Читать книгу Imagining LatinX Intimacies - Edward A. Chamberlain - Страница 5

During the 1990s, for example, there were a limited number of public spaces that resonated with queerness and foreshadowed the existence of a larger queer world. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner speak to this world in their 1998 essay “Sex in Public,” where they theorize: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies.”^[9] Like Berlant and Warner, I contend the queer world can take manifold forms, even as some queerly physical spaces such as bars and clubs are not inclusive to all folks because of marginalization that is classist and racist. In light of such displacements, Latinx queers also took to commenting on socio-spatial experiences through representation. Scholar Mary Pat Brady offers key perspective on Chicana representations of spatial experience by illuminating how spaces are made and transformed through human actions.^[10] In the pages that follow, I extend the spatial praxis of Mary Pat Brady and Ernesto Javier Martínez by illuminating how a set of queer Latinx creative forms function as a notable set of “spaces” for bringing underrepresented voices into dialogue. This dialogue concerns the challenges of being queer and Latinx in a national space—the United States—where bias against queer, brown, and migrant people was inculcated in the 1990s.

The process of changing that phenomenon requires new ways of thinking about US spatial experience. Hence, this book conceptualizes “space” as being predicated on US realities, such as familial contexts, while also extending beyond such confines. These spaces materialize as imaginary scenes like those that are found in the fiction, memoirs, poetry, and visual art that convey stories of finding closeness and strength in spaces that allow for people to foster an alternative sense of family and community. Although these spatial experiences occur in several forms, I concur with Richard T. Rodríguez who suggests that many Latinx spaces hold potential to “supply a sense of familia because of the ways in which they foster a sense of Latino/a queer belonging.”^[11] Feelings of familia (or family) can manifest in several spatialized forms, thus guiding figures such as those in the art and writing. Alternatively, to be rejected by one’s family or community can lead to displacement, which can be a crushing blow that affects how people envision their futures, lives, and potentials. These unsavory circumstances of unbelonging gained greater attention through an increase in media stories about such experiences during the 1990s and early 2000s—an era that came to be known as the Age of AIDS.^[12] As the media presented stories about human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), the public began to learn more about queers, but not everyone empathized. A coterie of politicians and leaders continued to emit antigay and anti-immigrant rhetoric, casting Latinx and LGBTQ peoples as threats to the United States.

More often than not, community leaders and pundits have linked the spread of illness to the presence of groups that are perceived as outsiders such as migrants, people of color, and LGBTQ communities.^[13] Similarly, dominant cultures repeatedly have accused Latinx and queer communities of being the purveyors of immoral ideas, thereby associating brown and Latinx bodies with contagion, physical dangers, and varying forms of impurity.^[14] In a relevant study, the scholar Hiram Pérez explains, “A national unconscious seizes on the brown body as a site onto which it can project the ‘unnatural’ sex act it disavows.”^[15] This projection took several forms in the Age of AIDS and made life exceedingly arduous, if not excruciating for many queer Latinx communities and people of color who departed from ingrained gender norms. This equating of brown bodies with the undesirable is visible in the US government’s ban on immigrants with HIV/AIDS—a ban that was imposed by callous officials in 1987 all along US borders. This ban produced even more mechanisms for stigmatizing people in the already vexed political processes of crossing borders and immigration. Over the course of its history, the United States has taken a varied approach to migration and immigration, although in recent decades the state’s power has been used repeatedly to detain, displace, and keep out LGBTQ peoples from multiple countries. In these tense contexts, racism and homophobia collide because as Sandra K. Soto explains, “race and sexuality are not self-contained, discrete categories.”^[16] These two elements of human experience exhibit considerable overlaps that manifest in the form of racialized sexuality and double marginalization, where people are discriminated against in two forms such as racist and homophobic abuses. These discriminations have occurred through events and policies that are local, state-based, as well as national. As a consequence, artists and critics upbraided US policymakers for allowing such marginalization to occur and, in the process, have called on the public to step away from worn-out puritanical values, white supremacy, and xenophobia.

Researching such struggles from the Age of AIDS often remains a challenge because of a heap of social factors like the silence and taboos that routinely accompany sexuality and sexually transmitted infections. Just as the critic and poet Anzaldúa suggests in the epigraph at the start of this introduction, Latinx peoples routinely struggle with “coming out” as being LGBTQ in their homes because of the possibility of being cast out.^[17] It is this horrifying possibility—this heart-wrenching feeling—that is most discomforting because the family sphere is believed to be a source of support when the world rejects people for being Other. This is not to suggest all Chicanx and Latinx families harbor such antigay attitudes because, in fact, a sizable proportion of families have proven accepting.^[18] Yet for those facing rejection, this experience is exacerbated by the fact that Latinx peoples also face discrimination in courts of law, employment, stores, and public spaces where the dominant white cultures hold sway. Similar problems were brought to light in Anzaldúa’s collection of writings Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, which intervenes in these matters by linking personal experience to history. Anzaldúa’s creative and critical thought about borderlands and otherness remain relevant presently as the world watches millions of people being displaced to varying degrees by community violence, civil war, and the aftermath of national policies including those of the US federal government.^[19]

Imagining Latinx Intimacies expands on the creative and critical work of Anzaldúa by showing how her theories can open new ways of understanding cultural artifacts, personal writing, and related forms of visual culture.^[20] Anzaldúa’s insights lend an idiom for explaining social and sexual dynamics of displacement and spaces where communities and officials have created what the writer Adrienne Rich has called “compulsory heterosexuality.”^[21] Within many heterocentric homes, moral constraints have been the unsavory seeds that fostered the creation of alternative spaces—sites and locales that the scholar José Esteban Muñoz views as vital social “outposts” of a queer world in the making.^[22] For peoples who feel that they have no place to go, alternative social spaces such as queer-friendly community groups can grant life-sustaining opportunities for connection, organizing, healing, and self-expression. Much as the artists in this book will attest, much can be done with a small amount of space. As viewers see in the short film Small City, Big Change by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, which is explored in the next chapter, meaningful change can be fostered by bringing together queer peoples of a small city for the larger public good.^[23] Whether it is a small city’s gatherings or a short film’s story, such social spaces enable participants to imagine hospitable spaces that are free of bias and exclusion. Even though popular queer social spaces like Castro Street in San Francisco and Christopher Street in New York City are hailed as significant queer spaces because of their high concentrations of LGBTQ businesses and denizens, these spaces continue to be perceived as welcoming only people who fit the mainstream media’s sanitized vision of sexual minorities: cisgender gay white men. To make a more equitable and inclusive set of spaces for queer people of color, a more egalitarian and socially conscious ethic of spatial creation must be imagined, produced, and set in place.

The Castro District gayborhood in the city of San Francisco, California.

In the eyes of critics today, the physical absence of LGBTQ and Latinx populations is a telling marker of the ways that bias, privilege, and power frequently collude, making spatial creation difficult. In terms of numbers, the US Census Bureau provides some insight into Latinx spaces during the late 1990s. The bureau published a report explaining how approximately 5.8% of all US businesses in 1997 were owned by Hispanics.^[24] Most likely, the bureau’s study is likely underreporting the exact number because many smaller businesses go unnoticed, yet it also speaks to the small number of brown peoples that felt comfortable going on the record in a predominantly white nation that has scrutinized Latinx peoples and their presence within US communities. In contrast, for many Latinx communities, local Latinx businesses bring people together and function as sites for sharing information; however, the census officials anonymize the data so assessing these enterprises remains difficult. Further, there is no official census data for LGBTQ businesses during the 1990s, though the number is conjectured to be low, and this dearth can be attributed to the persistent homophobia of the 1990s. Latinx-owned businesses grew considerably in the years following the 1990s, showing a desire to create more Latinx-friendly spaces that would provide support to communities imperiled by prejudices.

Recognizing the desire for more Latinx-friendly spaces is an important step toward the “browning” of public spaces, including LGBTQ bars and similar sites, which would enable queer Latinx peoples to have a greater number of life-sustaining spaces. Historically, US capitalists have constructed environments that are noninclusive toward both of the aforesaid communities, and as a result, Latinx queer peoples have taken to frequenting landscapes beyond urban terrains and suburban sprawls. As shown by the researchers Catriona Sandilands, Laura Pulido, and Juan Carlos Galeano, a multitude of queer and Latinx peoples celebrate and defend their connections to the natural world through a myriad of methods that are based in both the logics of reality and more imaginative terms.^[25] Nevertheless, in her study of environmentally related movements, the geographer Pulido articulates that “from the perspective of marginalized communities, environmental problems reflect and may intensify, larger existing inequalities and uneven power relations.”^[26] As a response to such uneven conditions, Latinx queer peoples such as Anzaldúa have developed an assortment of environmentally conscious commentaries and spaces that have served as a courageous reclaiming of land as well as a means to contest inequalities.^[27]

By using inventive spatial strategies, queer Latinx peoples have created a means of making real-life spaces as well as imaginary ones that allow for the celebration and development of queer Latinx desires and passions. For those seeking a space to freely express themselves, these sites may be seen as offering a type of “oasis where shared identities and experiences thrive,” though they are by no means utopian in nature or easily generalizable.^[28] The multiform aspect of LGBTQ spaces can be seen in how a great many sites serve as sanctuaries for LGBTQ identities, social practices, and thought. Among the many instances of LGBTQ spaces, the more commonly known sites include bars, bathhouses, bookstores, cruises, gayborhoods, parades, resorts, websites, and sociopolitical organizations such as the now nonoperational National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGÓ), which closed its doors in 2004. Then in some more progressive neighborhoods such as the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, many people endeavor to create a more queer-friendly dynamic through programs that foster a “safe zone” through sticker campaigns and decorative projects like rainbow crosswalks.^[29] Such queer spatial experiences also have been shape-shifting and on the move due to the way people hold LGBTQ gatherings in a range of spaces throughout the year such as in the case of supper clubs that move from one person’s house to another, and academic conferences that move from one city to another each year. Comparably, in the case of many youth spaces, as we see in the case of the young adult novel The Mariposa Club from the prolific Mexican American writer Rigoberto González, some Latinx LGBTQ youths gather with friends across whatever spaces are available and offer a modicum of privacy including the local schoolyard and neighboring homes. Such privacies are sought as many sites continue to be unwelcoming to young Latinx peoples. Because many US spaces continue to uphold white-centric and homophobic views as the norm, there continues to be a need for compassionate and egalitarian spaces that foster inclusivity.

A rainbow crosswalk in the Capitol Hill gayborhood of Seattle, Washington.

Imagining Latinx Intimacies aims to expand our concepts of queer social spaces by considering lesser-studied queer Latinx sites such as after-school programs, poetic scenes, and small towns that support queer and Latinx self-development. Already in the prior decade, a slew of studies of space have theorized the sociopolitical impact of public spaces like cityscapes and barrios. In turn, this dynamic creates a rather metronormative theory of belonging, community, and identity. In recent years however, there has been a move to focus on understudied locales like interstices (the blending of the public and private), rural areas, suburban places, evolving regions as well as locales that fall outside of binaristic thinking altogether such as transgender spatial experiences.^[30] This book falls within the latter set and explores how spatial experiences such as intimate spaces are laced with problematic assumptions about migrants, Latinx peoples, and people of color. The problematic thinking of nationalism and xenophobia came to a head during the Cold War and thereafter played a role in the way that Latinx queers were perceived in the late twentieth century and beyond. Kristin L. Matthews tells that the era of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991 was a turbulent time of “struggle in postwar America” where people tried to “delineate the good American.”^[31] For a bevy of critics in the 1980s and 1990s, the “good American” was by no means seen as LGBTQ, let alone Latinx. Ensconced in the fearful rhetoric of AIDSphobia and offensive terms like “illegal alien,” queer Latinx peoples were pushed to the peripheries of the public dialogue and spaces even before the discussion began.^[32] Resulting from this situation, many queer communities and Latinx peoples resisted such ideals because they demand a rigid conformity and inhibit creativity. Unsurprisingly, the mix of characters and creators examined in this study are unconcerned with assimilating to dominant standards, being proper, or developing what may be perceived as a “normal” connection to the nation-state.

The creative work considered here fosters distinctive messages, though Imagining Latinx Intimacies offers the viewpoint that a set of queer Latinx creators comparably capture and raise up intimate social relations of Latinx queers by emphasizing people’s connections to spaces. This emphasis comes through in the imagery and stories of Latinx queer figures. Their imagery and stories are powerful indicators of the degree to which queer Latinx peoples face (un)belonging, exclusion, and a sense of otherness across the United States. In response, the imagery and stories explored in this book exemplify the critical approach that bell hooks calls “talking back,” where people of color respond to the dominant culture’s mechanisms of power and normativity in poetic and inspiring discourse.^[33] This book contends that artists’ sophisticated portrayals of intimate life offer us strategies for resisting exclusionary and oppressive structures. These strategies are born out of the hybridity and queer experiences of people who migrate across or connect multiple cultures. For this reason, Imagining Latinx Intimacies builds on the concept of hybrid space, a critical concept that has been theorized by Adriana de Souza e Silva and Sarah Whatmore. Although Whatmore and de Souza e Silva discuss this notion in contexts other than Latinx studies, this lens is helpful for explaining how social spaces such as intimate sites often involve a mix of cultures, experiences, and languages. Through this optic, I explain how artists portray hybrid spatiality in chatrooms, landscapes, and youth spaces—the very scenes that should offer a means to nurture emotional and psychological well-being, yet is jeopardized by homophobic, racist, and xenophobic acts. This kind of study grants what Anzaldúa calls “a path of conocimiento”—a means to develop knowledge and solve problems such as biases and exclusionary mechanisms that have infiltrated nearly all aspects of our daily lives.^[34] Although this path-making takes many shapes, there is a common goal in the pieces examined here that is both spoken and beneath the surface: to create alternative and meaningful spaces where Latinx queers can congregate, share knowledge, and resist processes that threaten their lives.

Looking to the cultural history of queer Latinx experiences, the act of creating social spaces and intimacies takes place in a number of ways both planned and otherwise. While there are many permutations of this socio-spatial phenomena across the US mainland and beyond, one of the previous and high-profile examples of alternative space-making is a space known as “Nuyorico”—a portmanteau term that captures the alchemy of connecting New York City’s geography and Puerto Rican cultures.^[35] To a similar extent, queer groups of all heritages have come together to fashion alternative community spaces like those of the Radical Faeries, who instantiated shared spaces in natural settings in a kind of “back-to-the-land counterculturalism.”^[36] Much like the Radical Faeries and Latinx queers discussed here, I myself have found a need for queer social spaces for the sake of developing a close, intimate connection with like-minded people. After entering college for instance, I attended our campus’s queer student union, which was established in the late 1970s and went by the name “Gay Union of Trenton State” (GUTS). As I attended the weekly meetings, I wished such a social space had existed at my rather straitlaced high school. The scarcity of such sites is troubling for a range of reasons and points to the value of reimagining sites that might not initially seem to have queer social potential. To fashion these social contexts is a critical and creative process that lays a crucial groundwork for new alliances and homes for ethnic and social groups such as queer Latinx peoples who are made to feel like outsiders. In looking to the extant research, forms of home have received more attention by researchers in Latina/o and Latinx studies in recent years.^[37] Often such studies focus on social dimensions of Latina/o families, yet only a few of them have begun to theorize the multifaceted queer dimensions and efflorescence of Latinx intimate spaces in modern representation.

Spanning the space of the family home to more expansive social realms, this book speaks to the fraught relations that Latinx queers experience in heteronormative cultural contexts in the United States during the 1990s and early 2000s. This book largely gives its focus to examples, ideas, and theories of non-normative Latinx sexualities and spatial thinking, while also remaining attentive to the distinctive ways that notions of “place” have been envisioned by scholars.^[38] The concepts of space and place are helpful tools for understanding the troubled and unique social relations produced in and around queer Latinx communities. In an article written for Time Magazine, the cultural historian Julio Capó insightfully comments on these troubled relations by highlighting the ways that “queer and transgender Latinos have historically fallen victim to habitual and casual violence by both the state and civilians.”^[39] This dismaying and painful pattern of violence takes place in innumerable landscapes, constituting an unsavory sociopolitical phenomenon that I call spatial violence—an ingrained predicament that is perpetrated through quotidian relations and processes of the white and heterosexual US nation-state. Disturbing forms of spatial violence occur at one of the spaces commonly explored in the field of Latina/o studies—the borderlands—resulting from various kinds of discrimination and physical violence take place at borders and within the wake of such sites.^[40] Envisioned as an herida abierta (open wound) by Anzaldúa, this liminal kind of socio-physical space looms large in Latina/o and Latinx cultural production from the latter half of the twentieth century and into the present.^[41] To counter that vulnerability of being wounded, queer Latinx peoples use their creative ingenuity to imagine beneficial spaces of connectivity, including new visions of domestic life and social spheres occurring in less obvious expanses such as the Internet where the spatial dynamics of diffusion and discontinuity allow for less fixity in human spatiality.^[42] These spaces also include the geographies of coalition-building, which can take place across a range of sites and is one of the beneficial outcomes of fostering queer spaces. Imagining Latinx Intimacies highlights this coalition-building to speak to the positives of fostering bridges across social divides and finding common cause for the purpose of creating positive social change.

Instead of accepting the idea of the family home and one’s local homeland as being the most important social space of community-building and self-creation, this book explores the manner in which queer Latinx peoples craft a variety of socio-spatial experiences. This in turn provides blueprints for living a more desirable and rewarding life that is not predicated on the structures of capitalism, which are often sexist, homophobic, and racist in their composition. I use the word blueprint intentionally here to speak to the belief that the caustic homophobia of the past and present necessitates the creation of new plans for inclusive and forward-thinking communities. Such blueprints can open our minds to the alternative ways of existing in a world that has taken a punitive stance against brown peoples who exhibit transgressive genders and sexualities. In looking back, the sociologist Sean Cahill expounds on these dynamics through a lens of sexuality studies by identifying how “the religious right has sought to pit gay and lesbian people against people of color and to portray the two communities as mutually exclusive.”^[43] As Cahill shows in his study of black and Latino same-sex households, the divisive acts of some traditionalists can sometimes have the effect of inhibiting the formation of coalitions that can engender positive formulations like community dialogue in socially diverse spaces.

As a part of this building of coalitions, the research collected in Imagining Latinx Intimacies provides a glimmer of the multiplicity of sociopolitical coalitions that can be built. This book however, has limits, too. Much of it focuses on the lives of young people and those entering mid-life. More research and coalition-building must be done to support the lives of elder Latinx queers, who sometimes have been cast aside. Nonetheless, this coalition-building has been (and continues to be) crucial for creating political progress. As David Eng explains, “our historical moment is defined precisely by new combinations of racial, sexual, and economic disparities.”^[44] In light of ongoing inequalities, a more enlivening and thoughtful set of blueprints is necessary. Developing such blueprints can allow us to foster the more hospitable “queer futurity” that has been theorized by scholars like Muñoz.^[45] Moreover, as researchers show, the real-life experiences of encountering discrimination, hate, and violence in the private and public spheres negatively affects the emotional and physical well-being of queer Latinx people as well as similarly marginalized sexual minority groups. Being displaced from one’s home, as we see happen in González’s novel The Mariposa Club, has been shown to have a profound impact on one’s self-esteem, sense of self, and self-development. In studying The Mariposa Club, which shows a young transgender girl being forced out of her home, there is a parallel with González’s own experience. In an interview, he explains, “like many gay men, I had to leave my family in order to thrive. But that lack of familial love—that emptiness—continues to haunt me.”^[46] Such struggles also have been explored by scholars such as T. Jackie Cuevas, whose research on gender variant critique in Chicanx communities attests to the challenges of blazing a trail beyond the gender binary.^[47] In this same context, recent studies have shown that queer Latinx youths are twice as likely to feel they lack social belonging in their communities, and they are also twice as likely to be excluded in public school spaces where students bully LGBTQ students for going against the norms of gender and sexuality.^[48]

Considering how queer Latinx artists have been pressed by traditionalist norms and policies of people such as the now-deceased Senator Jesse Helms, who actively fought against federal funding for art programs and AIDS research, there is a great need for spaces to connect, create, and practice forms of self-care in the 1980s and thereafter.^[49] Such spaces are, like the identities that frequent them, shaped by several factors, including nonconforming experiences of gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality. This book neither purports that all Latinx experiences are similar, nor does this project use the nomenclature of Latino, Latina, or Latinx to blur the many diverse lives of individuals considered here. I employ an approach that is similar to that of scholars such as Muñoz, who have articulated critiques about the manner in which the experiences of Latinx peoples are often generalized. In the past, critics spoke about “the Latino culture,” which conjures to mind a monoculture that flattens the distinctiveness and multiplicity of Latinx social experiences.^[50] Instead of maintaining such views, this book fosters a critical consciousness of the ways that Latinx lives and spaces intersect with a set of genders and sexualities that transgress normative constructions. Incorporated here is the thought of scholars that research intersectionality, a major critical concept that was first articulated by the US legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s.^[51] In the case of Latinx LGBTQs across the United States, a pernicious set of homophobic and racist practices continue to intersect within a slew of contexts and cause a painful double marginalization. To address the artistry that challenges this painful phenomenon, Imagining Latinx Intimacies takes a more socially conscious approach and builds on the concept of Latinx as a means of challenging the gender dichotomy implicit within the ethnonym Latina/o, which has been read as expressing either feminine or masculine gender experience. This binary forecloses the possibility of self-identifying in multiple ways such as nonbinary and transgender. More recently, scholars such as Catalina M. de Onís, Roy Pérez, and Juana María Rodríguez have contributed telling commentaries on the manifold ways in which Latinx writers, filmmakers, and artists have contributed to, or have participated in, the ongoing instantiation of Latinidad that extends beyond dualisms, deepening our understanding of Latino-ness.^[52] While showing a spectrum of ways to perform Latinidad, their work thoughtfully illuminates the manner in which queerness informs the making of Latinx lives and spaces.

To develop this line of thinking, Imagining Latinx Intimacies links discussions of Latinidad to the significant scholarship of Nayan Shah, who first articulated the relevant concept of “queer domesticity,” a framework that underpins the first half of this book.^[53] In his study, Shah vocalizes that queer domesticity manifests as a mix of social circumstances and practices that run counter to the normalized western visions of heterosexual relations that are shored up largely by a cult of “respectable domesticity.”^[54] Shah uses the concept to theorize the social relations that were created and perceived within San Francisco’s Chinese American population during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although my study here does not examine Asian immigrant culture, I find Shah’s terminology provides a useful framework for Latinx forms of culture that similarly go beyond the heteronormative spatial relations. In particular, his ideas provide a supportive lens for understanding the queer spatial relations generated by the cultural artifacts of film and literature. In the texts I study here, the “queer domestic” manifests in multitudinous ways, showing the rich diversity of possible belonging and kinship experiences. The daily lives of queer people and related circumstances, such as battles against HIV/AIDS, tend to remake spatial arrangements. By “remake,” I refer to the ways that queer people’s social relationships and values transform domestic and spatial arrangements for the betterment of all people, hence making the domestic sphere and other milieus more hospitable and inclusive to people existing outside the center of cultural and societal normality. Moreover, I view this “queer domestic” as being a phenomenon that extends beyond the typical home-space inasmuch as I contend the privacies of queer relationships often spill over to locales that may not be perceived as domestic per se—as I show in my discussion of school-based clubs that exhibit a domestic dimension.

The spillage of queer relationships is further explored within the second half of Imagining Latinx Intimacies, where I provide three case studies of queer spatial imaginings. This queer spillage of relationships takes on another dimension in the latter half of the book, where I examine how queer Latinx artistry from the early 2000s exhibit a highly imaginative approach that connects disparate elements and alternates between bizarre and playful. To explain these hybrid depictions in the second half of the book, I introduce a concept that I call the queerly inventive, a term that is meant to capture the fanciful, performative, and spirited way that Latinx lives are being depicted through language, imagery, and scenes. The terminology is a way of identifying a broader set of imaginative phenomena, and this neologism serves as a critical formulation that is intended to give a name to a set of cultural and artistic dynamics. In several pieces considered here, the depicted bodies are given greater emphasis and challenge US physical ideals. These cultural artifacts show bodies that are imaginary or metamorphosed into figures that are half-human and half-animal (or plants). These cultural producers’ embrace of such radical imaginings is comparable to the inventive interventions of advocates and reformers such as AIDS activists late in the twentieth century. To grab the attention of the media, groups such as AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) imaginatively created direct actions such as street theater and die-ins, which ultimately were intended to foster dialogue, democratize society, and empower people with AIDS that typically were denied rights and opportunities.^[55]

Although judges, the state, religious groups, and others have attempted to repress queer and Latinx communities by historically associating these groups with abjection, immoral conduct, psychosis, and Satanism (among other negatives), a cluster of queer artists and activists have built socially engaged artwork in the form billboards, fundraising, Internet campaigns, poster campaigns, demonstrations, and other forms of civil disobedience that use queer personal experience as evidence to counter problematic defamation. Hence, I read the creative work here as being artistic extensions of larger LGBTQ liberation and Latinx movements that cross the Americas in a range of sites late during the twentieth century.^[56] This diverse set of printed and visual texts has much in common with the activisms of the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Chicana/o Movement, Black Lives Matter, and UndocuQueer Movement, which similarly resisted systemic bias. This diverse set of artists likewise encourages us to throw off the constraints that hinder the expression of our personal stories and intimate spaces. As I have assembled this book’s archive of art, film, and writing, it became clear that not all people identify themselves or their activities using the same terminology. Still some terms, such as the words gay and queer have managed to circulate in numerous parts of the world. In view of that, I wish to foreground my use of the term queer for the sake of clarifying and because it is one of the overarching concepts that animates my larger discussion of the artists’ actions, lives, materials, and intellectual projects. In using the term queer, I remain cautious because like many other critics in the field, I believe that this term can be limiting and that it often connotes the idea of a pregiven or essential identity. However, this book does not impose a fixed identity on the characters or artwork. Instead, I endeavor to make sense of the lives, styles, and social phenomena experienced within these contexts. Siobhan B. Somerville also rightly points out that the concept of “‘Queer’ causes confusion.”^[57] Somerville’s critical discussion of the term’s meanings shows that although the concept can be flexible, the multiple meanings can lead to some forms of bewilderment, especially if critics disregard the need to carefully contextualize their use of the term. In part, I use the term queer as a way of uniting the pieces—not for the purpose of erasing their unique sense of self—but rather for the purpose of assembling a coalition of speakers who can testify about similar circumstances. In the process, my project embraces the fairly common viewpoint that these lives are shaped by sociopolitical discourses, ideology, and practices. Through this optic, I consider how the heterosexual allies of queer peoples, such as caretakers or the friends of queers, similarly can occupy a positionality of queerness when they socially align themselves in common cause with Latinx queer peoples. My queering of heterosexuals here is not meant to be assimilative in approach, but rather, this method highlights how queerness can have many valences and materialize in a slew of forms.

In part, Imagining Latinx Intimacies uses the term queer to articulate how some seemingly straight people and cultural objects, such as literature, can be said to exhibit a queer sensibility. This sensibility is—within the eyes of dominant culture and queers themselves—antinormative, irreverent, and unconventional by the often-unspoken standards of Anglophone white cultures. Similarly, I remain thoughtful about how the concept and experiences of queerness are polysemous and ensconced in multiple histories. Ultimately though, a common language can be helpful to bring these topics into dialogue. In his book Queer Ricans, La Fountain-Stokes insists queer functions as a suitable idiom to discuss Latina/o and Latinx experiences insofar as this concept has gained a currency in academia, activism, and public forums, among others.^[58] Yet some strands of queer theory have overlooked some socially affirming experiences that allow for conviviality.^[59] Scholars such as Michael D. Snediker theorize it is actually possible to embrace optimism and positive forms of affect in queer forms of study.^[60] Hence, instead of seeing the space of home and social sites as always being ruled by heterosexism, I explain how homes and social spaces can be reimagined as queer-friendly and enable further actions like resistance and positive “emotional refreshment.”^[61] This idea is shored up by the scholarly work of researchers such as Lauren Berlant, Jennifer Cooke, and Ann Cvetkovich, whose research on intimacy demonstrates the usefulness of intimacy and spaces.^[62] As these scholars show, intimacies can be perceived as striking political interventions. Yet these personal experiences also are already made vulnerable by social and national pressures across the United States, even in sites such as the home-space that may appear sequestered from the political fractiousness of US public life.^[63]

In contrast, creative acts can function as a means to remediating damage and generating healing forms of bridges such as those that Anzaldúa theorizes in her later anthology This Bridge Called Home. To extend this way of thinking, it behooves us to ponder what it takes to create these spaces that link communities and allow people to connect with one another. What does it take for diverse cultures to come together and become more socially hybridized? To theorize this situation, I turn to the research of Adriana De Souza e Silva and Sarah Whatmore. They have developed concepts of “hybrid space” that have certain commonalities with the spatial thinking of Anzaldúa, though they look at hybrid spaces in different contexts such as mobile technology.^[64] Their discussions of hybrid spatial experience provide a means of explicating the links between queer Latinx spaces and those beyond their local sphere such as more public spaces like dance halls that feel intimate and have a domestic resonance. Through these lenses, I develop a notion of queer hybrid space to articulate the multilayered sites that queer Latinx people inhabit. The lens of queer hybrid space also gives space-makers and researchers a means of naming resistant forms of social and community investments that take shape in several spatial forms. Queerly hybrid spaces include art, texts, and contexts that not only create bridges between people but also resist deleterious imperatives for purity and separatism that lead to conflicts such as border disputes, culture wars, and community violence. In pragmatic terms, practitioners can use this framework to extend research in multiple disciplines like border studies and Latinx studies.

In studying these contexts, I reflected on my own positionality as a queer and white researcher who exists at the interstices of communities as well as outside of cultural norms. I am a queer son of a heterosexual woman who immigrated to the United States from Australia in the 1970s. As I grew up, I realized my mother was not seen as “belonging” in the United States. As a child, I helped her to practice for her citizenship test, which made me see that she was perceived as an outsider and Other. In a comparable way, I was made to feel like an outsider when my peers labeled my interests as “girly” and cast my physical mannerisms as “different.” I was perceived as feminine, queer, and unathletic—three unpardonable sins that deviated from my rather traditional school’s social expectations and values. As I was bullied by youths extolling such values, I also struggled with my own body image, which caused me to question the social mores that shape one’s internal sense of identity and self-worth. These events led me to become more reflective and hold a deep passion for studying how ideas of belonging, normative practices of social life, and human movement shape humanity. In light of this, I have devoted my life to understanding how social problems such as discrimination, hate speech, inequality, and violence give rise to a dearth of socio-spatial possibilities for queer and brown peoples. I find a common cause with Latinx queers that show an interest in challenging biased attitudes and normative practices, which have had the effect of shoring up discrimination, otherness, and exclusion.