Contents:
- APPRECIATN: WHY LUIS ZAPATA’S BREAKTHROUGH GAY MEXIN NOVEL MANDS A NEW TRANSLATN
- EIANO ZAPATA, ¿ERA GAY CLóSET?
APPRECIATN: WHY LUIS ZAPATA’S BREAKTHROUGH GAY MEXIN NOVEL MANDS A NEW TRANSLATN
Gay and closeted men dulged the thrill of quicki wh strangers the men’s room stalls, or picked one another up for later, to the eternal tratn of the staff. The Sanborns cha — owned today by the ultra-wealthy Carlos Slim — beme a bean for a burgeong muny, allowg gay people to gather at a time when the ernment was clampg down on social dissints of every kd, cludg LGBTQ is the sort of illumatg cultural lore no one ever bothered to wre down Mexi — until the publitn 1979 of the novel “El vampiro la lonia Roma, ” or “The Vampire of Colonia Roma, ” by Luis the height of social ntrol unr the thorarian le of the Instutnal Revolutnary Party, or PRI, Zapata’s novel upend stereotyp of gay Mexin inty through the story of a lonely htler named Adonis García.
To this day, is beloved by gay and nongay rears alike. It displayed for the first time morn Mexin lerature a gay figure assuredly habg their sexualy, a notn patible wh Mexi’s perennially macho view of “El vampiro’s” earlit rears, the dac voice of the narrator was the book’s irristible hook. ”Gay wrers of promence had emerged om the fervor of the 1968 generatn, led large part by celebrated urbane sayist Carlos Monsiváis, or “Monsi, ” as the wrer was affectnately known.
EIANO ZAPATA, ¿ERA GAY CLóSET?
Monsiváis gaed acceptance the middle class and on mastream televisn by subtly distancg himself om the seedier aspects of gay life at the, ntrast, embraced . “He created an unfettable protagonist, an archetype of gay lerature, ” said Juan Carlos Btista, a poet and iend who published alongsi Zapata wh the small queer prs Quimera.
Btista remembers first readg the book furtively as a 17-year-old, when he was emergg to his own gay inty. “Luis totally flipped the fn that popular culture had about homosexuals, which was as praved figur, submerged speratn and tragedy, ” said Btista, reached by phone Xalapa, Veracz. ” (Daniel Hernanz/Los Angel Tim) Though Zapata is mostly unknown north of the borr, there is an English translatn: In 1981, the old-school San Francis publisher Gay Sunshe Prs produced “Adonis Garcia: A Pirque Novel, ” wh the late Canadian translator Edward A.
“I’m not sure anybody was gay that class, ” Loisel relled. ”The emergg gay metropolis. Back when “El vampiro” first appeared, was a weird time to be gay lg party had massacred prottg stunts at Tlatelol jt before the 1968 Olympic Gam, and the enomic and cultural liberalizatns of the 1980s were years away.