokes identifies as “one of Ramos Otero’s most important literary precursors” and makes central to his analysis of the Puerto Rican’s work.

Cernuda, who took his inspiration from another queer icon, André Gide, was part of Spain’s so-called “Generation of ’27” of writers and artists, which included Lorca, who emerged prominently in the mid to late 1920s; in fact, it was in ’27 that Cernuda published his bold collection “Los Placeres Prohibidos” (“Forbidden Pleasures”), a surrealist exploration of same-sex desire. One of his gay-themed poems was cited by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in his 2005 speech to the Spanish Parliament on the day it legalized gay marriage, undoubtedy the most remarkable speech in favor of full equality for those with same-sex hearts ever delivered by a head of government anywhere. Cernuda chose exile from Franco’s fascist dictatorship after the assassination of Lorca and took himself to France, Scotland, and California before finally settling in Mexico.

*
Ramos Otero moved to New York City to flee Puerto Rican homophobia the year before Stonewall, living there until his death from AIDS in 1990. He taught at Rutgers, York College, and Lehman College and founded a small (and short-lived) publishing house, El libro viaje (The Book Trip), which published his only and “highly experimental” novel, the 1976 “La novelabingo” (“The Bingo Novel”).

In an essay on Cernuda, Ramos Otero wrote that “his poetic vocation always occurs in the margin and comes from the margin, from the border between the truths that feed his desire from an existence stuck in tradition.” Ramos Otero’s fiction is also located in the margins of society. His mid-’70s short story “Historia ejemplar del esclavo y el señor” (“Exemplary Story of the Slave and the Master”), about gay sado-masochism, created one of “the most notorious scandals in Puerto Rican literary history,” according to La Fountain-Stokes.

To further illustrate the marginality at the heart of Ramos Otero’s work, La Fountain-Stokes provides lengthy synopses and analyses of his short stories, many of them semi-autobiographical and frequently located at the edges of New York’s gay sub-culture, a world of drugs, hustlers, prostitution, and the dark sexual playgrounds that were the rotting piers of the Greenwich Village-Chelsea waterfront in the ’70s and ’80s.

Another of La Fountain-Stokes’ major subjects, the lesbian poet, scholar, and human rights activist Luz Maria Umpierre, like Ramos Otero also migrated to New York while in her 20s, in 1974. (Correction: She migrated to Philadelphia in 1974.) She has said, “Like the majority of Puerto Rican gay and lesbian writers in the USA, I left because of persecution — even from the police — for my sexual preference.” But she did not come out in print until relatively late, in her “dramatic” 1987 fourth poetry collection, “The Margarita Poems.” Before that, she concentrated her work on community poverty and the working class, and the condition of women in general.

Some of La Fountain-Stokes’ readings of Umpierre’s poetry are rather contestable. Her poem “Maria Christina,” he writes, “seems an authorial self-projection of Umpierre,” and regarding the line “I do fix all leaks in my faucets,” he says that this “phrase can be seen as an oblique allusion to masturbation, yet Umpierre has stated that it is not a sexual metaphor but rather a reference to women’s technical mastery and skills.” Well, surely she should know better, shouldn’t she?

The filmmakers Rose Troche (“Go Fish,” “Bedrooms and Hallways,” “The Safety of Objects”) and Frances Negron-Muntaner (“Brincado el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican”) and the cartoonist, writer, and performance artist Erika Lopez (whose fiction includes “Lap Dancing for Mommy” and “Hoochie Mama: The Other White Meat/La otra carne blanca”) get lumped together in one chapter as “three diasporic Puerto Rican queer women artists who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s.”

And the book also looks briefly at the work of two other performance artists — Arthur Aviles, a former lover of the noted choreographer Bill T. Jones and a member of his dance troop, who was hailed by the New York Times in 2003 as “one of the great modern dancers of the last 15 years” and went on to found his own avant-garde Arthur Aviles Typical Theater, which stages “dance-plays” at its home in the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance; and Elizabeth Marrero, whose one-woman shows have “a variety of characters in a style reminiscent of John Leguizamo’s early work, but with a butch Puerto Rican lesbian twist.”

I was looking forward to reading “Queer Ricans,” but was greatly disappointed. This book is essentially La Fountain-Stokes’ PhD thesis, and has all the faults of the worst of the genre — it is larded with arcane academic buzzwords and concepts; filled with name-dropping of the work of obscure scholars designed to display the graduate student’s erudition but whose content goes unexplained; and has many prolix sentences and paragraphs so embarrassingly bad in their construction as to make one weep for the dead trees sacrificed to this book’s publication. Although he is the author of a recently published book of short stories, “Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails” (Bilingual Press, 2009), in “Queer Ricans” he displays little grasp of narrative and his prose is often quite heavy slogging indeed.

Nor can the book be taken as a survey of all that is best in what one critic has called “Diasporican” queer culture. For example, mentioned only in passing are such major queer Puerto Rican writers as Edwin Sanchez, arguably the most important gay Puerto Rican playwright currently working in the American theater (his “Clean” won the American Theater Critics’ 1995 award for Best New Play); the bisexual playwright Miguel Piñero (1946-1988), whose life was portrayed in Cuban-American director Leon Ichaso’s 2001 Hollywood film “Piñero” with Benjamin Bratt in the title role; or the bisexual poet and anthologist Miguel Algarin (b. 1941), founder of the renowned Nuyorican Poets Café, where he still serves as executive producer, and whose acclaimed 1997 collection of poems, “Love is Hard Work,” chronicles his living with HIV. Aldo Alvarez, the short-story writer who edits the well-regarded online queer fiction magazine Blithe House Quarterly (blithe.com/), is mentioned only in an obscure footnote.

Finally, the horrific November 2009 murder in Puerto Rico of the 19-year college student and gay activist Jorge Steven López Mercado, who was beheaded, castrated, and burned in a hate crime, shows that the violent homophobia that drove so many queer writers from the island is still much too rampant, although La Fountain-Stokes’ book is seriously blind to this fact. But what has changed in Puerto Rico is the existence of a large and vibrant LGBT movement that responded to young López Mercado’s assassination with an enormous demonstration in San Juan that drew tens of thousands of participants. Curiously for a self-described “activist,” La Fountain-Stokes in his book shunts aside the crucial role of Puerto Rican queer activism both there and here in creating the public space and audience for the cultural productions he chronicles.

For further exploration of good Puerto Rican queer writing, anyone lucky enough to read Spanish would do well to obtain a copy of the first-ever Puerto Rican LGBT anthology, “Los Otros Cuerpos: Antologia de Tematica Gay, Lesbica y Queer Desde Puerto Rico y Su Diaspora,” edited by David Caleb Acevedo (Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 2007). It is still in print but unfortunately not sold by Amazon, so it must be ordered from bookstores in Puerto Rico like Liberia Isla (http://libreriaisla.com/mm5/merchant.mvc). It includes work by Ramos Otero, Moises Agosto, Rubén Ríos Ávila, Luz María Umpierre, and Nemir Matos-Cintrón.

Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.

Complete Information:

QUEER RICANS:

Cultures and Sexualities

in the Diaspora

By Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

University of Minnesota Press

242 pages, $22.50

CORRECTIONS: I have corrected several mistakes in the above article (as it appears online). One is the spelling of Luis Cernuda, which appeared as "Cernada" (sic). Another is the city where Luz María Umpierre migrated to in 1974: she went to Philadelphia, not New York. Finally, I corrected a typo in the title of my book, which is "Diaspora", not "Disapora" (sic).--Larry La Fountain-Stokes

Conversations about Haiti with Laurent Dubois and Marvin Chochotte

2010-01-31T13:45:00.000-08:00

University of Michigan Professor Larry La Fountain in conversation with Haiti experts Laurent Dubois, Historian and Haiti specialist from Duke University, and U-M Haitian-American graduate student Marvin Chochotte.

(U-M Portal en español, LACS and Latino/a Studies production)

UM professeur Rebecca Scott dans une conversation avec Laurent Dubois, historien, Duke University et l'étudiant diplômé UM-haïtien-américain Marvin Chochotte.

(U-M Portal en español, LACS and Latino/a Studies production)

Charlie Vázquez on Queer Ricans

2010-01-31T13:27:00.001-08:00

(click on image to see larger view)

Muchas gracias a Charlie Vázquez, who recently published this review of Queer Ricans in the third issue of the fabulous Latino gay magazine Zona Rosa (February/March 2010)! Thanks Charlie!

Stay posted for upcoming presentations in Puerto Rico:

Thursday, February 11, 2010: Presentación de Queer Ricans auspiciada por el Colectivo Literario Homoerótica, con presentación por Rubén Ríos Avila e intervenciones artísticas por el bailarín Norberto Gabriel y el artista y performero Freddie Mercado Velázquez, Nuyorican Café, Calle San Francisco #312 (entrando por el callejón), Viejo San Juan, 7:30 pm.

Friday, February 12, 2010: Conversatorio con Larry La Fountain-Stokes acerca de su libro Queer Ricans. Con: Carmen Luisa González, Agnes Lugo Ortiz y Catherine Marsh, Seminario Federico de Onís de la Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, 10:00 am.

Eliana Moya-Raggio, pionera/pioneer

2010-01-23T10:03:00.000-08:00

Las vidas de las latinas en los Estados Unidos y de las mujeres latinoamericanas se entrelazan de maneras fascinantes.

The lives of Latina women in the U.S. and of Latin American women come together in fascinating ways.

Eliana Moya-Raggio es una pionera de la enseñanza sobre las mujeres latinas en la Universidad de Michigan, Ann Arbor y por 26 años fue lectora en el Residential College de U-M. También se especializó en promover y estudiar el movimiento artesanal feminista de las arpilleras chilenas, que se oponía a la dictadura de Pinochet. Su hija Jimena Loveluck es Directora Ejecutiva de HARC, una agencia de sida en Míchigan. Conocí a Eliana en 2009; aquí comparto esta entrevista que le hizo Vivianne Schnitzer.

Entrevista con Eliana Moya-Raggio from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

Eliana Moya-Raggio is a pioneer in the teaching of Latina studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is lecturer emerita at U-M's Residential College, where she taught for 26 years. She is also a renown promoter and scholar of the Chilean feminist arpillera artisanal movement of resistance against the Pinochet dictatorship. Her daughter Jimena Loveluck is the Executive Director of HARC, a Michigan HIV/AIDS resouce center. I met Eliana in 2009; here I share an interview by Vivianne Schnitzer.

Interview with Eliana Moya-Raggio from Universidad de Michigan on Vimeo.

Lady Gaga, Lord Kermit, und Lady Lola von Miramar?

2010-01-21T15:46:00.001-08:00

Fräulein Lola von Miramar has been practically hallucinating on thin air since her fabulous and oh-so-kind neighbor, the composer and guitarrist Carl Michel sent this photo of Lady Gaga and Kermit the Frog her way. You might not know this, but Lola von Miramar has always harbored a little, itty bitty crush on the suave green felt amphibian. I mean, he's soft, cuddly, lovable, and gainfully employed at a fascinating office job where he keeps immaculate track of Lola von Miramar's every Internet post:

(Photo of Kermit enjoying Lola von Miramar's blog.)

As Lola is not the jealous type, she is delighted that he has made a new friend, that glam-rock of feathers, metal and blood, the young starlet known as Lady Gaga, who even wore a red leather outfit to meet the queer of England! Of course, Lola is much closer to Gaga's lost sister, Sherry Vine, which is why poor Lola almost lost her marbles (not to mention her mostly-digested dinner) after seeing Sherry's hi-LARRY-ous video rendition of her hit "Bad Romance" parody! Ho ho ho!

Ah, what humor! But anyway, back to my story. If Lady Gaga is dating Kermit the Frog, does that make him a Lord? I think it should! Lord Kermit! And if they are going to be part of the British royalty, well then Lola thinks that she should be Lady Lola von Miramar aussi! Opinions? Don't bother responding if you don't agree!

Love and kisses,

Lola von Miramar

Lola Loba

2010-01-20T20:59:00.001-08:00

La verdad es que Lola está gozando de lo lindo. Aquí estaba yo, es decir, Lola, montando unas canciones en la computadora, preparándome para acostarme en mi camita, y por supuesto, pasó lo que tenía que pasar. . . Lola oye Shakira, ¿y ahora quién puede dormir? Lola se ha puesto a bailar en su silla y a sonar los dedos. ¡No hay quien resista a la Shakira! Pero la verdad es que más que "Loba" la canción que está volviendo a Lola von Miramar loquita ahora mismo es "Lo Hecho Está Hecho" (claro que Lola le hubiera puesto "Lo Hecho Hecho Está" pero eso es porque Lola es alemano-caribeña, bien sur. . .).

¡Buenas noches, conejitos!

Siempre los adora,

Lola von Miramar

A beleza da Elis Regina

2010-01-19T20:34:00.000-08:00

Lola is literally speechless! Lola von Miramar has known the music of the incomparable Elis Regina, well, since Lola was a little Mädchen running in the streets of São Paulo in the late 1980s! (Lola was but a tiny girl back then...) But who knew that in addition to a most divine voice and style, Elis was also a most beautiful woman? Elis, we miss you so much! You were a Göttin on earth (that means goddess in German)! Mein dear Kinder, listen and watch and enjoy the wonders of one of Brazil's biggest gifts to the world!

Love,

Lola von Miramar

Transgender Children

2010-01-17T14:10:00.000-08:00

I just heard a very moving segment on the Chicago Public Radio program This American Life on transgender children (Expisode 374, "Somewhere Out There," originally aired 02.13.2009, rebroadcast 01.15.2010). It was very moving and extremely informative:

Act Two. Tom Girls.

Lilly and Thomasina have a lot in common. They’re both 8 years old. And they were both born boys, although it became clear pretty early on that they'd prefer to be girls. There aren’t all that many kids in the world like them, but recently, at a conference in Seattle on transgender parenting, they met. And they immediately hit it off. They could talk about things with each other that they'd never been able to share with other friends back home. And that’s comforting, even if they never see each other after the conference ends. Producer Mary Beth Kirchner tells the story, with production help from Rebecca Weiker. (17 minutes)

I highly recommend it!

Blue Fingernails reviewed in Multicultural Review

2010-01-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

Himilce Novas recently published this kind review of my book Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Review Press, 2009. 344 pp.) in the Winter 2009 issue of Multicultural Review (Vol 18, #4, p. 55) (currently not available online). Her review reads as follows (thanks, Himilce!):

The bilingual cuentos, or short stories, woven together represent a poetic journey, a deep submersion into the cosmology of gay and lesbian Puerto Rican identity; and, as in all true literature, they sing a universal song that reaches readers of all climes, cultures, and sexual identities across the hemispheres. On the whole, the collection is charming, enlightening, humorous, touching, uplifting. The stories are as good in English as in Spanish, with the vernacular in each version so that nothing suffers in translation.

The word diversity applies to the stories not just because of the bilingual publication and the multicultural characters represented in each but also because of the various literary genres presented in this collection. Take your pick: Science fiction, detectives, fantasy, and urban sound and fury all meet under the cover of this book in one grand harmonious convergence. To that, you may add generally sensitive thematics, such as sadomasochism, transvestism, intersexuality, prostitution, and pornography. And still, on the whole, each story maintains a true-blue (azul) literary balance, where shameless bad taste or cheap prurience is overcome by poetry, insight, honesty, and the grander, long-shot view of the lives of the very human and often suffering personages sojourning across the pages.

Himilce Novas
http://supernovas.org

Cyborg Manifesto

2009-11-02T22:31:00.000-08:00

(From the files of the Museo del Barrio in New York City, courtesy of intern extraordinaire Carolyn Chin Choy! Wow is all I can say. . .)

I am blown away by the resurgence of the past. . . because Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been there since 1992, my 500th year anniversary of being a cyborg in love (with Roberto Sifuentes, of course). . .

I remember this Saturday afternoon quite distinctly. I met the Village Voice film critic C. Carr at the exhibit. We spoke of, oh, I don't know what. . . the Anthology Film Archives? Paris Is Burning? Mexican performance art?

I love how I fall into performative trances with Guillermo. I love that this one was documented, lost and found (like I am found and lost again). Muy poético, un círculo à la Mircea Eliade, por no decir Richard Brautigan. I love how Carolyn (who was my Spanish student at Fordham, Lincoln Center campus) found this and found me on Facebook!

I love it. I love it. I. . . siento. (¡Viva la Pocha Nostra!)

Michigan Latina/o Studies Silver Symposium, Oct 29-31

2009-10-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

You're Invited!
Latina/o Studies Silver Symposium

Past, Present, and Future of the Discipline
Latina and Latino Studies Program in the Program in American Culture
University of Michigan

Thursday, October 29 to Sunday, November 1, 2009
Ann Arbor, MI

Thursday, October 29
Location: 1014 Tisch Hall

4:00 - 5:15pm
Welcome by Dean Terrence McDonald with Address by George J. Sánchez and Ruth Behar

Friday, October 30
Michigan League

9 – 10:30
Mundo de los Recuerdos: Exploring the History of Michigan’s Latina/o Studies Program
Panel: John Chávez, Hector Delgado, Silvia Pedraza, Margarita De la Vega-Hurtado, Eliana Moya Raggio

10:45 – 12:15pm
Where is the Latino Past in the Future?: Trends in Latino/a History and Historiography
Panel: Natalia Molina, Adrián Burgos, Jr., Daniel Ramírez, Pablo Mitchell

1:15 – 2:45
Latino USA?: Politics, Populations, and the Face of the Nation
Panel: Fernando Guerra, Neil Foley, Rodolfo Rosales, Frances Aparicio

3:00 – 4:30
Give Me that Latin Beat: Latinos Make Culture
Panel: Colin Gunckel, Anthony Macías, Yeidy Rivero, Margarita De la Vega-Hurtado

4:30 – 6:00
New Latino/a Histories: Graduate Student Panel
Panel: Aaron Cavin, Christina Abreu, Emma Amador, Isabela Quintana

7:15 – 9:00 pm
Current Films on Latino Issues with Stephanie Alvarez
Location: UMMA

Saturday, October 31:
Michigan League

9 – 10:30
Consuming Latinos: Trends in Latino Cultural Studies
Panel: Lucía Suárez, Jillian Baez, Amy Sara Carroll, Stephanie Alvarez

10:45 – 12:15pm
Sexing it Up: New Approaches to Latino Sexualities
Panel: Jossianna Arroyo, Larry La Fountain, Danny Méndez

1:15 – 2:45
Social Science, Migration, and Latino Lives: Graduate Student Panel
Panel: Kristine Molina, Erik Morales, Sandra Gutierrez

3:00 – 4:30
Taking it to the Streets: Bridging the Gap Between the Academy and the Community
Panel: Estevan Rael-Gálvez, Rosa Rosales, Catherine Benamou, Silvia Pedraza

6:15 – 7:00
Address by Ruth Behar to Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
Location: Palmer Commons

For more information, contact Anthony Mora (apmora@umich.edu) .

Erika Lopez!!!!! Video of The Welfare Queen!!!

2009-10-09T10:21:00.001-07:00

This is awesome!

Queer Ricans in Ann Arbor! Wednesday, Oct 7 at 7 pm

2009-10-03T11:53:00.001-07:00

Hope you can join us for this fun event!

SH\aut\ Cabaret and Gallery
325 Braun Court
Across from the \aut\ Bar
Ann Arbor, Michigan
734-663-0036

Event sponsored by Common Language Bookstore
http://glbtbooks.com/

Queer Ricans in the Bronx! Thursday Oct 22, 8 pm

2009-09-29T23:24:00.001-07:00

Thursday, October 22,
2009
at 8pm
Admission: Free
Barrier-Breaking Boricuas
QUEER RICANS
Scholar and cultural warrior
Lawrence La Fountain-
Stokes discusses his new
book, Queer Ricans: Cultures
and Sexualities in the
Diaspora, and shares the
work of his subjects
including choreographer
Arthur Aviles, visual artist
Erika Lopez and writer
Manuel Ramos Otero and
many other groundbreaking
queer Puerto Ricans.
Followed by a book signing.

BAAD!
Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance
841 Barretto Street, Bronx, NY 10474

Take #6 train to Hunts Point Avenue. Cross under
Bruckner Expwy to 1st block (Garrison Ave.).
Make right on Garrison and go 2 blocks to Barretto
Street. Make left on Barretto Street to
841 Barretto in the middle of the block, right hand side,
large warehouse, red door.

718-842-5223

www.BronxAcademyOfArtsAndDance.org

The Journey of Queer Ricans - Feast of Fun #1064

2009-09-28T18:54:00.000-07:00

Every year thousands of Puerto Ricans emigrate from the the Island of Puerto Rico to other parts of the world in search of a better life. Their quest mirrors that of many queer folks who travel from their hometowns to other places to express their identity.

But with modern times, we see that this type of travel isn’t always a one way trip and now we see people are living the life they want in their hometown or anywhere they choose.

On today’s show we’re talking to the ever giddy and delightful Larry La Fountain-Stokes, professor of queer studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His new book Queer Ricans-Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora, explores the cultural expression of Puerto Rican queerness and how sexuality has shaped and defined the Puerto Rican experience in the United States.

In his book Larry examines the lives of queer artists of the 60s through the present day whose work is flavored by their Puerto Rican-ness, whether living on the island or in major urban Puerto Rican communities.

Listen as we discuss how Puerto Ricans’ love of the derriere has influenced American culture by giving the backside the respect and admiration it so greatly deserves.

Does gay American culture overly sexualize or fetishize Puerto Rican men? Is there anything wrong with that?

To listen go to: http://tinyurl.com/yeu8k7g

Feast of Fun Show #1064 - 09.28.09

http://www.feastoffools.net/gay-fun-show/2009/09/28/fof-1064-the-journey-of-queer-ricans-092809/

IRN-AFRICA Conference 2009: Genders  and  Sexualities  in  Africa

2009-09-15T23:57:00.000-07:00

IRN-AFRICA Conference 2009:
Genders  &  Sexualities  in  Africa: Opportunities  and  Challenges  in  the  21st  Century
Hosted by Empire State College, Central New York Center, Syracuse, NY, U.S.A.
October 1st through October 3rd, 2009

The International Resource Network in Africa (IRN-Africa) aims to link people doing research (both academic and community based) in areas related to gender and sexuality in Africa. We promote international communication and exchange through scholarship to expand knowledge building, foster comparative and collaborative projects among researchers, advance curricular and course development, and widen the availability of scholarly resources.

The IRN-Africa 2009 conference will bring together researchers, activists and thinkers whose intellectual work and political engagement are centered around issues of gender and sexuality, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered (LGBTQ) peoples in Africa and the Diaspora. The conference seeks to explore new opportunities arising from the internalization of research on sexualities in Africa, new challenges we are encountering in the 21st century, and new partnerships drawing from our diverse experiences in the Diaspora. Presenters include scholars, public intellectuals, and artists whose work defines new critical pathways to constructing a utilitarian and collective knowledge about sexuality, gender, society, and human agency.

The International Research Network in Africa (IRN-Africa) is funded by the Ford Foundation and works in partnership with Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York City University of New York (CUNY) in the United States of America. Empire State College (SUNY) is generously hosting the second meeting of IRN-Africa in Syracuse, NY, with paper presentations taking place Thursday, October 1st through Saturday, October 3rd. The conference is open to the public, and will include an art reception featuring Zanele Muholi’s photographic essay, “Faces & Phases, 2006-2009”, on Friday, October 2nd at 6:00pm. More info here.

Scholars will present papers as a panel within the following topical areas. (For a complete list of papers, please visit our website)

Women & Desire

Artistic Interventions: sexuality, art & media

Sexuality in Africa: Queer Methods

Sexuality & Human Rights

HIV/AIDS: culture and activism

Queering Religious Discourses

Queer Identities in Africa & the Diaspora

To register for the paper presentations please visit our website

Entrevista y Lectura en Bogotá, Colombia (2009)

2009-09-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Fragmento (grabación) de entrevista sobre Uñas pintadas de azul realizada en la Fundación Universitaria del Area Andina, Bogotá, Colombia, el miércoles 26 de agosto de 2009. ¡Gracias a Kevin Sedeño Guillén por la invitación a su universidad y por facilitar mi lectura allí! No dejen de visitar el blog de Kevin, titulado Bojeo a la isla.

Josu Sein y Uñas pintadas de azul

2009-09-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

Josu Sein escribe en su Fotolog (¡¡¡gracias, Josu!!!):

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes: "Uñas pintadas de azul"
8/25/09

Larry es un puertorriqueño afincado si no me equivoco en Nueva York (y si no en los alrededores). Aunque personalmente es en lo que menos me fijo, Larry dice que su literatura está marcada por 2 características que influyen en toda su obra; que es puertorriqueño (un latino, como dirían en EEUU), y que es homosexual. Para él es necesario remarcarlo y sentirse orgulloso de ello para que la gente entienda su literatura. Y es que no es una lectura fácil. Este libro en concreto, escrito originalmente en castellano pero traducido por él también al inglés y publicado en edición bilingüe (se ha de adquirir por internet, en España no está editado), está basado en diversos relatos en los que aunque se repiten algunos nombres y anécdotas, no están relacionados entre sí. Es el estilo y lo que sientes al leer los relatos lo que le da una coherencia.

Está escrito con una prosa poética no apta para todos los públicos, para qué engañarnos, al igual que mucha gente sigue sin entender la literatura de mi amadísimo William Burroughs. Se parece a él en muchos aspectos. Frases "aparentemente" (sólo aparentemente) inconexas y estructuradas de una manera a la que la mayoría no estamos acostumbrados, ausencia de puntos y mayúsculas en algún relato, homosexualidad, pornografía y vampirismo en algunos casos, etc. Quizás los cuentos más aptos para todos los públicos, ya que no se anda con rodeos y son muy fácilmente comprensibles, sean "De un pájaro las dos alas", sobre la situación actual de Cuba, y "http://www.songorocongo.com/~muñeca", sobre un tío que queda en una sauna con un desconocido y hace de todo con todos menos con el hombre con el que había quedado a través del chat.

Lo que a mi entender le da coherencia a todo el libro, es el deseo de dejar de sentirse solo mientras caes en sórdidas experiencias sexuales.

"Siento, sin embargo, cuando camino por la calle, que a veces soy otros: William Burroughs, Truman Capote, René Marqués. Puto, paseante, drogadicto, artista, excritor, genio, pornógrafo, homosexual (por poco se me olvida-¡qué despiste!) y otras cosas que podría tardar años en enumerar. Ah, y criminal, cómo no mencionarlo
(...)
las anécdotas de mi diario, de mis viajes por América, esa America tan perversa de Blue Velvet y Nan Goldin y Walt Whitman, de esos bares de negros y marineros por donde anduvo Lorca..."

Ya ha mencionado a David Lynch, William Burroughs y Nan Goldin, 3 de mis grandes ídolos y referencias... ¿Cómo no sentirme identificado con mucho de lo que escribe?

Y bueno, para cambiar un poco de tema y hablar de mis textos además de los de otros escritores, he de decir que a Consuelo, gran amiga de /norl, le han gustado muchos de mis textos, por lo que de momento uno de ellos, "Carta a David", relacionada con mis 2 actualizaciones anteriores, ha sido publicado en la publicación digital Nos Queda La Palabra. Ya no recuerdo si alguna vez lo puse por aquí, es probable que sí, o no, o quizás en el fotolog que me cerraron, pero de todas maneras éste es el link:

http://www.nosquedalapalabra.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=542:carta-a-david&catid=4:cultura&Itemid=15

Bueno, y ahora voy a comer gazpacho, faláfel, humus, y quinoa con verduras y algas. Mmmmm... :-)

http://www.josusein.com

Blue Fingernail Polish

2009-08-29T08:26:00.001-07:00

dig my fingernails
into the armpit of america
let down ur hair
hang on 4 the ride
concorde takeoff
plastered 2 the back of my seat
blue fingernail polish

--poem by my friend Giuseppe Campuzano, author of the Museo travesti del Perú (Lima, Perú). ¡Gracias, Giuseppe!

Queer Ricans!

2009-08-15T13:39:00.000-07:00

Queer Ricans..à la Larry La Fountain

[Blogpost by Charlie Vázquez:
Queer Latino Musings on Literature…and more…]

Puerto Rican writer and scholar Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’s latest tome Queer Ricans (University of Minnesota, 2009) takes a playful and critical look at the creative works of queer diasporic Puerto Ricans in the United States—New York to San Francisco, the 1960s to the 1990s, male and female, island-born and mainlander. This complex and fascinating study discusses homophobia, AIDS, feminism, sexism, racism, and a variety of other agents of marginalization, which although are scornful by nature, inspired the creation of that unique dimension from which queer Puerto Rican artists operate. Entrenched and seething island homophobia inspired migrations of queer Puerto Ricans to the mainland—and many were artists. And although the majority might have settled in New York—others found themselves in other locales such as Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Beginning with a dissection of the writings of Manuel Ramos Otero (who succumbed to AIDS in 1990), La Fountain weaves a rich tapestry of art criticism that ultimately leads to a kind of “Oz”, a Nuyorican Oz, as interpreted by Boricua lesbian performance artist Elizabeth Marrero. The fanning out of Puerto Ricans on the mainland, as they both assimilated into and resisted white mainstream America, begat yet another wave of artistic output shaped by birthplace, gender, race, and dominant language (Spanish vs. English). From Manuel Ramos Otero’s fiction to Erika López’s punk-informed subversive imagery and writing, the queer Puerto Rican canon of literature and art in America is more diverse than I ever imagined. Applause for Larry’s La Fountain’s groundbreaking cultural breakthrough!

I had a few questions for him…

CV: So before we get serious—I had no idea that Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero were bisexual. Was this an openly discussed thing in Manhattan underground Latino culture, and how did their Lower East Side base abstract them from other Puerto Rican artists based in El Barrio or the Bronx?

LLFS: Wow, this is a complicated question—much more serious than you suggest! Let me clarify a couple of things. I can tell you for a fact that people currently discuss Miguel Piñero’s bisexuality (or his attraction to and relationships or encounters with men and women); León Ichaso portrays this in his biopic Piñero (2001), for example. I cannot tell you that Piñero himself used the word “bisexual” or considered himself to be one. Regardless of this, the word is useful to describe his life and his sexual activities.

In the case of Miguel Algarín (who is still alive), I can tell you that Algarín’s literature has been suggesting this since the 1970s, in classic works such as Mongo Affair (where he talks about loving, i.e., feeling intense feelings towards an elderly black man in Puerto Rico) and of course in his extraordinary Love Is Hard Work: Memorias de Loisaida (1997), where he engages his experiences as an HIV-positive man who has sex with men and women. But just as the case with Piñero, I don’t know that Algarín personally uses the label “bisexual” to describe himself; I have never asked him and quite frankly would feel a little bit shy about bringing up the topic with him.

My suspicion (and understanding) about this matter is that it was a tacit subject, un secreto a voces or open secret, in other words, something that people know but don’t discuss a lot, unless you prompt them (or in my case, tell them what my book is about!). Then people start to tell you all sorts of things.

CV: As a punk culture aficionado (and as a Latino) I was very moved by San Francisco artist Erika López’s work, especially “A Postcard from the Welfare Line” which is loaded with tons of political symbolism. How did you learn about her and what is she doing now?

LLFS: Erika Lopez is an absolutely amazing artist! I first learned about her in 1997 when her first novel Flaming Iguanas and her book of comics Lap Dancing for Mommy came out. My friend Celinés Pimentel bought a copy at St. Mark’s Bookstore in New York City and both of us got hooked. Erika quickly came out with the sequel to her novel, They Call Me Mad Dog! in 1998. We just could not believe a queer Boricua was publishing this stuff and that it was illustrated to boot! I’ve been a fan of Erika’s ever since. You’re absolutely right that there is a fascinating political slant to her work. I think people sometimes don’t notice that right away because of her humor and allegiance to pop culture and to cartoons. For me, she’s as invested in social change and social justice as anyone else, particularly when compared to dour, serious artists. As to what Erika’s up to nowadays, I can tell you she’s working on making a film and she also writes a cartoon blog that she calls a clog! You can check her out at http://clog.erikalopez.com/ and at http://www.erikalopez.com/

CV: Queer Ricans covers a diverse range of work and personalities—from the prolific filmmaker Frances Negrón-Muntaner to modern dancer Arthur Avilés, who is based at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD). You apparently know many of the subjects of whom you write. Was this book a result of your own fascination as a queer Puerto Rican scholar and writer, and did you feel a conscious need to unify in one book the stories and works of these agents of Puerto Rican queer art history?

LLFS: At the very, very, very beginning, I thought I was going to write an exhaustive encyclopedia on homosexual literature and culture from all of Latin America and the Caribbean! As you can imagine, the prospect was so overwhelming that I was basically paralyzed. My dissertation advisor, the feminist scholar Jean Franco, suggested I focus on Puerto Rico and Cuba. Even that seemed like too much for me. I narrowed it down to Puerto Rico, and settled on the issue of queer migration. I also had to give up my initial impulse to write about every single LGBT Puerto Rican artist and writer—it was just too much. I started writing Queer Ricans in 1995 and did not really get finished until 2007 (or 2009, if you count the months I spent earlier this year indexing the book).

It really started out as an exploration of queer Puerto Rican literature, and morphed as it went along, in part because of the recurrent themes that kept coming up, especially migration, but also because I was living in New York City, and I was immersed in an environment that was exploding with queer Puerto Rican artists and writers and filmmakers and activists as well as with queer Puerto Rican scholars who were presenting very pioneering, groundbreaking research on queer Puerto Rican, U.S. Latina/o, and Latin American culture. The mid 1990s were just an incredible moment in terms of Latina/o queer culture in the U.S., and New York City just seemed to be the epicenter of it all. It all clicked together when I got a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and got to spend several weeks during the summer of 1997 in North Carolina discussing issues of international migration.

But to answer your question: some of the people I knew, or met along the way, like Luis Rafael Sánchez, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika López, Elizabeth Marrero, and Arthur Avilés; some were already dead, like Manuel Ramos Otero (but were so present in my mind and in my readings and in people’s stories that it’s as if they were still alive). There are a lot of additional artists that I met (or would like to meet) that I did not have a chance to write about in this book, such as Rane Arroyo and yourself, and that I look forward to writing about more extensively in the future.

Applause. To purchase this book go here (I’m still pissed at Amazon): http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780816640928

I’d like to thank Larry for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer these questions and want you all to know that on Tuesday, August 18th, Queer Latino Musings on Literature will be hosting Cuban-American author Raul Ramos y Sanchez for the third Virtual Latino Book Tour. Raul’s new book America Libre was published by Grand Central Publishing and we’ll discuss his forging of a new popular genre: the Latino thriller.

America Libre fuses speculative politics, rioting, and cultural upheaval and takes a scary look at the oppression of Latinos, set in a near-future America, where a dangerous and new right-wing government combats angry Latinos, who have become a second-class citizenry by law. We will also be giving a free copy away! All you need to do is comment on the interview—the winner will be chosen randomly by me and mailed a copy by Raul. If you’d like him to sign it, please request this and be clear as to whom you want it signed to.

As for me, I’ve been doing different readings around town and hammering away at my new short story collection Island Stories, which should be ready to submit to publishers by year’s end. I read a new story in Astoria on August 13th, for a benefit for Green City Council candidate Lynne Serpe (thanks Brandon Lacy Campos!). The new story is called “The Fruit Vendor” and pits the political and cultural frustrations of an islander and a stateside Puerto Rican, albeit with a very erotic subtext. Coming soon! (Did I just say that?)

Watch this short clip of me reading in NYC, courtesy of WepaTV:
http://blip.tv/file/2478867

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Original link for article:

http://charlievazquez.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/queer-ricans/