Tropics of Desire

Interventions from Queer Latino America

Jose A. Quiroga

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814769546
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Hispanic American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From its sweaty beats to the pulsating music on the streets, Latin/o America is perceived in the United States as the land of heat, the toy store for Western sex. It is the territory of magical fantasy and of revolutionary threat, where topography is the travel guide of desire, directing imperial voyeurs to the exhibition of the flesh.

Jose Quiroga flips the stereotype upside down: he shows how Latin/o American lesbians and gay men have consistently eschewed notions of sexual identity for a politics of intervention. In Tropics of Desire, Quiroga reads hesitant Mexican poets as sex-positive voices, he questions how outing and identity politics can fall prey to the manipulations of the state, and explores how invisibility has been used as a tactical tool in opposition to the universal imperative to come out.

Drawing on diverse cultural examples such as the performance of bolero and salsa, film, literature, and correspondence, and influenced by masters like Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and a rich tradition of Latin American stylists, Quiroga argues for a politics that denies biological determinism and cannibalizes cultural stereotypes for the sake of political action.

1
The Mask of the Letter

Envelope

When Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951 and met Lota Macedo de Soares, she took a bite of a cashew nut and got sick. By the time she recovered, she was in a relationship with Lota Macedo that kept her in Brazil for the next fifteen years, in a home in the mountains above Petropolis in Samambaia. Bishop was protected from neighbors by miles of land, as she confessed in a letter. “[T]he scenery is unbelievably impractical … it is a sort of dream-combination of plant & animal life. I really can’t believe it at all. Not only are there highly impractical mountains all around with clouds floating in and out of one’s bedroom, but waterfalls, orchids, all the Key West flowers I know & Northern apples and pears as well.”¹ While Bishop’s life was consumed in this dream, the Brazilian “friend” and “companion” was ordering teams of workers to carry out the process of building a house.

Elizabeth Bishop writes in a haze, while Lota, who was described by Robert Giroux as having “intelligent eyes and mannish looks,” fights with the workers. Elizabeth referred to these workers in her letters: “he and Lota have screamed their heads off at each other—worse scenes than usual, because carried on in the shop with twenty men hammering iron and working buzz saws and blast furnaces, etc., all around us” (241). The house was, as Robert Giroux calls it in his introduction to Bishop’s selected letters, an “architectural marvel” when completed: a prize-winning “split-level, horizontal building, with ramps, sliding glass walls, and what was to be an aluminum roof” (xv) with rooms for the maid and separate houses for the cook and the gardener. On a space separated from the house and above a boulder, a running stream was transformed into a swimming pool. There Bishop had her own studio, with a wall that prevented her from being distracted by the spectacular view of the mountains. From the studio she sent “imaginary letters” and real letters while the weather changed in the course of a day: “[y]ou put on all your clothes to start with, peel off all morning, start putting on again about three, and go to bed with a hot water bottle and socks about nine, absolutely frozen” (239). The peeling off, or the adding on, was accomplished always within the context of “lofty vagueness” that Bishop liked so much in Brazil, where “a few clouds spill over the tops of the mountains exactly like waterfalls in slow motion” (243).

The isolation, the sheer exoticism (for Bishop) of the space, and the protection from the prying eyes of neighbors allowed the poet to compare herself indirectly to those clouds that came into the bedroom only to disappear. She writes surrounded by clouds that dissolve on the page on which she is writing, “where a cloud is coming in my bedroom window right this minute” (237) and where she confesses, “The intimacy with clouds may not be too good. … but I like it so much I don’t want to move” (237). Because this intimacy with clouds takes place in that modernist dream palace, no reader should gloss over the perfect metaphor that this entails. Two women, one of them dreaming, while the other oversees the construction of a house where nature and culture coalesce in the form of a running stream turned into a swimming pool. Nature is transformed into a habitable place by elegant tampering that sometimes wants to pass as natural itself. If nature is the essence, it is always there as a construction, as a stream that calls for transformation into a swimming pool.

Bishop and Macedo de Soares are subjects who remain in a space where confession and self-disclosure are seen as tautological. There is no radical narrative in this tale, no progressive story where the closet is abandoned for realization and then self-affirmation. Nature is not going to be radically altered by these subjects, but its meaning is going to be teased out as something that is always constructed. The “coming out” (if there is one) needs the realm of perfect construction, the modernist dream palace, where the subject plays hide-and-seek with clouds, writing those real and imaginary letters where the fact of being lesbian, of having a lesbian relationship, is not even brought onto the page. It is like those clouds of which Bishop speaks, the ones important for their disappearance.

Bishop’s way of not talking about sexuality in her letters is part of what Octavio Paz has termed Bishop’s “enormous power of reticence” (vii) in her poetry. But the more one reads these letters the more one wonders whether reticence is truly the issue here. Bishop’s letters may be important not for their reserve, but rather for the other realm of the mundane that they do not express. Who was in bed? What was love like? (I am not speaking of the banal aspects of lovemaking.) It may be that Bishop’s reticence precluded these confessions, but one should also try to find other reasons that account for it.

It is important to look beyond reticence and explore the situation of the letter itself embodying the silent drama of what is and is not said, the illusion of a private space. But if this space is not private, where do we look in order to find Bishop’s self-understanding as a lesbian? The spaces outside the letter and the “work” may be a better guide for this than paper itself: the architectural marvel of the house, the natural habitat that it tried to blend in and with, the reality of two women who needed that land as a buffer zone from prying neighbors, and Bishop as the only subject who has correspondents to write to—for she is the traveler, the exotic flower in the midst of that tropical landscape—inhabiting a space surrounded by clouds, where clouds in some way speak of what cannot be spoken about.

This image must be insisted on for the sake of its own aura, because the absence in the letters may only be the illusory mark of those clouds, the traces of another language that does not need to appear on paper. The edition of Bishop’s letters that I quote from carries its own disclaimer: “selected.” What has the editor excised? Or is the letter itself the mask of that absence? In these letters, homosexuality is the figure in the carpet—what is not said but is also not hidden. The mark of that absence is also the mask of the letter. Whatever it is that it covers, it also reveals.²

Stamp

When we were over, I wanted my letters back. My copyright she said but her property. She had said the same about my body. … I took them into the garden and burned them one by one and I thought how easy it is to destroy the past and how difficult to forget it.

—JEANETTE WINTERSON, Written on the Body

Letters are meant to be burned, destroyed, or lost. The epistolary is the most contradictory genre: it says that one owns more completely if one destroys, that one talks about things by not talking about them, and that desire is all about seeing oneself as one writes to an other. Whoever wants to explore private space will be disappointed in letters, for there is no solitude in their pages, and privacy is not a claim one can make; what we find is anxiety over what Winterson calls property and copyright. A letter is always someone else’s possession. The narrative of correspondence is not really about receiving letters and writing letters, but rather about losing them, about silencing, about what happens when they fall into the wrong hands.

Letter writing brings out gay and lesbian anxieties of possession. The fiction of letters manifests illusions of ownership and possession, traits and signatures that one acquires in order to have, and that one has to acquire in order to deploy. We may think that letters talk about private life, but what they actually talk about is a code in which privacy is nothing but spectacle, secrets are told when there are no secrets to tell. What is not in the letter carries the weight of its absence, renders the letters even more present to themselves because of what is excluded. From one gay man or lesbian to another the page is no shelter but a mask for distance—the distance between writing, expression, and an ownership sacrificed in order to establish a particular kind of property. Letters call for the kaleidoscopic eyes of the voyeur, but also for the enamored gaze of the believer.

If we want to have an idea of how homosexuality was or was not expressed in the 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, we have to dissect the space of correspondence. The more one reads, the more one understands that identity in some way or another was masked, or foiled, precisely by what initiated those letters—the sheer fact of absence. The questions one has as a reader (Did they talk about it? Did they go out to bars? Did they go cruising, and where? Did they have sex with each other?) all seem like impertinences to which letters only respond with silence. One could say that for the letter writers, then, identity was not an issue, or that identity and sexuality were not linked in the same way as they are for us. One way of reading this silence would be to appeal to culture, to say that sexuality was not important in the cultural context in which these writers moved. But then again, that seems like a poor answer—for how unimportant can sexuality be, when the roster of names that I will bring into this scenario reveals a kind of gay cultural network?

Elizabeth Bishop, José Rodríguez Feo, Lydia Cabrera, Hart Crane, and others lived with a remarkable degree of openness about their gender preference. These were not men and women whose sexuality is a point of contention or a secret. Their letters show an amazing range of style. Some, like Hart Crane’s, speak in one code to the family and in another to friends like Waldo Frank. Others, like Xavier Villaurrutia’s, replicate the poetic persona of their work: nostalgia is the theme of Villaurrutia’s poetry and also of his letters. The Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera engages in funny gossip and bantering that can also be seen in his tales, while the editor José Rodríguez Feo goes on a name-dropping rampage to Lezama, that monster of culture himself, who spends quiet days in his house in Havana’s Trocadero Street. It is clear that these letters in published form have been heavily censored, but even without censorship I would be surprised if more comprehensive editions revealed that editorial prudishness has excised all comments on sex, and that the writers are forthcoming about their sexual acts, as opposed to their steamy “blue periods.” First, for these border crossers, privacy is a foreclosed option when it comes to writing, for there is no private space the minute one puts pen to paper. Second, writing is all about forgetting, and one cannot forget what one does not write about. This is what the absence of homosexuality in their letters shows: that the writers are not allowed the privilege of forgetting.

As a confessional object, the letter is meant to bring out anxieties of possession.³ Oscar Wilde will endlessly fault Bosie for the careless treatment given to his letters, which end up being a matter of public record, as he states in De Profundis—another letter that was also not for him (Wilde) to possess. Unlike fiction, correspondence is enmeshed within a history of privacy, and as such it is part and parcel of a history of suspicion. Imprisoned for his crime, Wilde revisits the scene of the crime in the letter. Wilde could write De Profundis only because there was already a legal system bent on destroying him, and also because homosexuality was an item—indeed, the item—on the agenda.

In order to understand the language of letters we must understand three orders of communication, and these are not to be equated so simply with literary “genres.” One order is the language of the “work of art,” another is the language of memoirs—where the subject becomes the object of his or her own gaze—and the third is the language of correspondence. These three “languages” function and circulate within their own economies, never totally different from each other, but at the same time keeping their own borders under surveillance, since the three are predicated and centered on the fact of something that could and could not be said. The question here is not to see poems or novels as some other, more fully developed kind of “text” whose kernel is the letter. What the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia writes in a letter is not simply a more developed version of what he says in a poem; rather, the letter and the poem are two situations that stand at a particular relationship of desire to each other. These are, of course, not only relations of desire but also relations of production, sites of textual pleasure. Letters are spaces of alibis where desire is both subject and object, where whatever “exceeds” the text is not figured, but rather represented.

The “work of art” does not mimic the letter, and the letter itself is not the prelude to the work of art. What is interesting here is the network, the economy that they all deploy.⁴ It is a network that bleeds from one letter to the other; it allows fragmentary selves to have a point of contact. Letters are all about a circuit and not about a point of stasis. When Xavier Villaurrutia writes in a letter to his fellow poet Salvador Novo what he will then seek to express in one of the poems collected in Nostalgia for Death, the relations of production between one text and the other allow for a common language. Here Xavier Villaurrutia describes Los Angeles to Salvador Novo:

There is no beauty in Los Angeles except in the irresistible night. The nightclubs are beautiful and I rest in them, drinking beer before embarking on a new ascension to the heaven of my room, on the ninth floor. When you think that that ascent will be the last one of the night, a temptation, a new opportunity. I do not know what color dreams are in Los Angeles, I only know that these are blue.⁵

The letter is a form of code: Villaurrutia “rests” in nightclubs; he goes up and down the elevator. This is the same theme fully deployed in his Nostalgia for Death, with its constant mention of heaven on earth, angels, ascents and descents. If one wants to know what kind of weekend Villaurrutia may have had, one has to engage in the circuit, leave the correspondence altogether and look into Salvador Novo’s memoirs.⁶ There, Novo raves about a man called Agustín Fink. Novo explains that Ignacio Moctezuma, whom he describes as a “congressman,” “lived in the Hotel Iturbide and had as a lover a young athlete of German descent, Agustín Fink, whose mammoth cock only Nacho Moctezuma himself could boast of being able to accommodate.” The excerpt of the memoir concludes, of course with Novo olympically accommodating Agustín Fink, and thus beating Moctezuma at his own game.⁷

Agustín Fink was also Villaurrutia’s friend and guide in Los Angeles. But Villaurrutia’s reserve about these events (he does not rave about Fink as a sexual object in the published correspondence) I suspect has nothing to do with the reserve of homosexuality, or with reticence as such, as in the case of Elizabeth Bishop, but with the different forms of representation given in the letter, the memoir, and the poem. It is not an issue of the “closet” but of a subject position, a certain decorum in writing about oneself to another. It is not a failure to “come out” but a mode of representation. The secret is plain for all to see. After all, it is to Agustín Fink (Novo’s olympic conquest) that Villaurrutia dedicates one of the best poems in Nostalgia for Death: “Nocturno de los ángeles,” a poem that is perhaps more open than most about a homosexuality that it registers as an open pickup scene between angels who desire the very real bodies they encounter on the street:

They call themselves Dick or John, Marvin or Louis.
Only by their beauty are they distinguishable from men.
They walk, they pause, they move on.
They exchange glances, they dare to smile.
They form unpredictable couples.⁸

If poetry plays hide-and-seek with representing or figuring homosexuality, one would expect the space of correspondence to open up the closet, to explain that which could not be said in public. But writing a letter is different from writing a memoir. One has to factor in the scaffolding that correspondence builds for itself, which is as important as the material object of the letter. In this narrative the state that demands the stamp, the paper that does not quite hold the confession, and then the empty time that it takes to send, receive, and then answer a letter—all of these are perhaps more important than the fact of what is said. This scaffold is part of the circuit of self-representation. It is not that the narrative of letters is found elsewhere, but that the space that surrounds writing is part of the narrative.

The state always demarcates the borders of correspondence. Between the letter writer and the addressee, there is always the state in the form of the postal system—the state that spies and reads, the voyeuristic state seduced by the possibilities of intimacy. A letter is an object that flies, that is handled, a visible thing. Correspondence establishes a circuit: networks, figures, decentralized movements, rhizomes, codes—and then codes that point to themselves as codes. All of these account for correspondence as a “liminal” mode of textuality. It is the place where an individual becomes a subject, and a subject becomes an “author.”

Correspondence here is an emblem for homosexuality, or at least it illuminates the way we should explore homosexualities—by noticing the kinds of detours it makes, by reading a network spread out in space but localized in time. Correspondence, like homosexuality, beckons a play with liminal or marginal status, a play where readers rescue pleasure given in the form of absence.

Postmark

I made no attempt to conceal my inclinations, but Xavier [Villaurrutia] seemed not to have discovered his, or, at least, he was not eager to acknowledge them. His surrender or self-definition finally occurred in the letters we exchanged during the last trip my mother and I undertook to Torreón. … His letters were exquisitely wrought and I will never forgive myself for having lost them.

—SALVADOR NOVO, “Memoir”

The hypermodern house that Lota Macedo de Soares built for Elizabeth Bishop can be imagined as joined by beams that are somehow invisible to themselves and to each other, with rooms that have only tenuous hallways, always on the verge of virtual collapse. Clouds go in and out. They come from nowhere and go nowhere in turn. The house was a way of acting out, of building up what could not be said. It is a canvas, or a piece...