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Luis Zapata: A picaresque novel (Las aventuras, desventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la Colonia Rosa )
Adonis Garcia is a hustler who plies his trade in the streets and meeting places of Mexico City. His picaresque adventures in the Mexican gay sub-culture (which has its own rich slang) are detailed in this prize-winning novel translated into English for the first time.
Luis Zapata: A picaresque novel (Las aventuras, desventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la Colonia Rosa )
Adonis Garcia is a hustler who plies his trade in the streets and meeting places of Mexico City. His picaresque adventures in the Mexican gay sub-culture (which has its own rich slang) are detailed in this prize-winning novel translated into English for the first time.
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"This novel -- made up of poverty, desperate sexuality, sickness, hunger, persecution, abandonment and outlaw elements -- turns out to be, by a sort of magical transformation, a positive, cheerful, even optimistic book ... Luis Zapata stands revealed as one of the most radical contemporary Mexican novelists; his novel contributes to the struggle for the civil rights of the homosexual; it constitutes an ironic criticism of the use and misuse of language, of existing political and social structures, of the mass-consumption society, of deadening, alienating labor. . . " -- José Joaquín Blanco
"This novel -- made up of poverty, desperate sexuality, sickness, hunger, persecution, abandonment and outlaw elements -- turns out to be, by a sort of magical transformation, a positive, cheerful, even optimistic book ... Luis Zapata stands revealed as one of the most radical contemporary Mexican novelists; his novel contributes to the struggle for the civil rights of the homosexual; it constitutes an ironic criticism of the use and misuse of language, of existing political and social structures, of the mass-consumption society, of deadening, alienating labor. . . " -- José Joaquín Blanco
Zapata, Luis (b. 1951)
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήLuis Zapata is Mexico's most successful and productive gay writer. Between 1975 and 1990, he published four novels and a novelette in which the main character is either denotatively or connotatively gay.
In 1981, his critically acclaimed Las aventuras, desventuras y sueños de Adonis García, el vampiro de la colonia Roma became the first Latin-American gay novel to be translated into English. Two years later, his short story "De amor es mi negra pena" gave the title to Winston Leyland's collection of Latin-American gay fiction, My Deep Dark Pain Is Love.
Zapata has used a wide array of writing styles and techniques to present a variety of homosexual types and situations; taken together they offer a broad look into Mexican gay culture.
Born and raised in an upper middle-class family in provincial Chilpancingo, Zapata's childhood, like Alvaro's in La hermana secreta de Angélica María (The Secret Sister of Angelica María), revolved around going to the movies. His adolescent writings, were screenplays, often comedies about recent newlyweds.
These details, taken from his autobiographical De cuerpo entero (Looking Back), explain several elements of his work: the prominent function of cinema and popular culture, the application of humor, and his tendency both to mock and relish and finally to co-opt traditional heterosexual fantasies.
In 1975, he published his first work, Hasta en las mejores familias (Even in the Best Families), which traces the relationship between an alienated, sexually ambivalent youth and his father, a closeted homosexual.
Four years later, Zapata published Las aventuras.... The work is presented as a transcript of a taped monologue recounting the adventures of a local hustler, Adonis García, a sexy and highly sexed, often wasted, street kid.
In 1983, Zapata published Melodrama, a camp novelette about a love-conquers-all relationship between a dynamic and athletic youth and a handsome, married detective.
Two years later, En jirones (In Shreds) appeared. The novel is a narrative in the form of a diary of an obsessive relationship between two young professionals: one gay-identified and the other straight-identified and eventually married.
Zapata's 1989 novel La hermana secreta... is the story of Alvaro, a hermaphrodite in love with the cinema. He has also written several short stories with a gay theme, included in his 1983 and 1989 collections.
Traits common in his works include a linguistic and stylistic playfulness and a democratic presentation of homosexual types. Zapata indulges the gay reader through his use of camp, narrative tease, and sexual explicitness. His subject matter tends toward the melodramatic, romantic, or marginal.
Heterosexuality appears almost exclusively in terms of families, and these are often presented as clichés. Hypocrisy revealed and accepted is a common resolution to the conundrum of homosexual pleasure versus heterosexual family duties.
There are no lesbians in his literature, and the few female characters are generally mothers or sisters. In writing about a marginal and repressed culture, his fiction also has some qualities of protest literature.
Maurice Westmoreland (glbtq.com)
A cosmopolitan Mexican friend startled me back in 1980 by calling this book a "gay City of Night." Having expected, perhaps, to hear "a Mexican City of Night," I didn't understand his point until I read the book. Males who have sex with males in Mexico — particularly back in the 1970s — is supposed to be a top (activo) or a bottom (pasivo), except for a few jet-setter like my friend for whom the term internacional was coined to account for their odd switching of sexual roles in bed with different partners (or, sometimes, even the same partner). This role split is still the "common sense" expectation among noncosmpolitan (unglobalized or preglobalized?) males in Latin America: the ongoing "traditional" system is explained in Heterogender Homosexuality in Honduras, a book I coauthored with Manuel Fernᮤez-Alemany.
ΑπάντησηΔιαγραφήAdonis Garc the picaresque narrator of Luis Zapata's novel is "gay" in the "modern sense" without ever having boarded a jet or interacted with visiting foreigners. Almost his whole life has been spent in barrios of Mexico City and he is (in the subtitle of the Spanish version of the book) "the vampire of the Colonia Roma," a hustler in the land of machismo who spends barely a moment being hung about sexual roles. "My debut as a hustler [who should only top other men for hire] and there I was already fu_ked," he exclaims.
Unlike John Rechy's earlier narrators/alter egos, Adonis is not taken in by his tough image and he does not agonize even for a chapter (let alone multiple books, as Rechy did) about his masculinity being compromised by homosexuality, or even (unthinkable to Johnny Rios and other Rechy figures) sexual receptivity. Before his hustling career began, Adonis "didn't know that the guy that fu_ked the queer was homosexual himself" (many Latinos still do not conceive this!), but it is a conclusion he reaches quickly.
Adonis is able to view himself and his behavior ironically, which sets him off not only from Rechy but from many Mexicans I have known who might turn over and permit penetration, but would never laugh at themselves or their sexual conduct. I can't imagine any of them writing: "I fulfill my parta the bargain by sticking my cock up their a-s-s or letting them stick theirs up mine according to taste right? no need for me to writhe in ecstasy." No need either to guard himself from relationships — or to sentimentalize them.
If you don't take sex terribly seriously, being a "sexual outlaw" need not be a tragic role. Adonis is (blessedly) an ironic sexual outlaw. He is lower in class origin and more insightful, but just as anarchic as the narrator of "Taxi zum Klo," who also opens himself to relationships without closing himself to novelty.
The Spanish title promised chronicles of the adventures, misadventures, and dreams of Adonis Garc In my opinion, the delivery of the first two items from this list are perfect. Some gay Mexicans with whom I discussed the book felt that the dreams were the only "fiction," that the other parts are direct transcriptions of tapes with a hustler. (I don't think that they are right about that.)
The dreams are "arty" in the pejorative sense—overwritten and sentimental, as the recountings of adventures and misadventures never are. However, the real art of the novel is the creation of a narrative voice that is taken as authentic by those from neighboring barrios. Speech should be like Zapata's (and/or translator E. A. Lacey's), but never is (take the word of someone who has transcribed tapes of naturally occurring speech in both Spanish and English).
The only hesitation I have in terming this novel a masterpiece is that that word has been debased, so it might not be praise enough to motivate readers to find and read the book. The book is not perfect (I have already mentioned the preciousness of some of the dreams) but is the work of a masterful novelist and a masterful translator. Zapata wrote a highly idiomatic book that appeared to me to be untranslatable, so it seems something of a miracle that Lacey crafted an English voice to approximate the slangy eloquence of the picard the balance of hilarious and touching of his (fictional) memoir. (The reader quickly adjusts to the lack of punctuation and capitalization; there is blank space in place of the punctuation.)
by Stephen_Murray
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There is very little else of Zapata available in English, except for the title story of the collection My Deep, Dark Pain Is Love. My review is a revision of one that was published in The Advocate long ago.)