Plebeian Prose 1509534555, 9781509534555

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Plebeian Prose

Critical South The publication of this series was made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memory Néstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose

Plebeian Prose Néstor Perlongher

Selection and Prologue by Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria

Translated by Frances Riddle

polity

First published in Spanish as Prosa plebeya. Ensayos 1980–1992 © Néstor Perlongher, 2000. All rights reserved. This English edition © Polity Press, 2019 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3453-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3454-8 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10 on 12 Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Introduction – Cecilia Palmeiro vii Prologue: Prosaic Perlongher – Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria xxi Sixty-nine Questions for Néstor Perlongher

1

Desire and Politics 13 Cover Up, Girl 15 Loca Sex 19 Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground 26 Brazil: The Transvestite Invasion 29 A Marica Is Murdered 33 Lust and Violence in the World of the Night 40 Corporal Order 43 Avatars of the Boys of the Night 46 The Force of Carnivalism 60 Living-Room Deficiency Syndrome 63 Minoritary Becoming 65 History of the Argentine Gay Liberation Front 76 The Disappearance of Homosexuality 85 Muddy Baroque 93 Sandy Beaches to Muddy Delta 95 Foot Fetish 106 Baroquification 116

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Cuba, Sex, and a Bridge to Buenos Aires 121 Dress Straps for Puig 129 Flows in the Fjord. Baroque and the Body in Osvaldo Lamborghini 133 On Alambres 142 Anthropology of Ecstasy 145 Urban Poetics 147 Poetry and Ecstasy 153 The Religion of Ayahuasca 159 The Argentine Falklands 175 All Power to Lady Di 177 Island Illusions 180 Island Desires 184 Eva Perón 189 Evita Lives 191 The Corpse 197 Macabre Gems 201 The Corpse of the Nation 203 Miscellaneous 209 Acronyms 211 Credit for Tancredo 216 Lake Nahuel 221 Blue 224 Corpses 227 Appendix 239 The Gay Struggle in Argentina 241 Biographic Timeline 248 Notes 251 Index 266

Introduction Cecilia Palmeiro

‘They call me the father of the gay movement in Argentina but everyone knows that I’m the auntie’, Perlongher wrote in a letter to the founders of feminism in Argentina (Correspondence, ’73). This quote shows both his style and his commitment to the ethics, aesthetics and politics of dissidence and difference, elements that characterize not only his body of work but also his intellectual life, which changed the course of ideas, history and political practice in Latin America and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement as well as for a radical new conception of difference. Néstor Perlongher (b. Buenos Aires 1949; d. São Paulo 1992), poet, essayist and activist, not only survived dictatorships, the transition to democracy, neoliberalism, the AIDS epidemic and various resistance movements, but lived life to the full, with an intensity that radiates from the baroqueness of his plebeian prose, aimed at the minoritary, and at agitating accepted ideologies which for him translated to sexist, capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal violence against dissident bodies in whom he detected a revolutionary force. From his intellectual life surged a voice that remains one of the most relevant to modern debates on politics, poetics and social sciences in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. It is a voice that blends discursive genres, that contaminates and disrupts institutional hierarchies, that forges a new style. Lust and sensuality imbue the poetic texts, literary criticism, political documents and

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anthropological essays collected in this book, a work fundamental not only in Argentina and Brazil, where he spent his life, but vital to contemporary politics and revolutionary notions the world over. Because politics without poetics is bureaucracy, Perlongher’s words whisper in the rushing tide of the current feminist revolution, of which he is also the aunt (and one of our favourites). And poetics without politics is impossible, because where there is poetry there is always a politics of language and the body. It is precisely at this intersection of politics and poetics that we find the origin of queer theory in Latin America, inexorably linked to political activism. This unique articulation makes Perlongher’s work a baroque pearl in the field of critical theory, glowing with subversive style. Perhaps the central concept here is that of micropolitics, magnifying the quotidian and corporal dimensions of social transformation on a micro scale, with imagination playing a vital role in the design of what does not yet exist. Perlongher is recognized today as one of the most important voices in Spanish-language poetry, but also as a very unique brand of intellectual: activist, academic, cultural agitator, mystic. His thinking has proven central to global intellectual history as it connects to philosophy and academic knowledge, spirituality and subjectivity, desire as a revolutionary force, and everyday experience as something historical and political. These pages serve as an inspiration for the wave of feminism surging within Latin America and other parts of the world, and at the same time they provide a perspective on the sexual counterrevolution being waged by religions on a global scale. This plebeian prose offers insight into the current conservative reaction to desire politics and minoritary movements such as feminism and LGBT rights and the contradictions inherent to neoliberal appropriations of these struggles (for example lean-in feminism, identity politics and the right-wing LGBT). Perlongher’s texts give us the tools needed to understand the fascism rippling through our world and to formulate a radical critique of the new Alt-Right’s focus on identity and nationalism. Perlongher theorizes on ecstasy, on the sacred and the profane, and on desire as a transformative force. His writing centres on the body as a battlefield and desire as a force of desubjectification, of escape from the self, and of social micropolitical transformation through the orgiastic, in his youth, and through the mysticism of Santo Daime (a syncretic Amazonian religion characterized by ritual use of ayahuasca) in his later years as he battled AIDS and the sexual counterrevolution it spurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

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We may find the key to understanding this complex work at the intersection of poetry and philosophy: Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of power and becoming are the lens through which Perlongher views the political dimension of history. Sexual experience is configured in micropolitical terms, as a mutation of subjectivity, as the basis for all social transformation. Perlongher’s neo-baroque poetics lead us to the juncture where the plane of the body meets the plane of expression (the plane of desire and the plane of language), through his poetry as well as through his formulation of a political language that breaks down institutional discourse. Perlongher was first of all an activist, and his political experience is central to understanding his work and his legacy. He was born in a suburb of Buenos Aires in 1949 to a working-class family of Italian descent with whom he had a complicated relationship. He graduated with a degree in sociology from the University of Buenos Aires, where he had his first taste of activism in a Trotskyist organization, Política Obrera [Workers Politics]. This experience didn’t last long given the leftist homophobia of the 1970s (which considered nonnormative sexuality as an imperialist capitalist perversion) and he was pushed out of the group for being an ‘effeminate fag’. In 1971, at the age of twenty-two, he and some other students founded the Eros group, an anarchist-Trotskyist collective, which formed part of the historic Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina [Argentine Gay Liberation Front]. Founded in 1971, the FLH was the first LGBT group in Latin America, and its radical proposals continue to inspire young activists across the region. Through a feminist revision of Marxist theory, the FLH viewed the sexual revolution as a necessary, unavoidable aspect of the social revolution, and decried the patriarchy as a construction that led to capitalism, not the other way around, as maintained by the left and by revolutionary Peronism. These other leftist groups believed that the patriarchy was an effect of capitalism: with the advent of a classless society, together with the end of capitalism, the patriarchy would automatically fall. However, this theory did not match the historic reality of the Cuban revolution or the USSR, where the fall of capitalism did not signify the fall of the patriarchy, proving, in the eyes of the FLH, that it was possible, although contradictory, for an economic system to move towards socialism while maintaining right-wing morality and sexist oppression. For the FLH, the sexual revolution implied destruction of the sexual division of labour that assigned specific and hierarchical functions based on gender,

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guaranteeing the exploitation of women and feminized bodies. Despite their differences, the FLH always tried to align itself politically with Peronism and leftist revolutionaries, without much success. Armed organizations proliferated in a context of political violence inflicted to varying degrees by military dictatorships and authoritarian democracies. Beyond the fight for sexual and ideological liberation, the FLH diverged from the armed revolution where the concept of the body and its uses were concerned, as well as in its methodology and its relationship to the times. In the 1970s, the bodies of armed militants were tacitly expected to serve political ends: the revolution required an ethic of individual sacrifice for the good of the future. It might be useful to clarify that in those years in Argentina, on the left and the right alike, a revolution was brewing, only to be squashed by a totalizing counterrevolution, culminating in brutal state-sponsored terrorism that left a broken country and a sinister record of 30,000 persons disappeared at the hands of the last civil–military–ecclesiastic dictatorship (1976–83). Within this context, Perlongher’s political and erotic notion of the desirous body was considered subversive since it applied revolutionary objectives to the present, not to some imagined revolutionary future. The revolution began in the subject’s very body. To the extent that the sexualization of bodies constitutes a fundamental alienation, nonheteronormative sexual practices have critical value: artistic explorations of the body offered an alternative to the territorialization (genitalization) of the body with obligatory reproductive ends. Following this notion, the Eros group launched a fierce criticism of the heteronormative family, an institution they believed should be destroyed along with capitalism to produce a new society (and avoid the calque of the heterosexual model onto the homosexual lifestyle, as occurred with marriage equality, which Perlongher criticized thirty years before we’d ever dreamed of its existence). For the Eros group and the Gay Liberation Front, freedom from the patriarchal ideology of the body and desire would come through social change. Years later, Perlongher outlined some of these early theories according to Guattari’s concept of micropolitics to create a deliberate politics of effeminateness. It’s important to note that these initial attempts to politicize pleasure and desire and to focus on difference over identity are central to the later development of queer politics in Latin America, more closely linked to activism than to the academy, producing theories through

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political action and not the other way around. The tide of popular feminism in Latin America today should be conceived of in this same way: the time for revolution is the present and the individual’s body is the first field of political exploration. The figure of the ‘marica’ or ‘loca’ is fundamental to understanding the experience of homosexuality in Latin America, characterized in the 1970s by clandestine encounters and secret sexual orientations in times of intense political and moral repression. Homosexual practices in public spaces were limited, in terms of locus of action as such, to public restrooms, private parties and the urban circulation of desire in the form of casual ‘cruising’. The predominant subjects in this hidden promiscuous practice were the so-called maricas or locas (effeminate homosexual males) and the chongos (masculine male not identified as homosexual who occasionally engages in homoerotic relations). This traditional model of invisible, often promiscuous, male homosexuality in Latin America, found in every country on the continent, was quite different to the Anglo-Saxon model of gay identity, widespread in the 1980s, which would later be adopted in Latin America as a means of gaining visibility and acceptance, normalizing the gay identity in a misogynist, racist and classist way, as Perlongher noted in several of his essays. The Eros group in particular, within the FLH, proposed in the 1970s ‘an anarchist revolution of the order of desire’ and defended the figure of the flamboyant, androgynous marica, who destabilized models of masculinity and femininity, and who was defiant in face of judicial and military order, as seen in the text ‘History of the Argentinian Gay Liberation Front’. Perlongher’s essays, throughout his career, although especially during the 1970s and early 1980s, defended the marica as a countercultural resistance to machismo, to the extent that the marica voluntarily assumes feminine attributes: becoming homosexual and becoming woman. Here we may see the intersection of philosophy, politics and eroticism at the centre of Perlongher’s intellectual life. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of becoming provided the foundation upon which he analytically laid out the subversive nature of microfemininity as a disruptive aspect of the marica, historically conditioned by the experience of the dictatorship and within the context of a specifically Latin American sexuality. These concepts would prove fundamental to his poetry, to his anthropologic research, his life’s work, and to his political activism against identity stabilization, all of which takes the body as location of application of authority but also of subversion.

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In 1976, with the intensification of repression leading up to and immediately following the civil–military–ecclesiastic coup, the FLH was forced to suspend its activities and dissolve. Perlongher himself ran into trouble with the law, not due to his political activism, but because of the police’s strict moral vigilance, which led to an illegal search of his home after a report of ‘bothersome noise’ (he was listening to Pink Floyd with another male, a minor), which turned up traces of marihuana and led to a three-month prison sentence. In 1978 Perlongher began his relationship with Brazil as it transitioned to democracy, first visiting on holiday and later settling there in what he called ‘sexual exile’. He was unable to bear the dictatorship in Argentina which was characterized by systematic arrests, disappearances and torture inflicted by the government on disobedient bodies, and by the intense militarization of everyday life and of customs in general. Brazil at the time was at the end of its long military dictatorship (1964–85), experiencing a transition to democracy they called the ‘opening’, with amnesty offered to political prisoners and the exiled. It was a period of ‘softening’ of repression, as the government was more preoccupied with stamping out popular armed organizations than with controlling the lives of individual dissidents. Focused on the systematic destruction and annihilation of guerrillas and the revolutionary left, the dictatorship overlooked the insurgent power of alternative forms of politicization that began to proliferate in the form of identity struggles, which Perlongher called ‘minoritary becomings’: feminism, Black Power, LGBT Pride, the hippie movement, indigenous rights, counterculture youth, etc. This implied a displacement of the struggles centred on class differences to a focus on the cultural differences that produced inequalities (mainly racism and machismo, but also ageism). Among the youth, a new form of counterculture began to spread, the result of tropicalism, a field of micropolitical experimentation known as desbunde. The desbunde (from the Portuguese bunda, arse) was a kind of ethical, aesthetic and political opening up of the Brazilian youth, flashing their arses at the establishment. At the same time, it was a form of subjective resistance against not only the dictatorship, but also conservativism and hypocrisy, and the microfascisms typical of the colonialist and patriarchal Brazilian society. The desbunde consisted of a politicization of the everyday, a vibrant vanguard that broke down the prevailing subjectivity through experimentation with alternative lifestyles, nonnormative

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sexuality, the use of psychedelic drugs to alter perception, and essays on new forms of community. Perlongher was immediately seduced by the Brazilian desbunde and by its proposed revolution against the worn-out model of 1970s leftist social change. The attempts at subjective transformation to incite social change immediately shared the methodology of the extinct FLH, which became a source of inspiration and radicalization when it was imported to Brazil during the transition to democracy. From his first trips to the country, Perlongher brought the FLH’s ideas with him through its organ of communication, the journal Somos, and in 1978 a group of Perlongher’s writer friends founded Brazil’s first gay and lesbian group, called SOMOS in homage to the FLH. Perlongher’s anthropologic research, some of the first studies on marginal groups, with which his own experience made him familiar, allowed him to establish a concept of identity that drew on the notions and practices of urban anthropology. In 1981, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a Master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo. There he began field research on male prostitution, probably the first person in the discipline to convert his sexuality and his contact with marginal territories into a research subject and field of study. In his thesis, later published as the book O Negócio do Michê [Male prostitution in São Paulo], which quickly became a bestseller in the genre, Perlongher critically analysed the construction of the gay identity, and the differences inherent to the Latin American model marica/chongo (bicha/bofe in Portuguese), in the monetization of passions and the libidinization of capital. This study into the destabilizing nature of masculine homoerotic desire and his scrutiny of the corresponding inequalities and differences prove that Perlongher’s work was a fundamental precursor to queer studies on a global level. Some of these studies, published as short essays, appear in the ‘Desire and Politics’ section of this book: ‘Lust and Violence in the World of the Night’, ‘Corporal Order’, ‘Avatars of the Boys of the Night’. Once he’d settled in the Brazil of ‘Minoritary Becoming’, an essay in which he ponders his own experience seen through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts of becoming and micro­ politics, Perlongher joined the SOMOS group, already divided by an internal conflict that would become a classic for the LGBT movement: autonomy or affiliation (in this case, with the budding

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Partido dos Trabalhadores led by the young unionist Lula, who years later would become the most popular Brazilian president in history, today unjustly held as a political prisoner). Perlongher took sides in this conflict, always in favour of weaving political alliances, in particular to denounce the neoliberal normalization and appropriation of the gay identity which began in the 1980s, particularly after the AIDS crisis when the gay ghetto became a place of stigmatization and isolation. Perlongher anticipated thirty years of debate on identity, warning of the implicit misogyny and foreseeing the production of new laws and exclusions. Ferocious critic of gayness as identity, once the SOMOS group dissolved around 1984, his political interests turned to feminism, smuggling its notions into his letters and articles which blurred the lines between specific ideologies and struggles. His disenchantment with gay activism, which can be read in ‘The Disappearance of Homosexuality’, ran parallel to his connection to the plane of the sacred through his mystic experiences with Santo Daime, a syncretic Brazilian Amazonian religion that was in vogue among intellectuals in the 1980s. The rituals of Santo Daime consist of ingestion of ayahuasca (prepared from roots and vines with high hallucinogenic content), which fosters collective mystic visions as a form of indigenous shamanic healing, amplification and intensification of spiritual perception, connection to other dimensions and life forms (vegetable and animal) and of transcendence of the individual. Santo Daime, which is also the name given to the sacred substance, offers a means of desubjectification, and this is perhaps the aspect most relevant to Perlongher’s critical thinking: overcoming the objectifying rational and colonial categories of western thought and its phallic, anthropologic biases. The leaving of the self and escape from societal pressures are key to political action in the sense that they blast away the pillars upholding the capitalist system. His abandonment of the orgy in favour of transcendent ecstasy as a vehicle to escape the self was contemporary with (even slightly prior to) his illness. In 1989, at a research centre in Paris, where he spent nine months doing a PhD in sociology at the Sorbonne, he was diagnosed with AIDS. In 1987, he’d published the book O que é Aids? [The ghost of AIDS], which he later criticized as a work written from a healthy perspective. In it, he denounced the control of the body that AIDS in particular implied as a form of taming the nomadic sexual practices and destructive passions that characterized the revolutionary nature

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of masculine homoerotic desire, domesticating it out of fear, using latex as a hygienic barrier to the exchange of bodily fluids and privatizing the urban circuits of desire (saunas, gay clubs, etc.) His diagnosis in 1989 caused him to return to Brazil after that ‘senseless deterritorialization’ in Paris, where he turned to the study of mystic ecstasy, profane and sacred, until his death in 1992. This line of investigation led him to a review of mystic literature and its relationship to the baroque phase of the Spanish Golden Age and to his creation of an eccentric minoritary baroque mysticism. Perlongher explored his political, erotic and mystical interests using poetic language, giving more conceptual and perceptive weight, fullness and density to his ideas. His work as an essayist overlaps with his vast poetic work, published in the books AustriaHungría (Tierra Baldía, 1980), Alambres (ed. Último Reino, 1989), Parque Lezama (ed. Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1990), Aguas Aéreas, El chorreo de las iluminaciones, Caribe Transplatino, in a bilingual edition (Iluminuras, São Paulo, 1991). His poems express his experience, despite the dearticulation of all referential intention, and prioritize language, summed up in the following central procedures: baroquization, proliferation and defilement of cultural materials, primacy of the signifier. Perlongher worked language with the care of a goldsmith: words were tools he employed like a skilled artisan to polish and sculpt his poetry, but also his theories and criticisms, as can be read in the essays of the ‘Muddy Baroque’ section of this book, displaying his search for a poetic prose with which to postulate on language. Throughout his career, he developed a poetics he called neobarroso, in a word play that substitutes the C from neobarroco (neo-baroque) with an S, in allusion to the barroso (muddy) banks of the River Plate in Buenos Aires. The neobarroso is a particularly Argentine and distorted version of the great Latin American neo-baroque of the twentieth century, linked to local formulations of the queer which celebrate effeminateness, poverty and the glamour of the subaltern (to the point that in Brazilian slang, ‘baroque’, in the feminine form – barroca – means queen). In the neobarroso, we find the erudition of vanguard Spanish literature blended with the colloquial slang of the ‘fag from the neighbourhood’, as Perlongher liked to say, forging ‘a baroque of the trenches’: poetic language as a revolutionary weapon. For the tradition of the Latin American locas, madwomen, as effeminate gay men were called, the neo-baroque is a stylistic code

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and a symbol of belonging. Perlongher explored this Latin American incarnation of the queer (before such a concept existed) in his book Caribe Transplatino. Poesía naobarroca cubana y rioplatense [Sandy beaches to muddy Delta: An introduction to Cuban and Argentine neo-baroque poetry].1 For Perlongher, the baroque was a latent force in the Spanish language, which found its Golden Age in seventeenth-century Spain and its subversive, queer Latin American splendour in the second half of the twentieth century. The neobarroso, or muddy baroque, an ‘exuberant explosion of artifice’, has a secret methodology: harvest material from the historic experience, such as political slogans, as Perlongher does in his now classic story ‘Evita Lives’, or in the poem ‘Corpses’, and drag them through the mud of the River Plate to create an iridescent gem, gleaming with profane illumination. Perverting the material, subverting and sensualizing the language to politicize it, inject it with libido, articulate the plane of the body through language, carnivalize it, dismember realism and its pretension of instrumentality, baroquize the kitsch and camp. The perversion (subversion) of language is the corpor­ alization of writing. As Nicolás Rosa wrote, poems are not sexual metaphors but hot sex. The recurring question is: how does one sensualize writing? How does one join the plane of expression with the plane of the body? To sensualize the language is to liberate the semantic xorá, to create a linguistic force, which registers the acts of the body. And this effect is created through reading: the accumulation and iteration of sounds that produce the sensation of bodily fluids. Perlongher told us to ‘Suck, lick, this swelling of Spanish’. The neobarroso, dripping with murky fluids, is the descent of the neo-baroque from the crystalline waters of the Caribbean to the muddy bottoms of the River Plate, the subversion of the signifier with respect to the signified, the transgression of linguistic law. A revolution in writing that deemphasizes significance and reference, that evades manipulative and objectifying language. Unnatural effeminacy and feminization, exaggerated eroticism oozing from the baroque machine, sullying the discipline of work and utilitarian morals with its ethic of excess and voluptuousness. While Perlongher refused to let his poetry be exploited by reality, his poetics were influenced by his political experience. Poetry was a space for production of a politicized language in the sense of its desirous corporality: a language that translated political discourse through transformative impulses experienced at the level of the

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body, through a willingness to conceptualize a de-autonomizing movement, a rejection of the purely aesthetic in favour of an understanding of poetry as something vital and therefore political, a guerrilla language. Not only was Perlongher one of the founders of the LGBT movement in Latin America; he was also a fundamental ally for feminism and a precursor to queer politics through his insistence on deidentification as an emancipating political strategy. He was queer before queer existed, as seen in notions on the relationship between inequality and difference, and in his concept of the body as location of ideological inscription and sexist violence, but also of subversive acts (in this sense, in a deliberate anachronism, his defence of flamboyant marica madwomen and transsexuals can be read as his contempt for the compulsive obsession with identification). Perlongher liked to refer to himself in the feminine, and he allied himself with women, lesbians, drag queens and transgender persons: the entire rainbow of locas, as a broad and inclusive category which in Latin America was complementary to the notion of queer, highlighting local characters linked to feminization and poverty. He was a pioneer in formulating an explicit poetics and politics of madwomen (it was the linguistic and poetic correlation of that sexuality gone mad that interested him more than homosexuality itself, the unleashing of desire, the liberation of all sexualities, the thousand sexes, as can be read in the essay ‘Loca Sex’). He founded a discursivity specific to the language of the locas that would be worth introducing into other languages to contaminate them and make them go mad. One of the aims of the translation presented in this book is to penetrate the English with this South American madness, to drive the imperial language insane with the thousand intensities and accents of all the locas that inhabit and agitate the world. Prosa Plebeya, originally published in 1997 (and republished in 2013) was conceived by Osvaldo Baigorria and Christian Ferrer as a homage to their recently deceased friend and as a map to Perlongher’s thinking, organized around the topics that mattered to him most. The ‘Desire and Politics’ section collects what are perhaps the most powerful and disruptive texts with which Perlongher smuggled the democratic ideas from the Brazilian desbunde into the timid postdictatorial underground scene in Argentina. Brazil at that time was a party, and Néstor the guest of honour. As he revelled in the Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ (much more imagined than real), he

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imported and exported ideas across the border. From this artificial paradise that would not last long thanks to the rapid institutionalization and neutralization of identities, followed by the final blow that AIDS would deal to this sexual revolution, Perlongher intervened in the alternative local circuits, introducing the first strains of a new democracy into his letters and texts published in feminist, anarchist and countercultural journals. Many of these essays rigorously analyse, in a literary style, the numerous configurations of machismo in Argentina which configure various forms of violence: ‘Microfascism is contained in each gesture, in each detail of the masonry of “normal” masculinity … Machismo = Fascism, read an old slogan of the tiny Gay Liberation Front in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the soldier-like semblance of the macho male is an indicator of the fascism that fills his head’, he ventured in ‘A Marica Is Murdered’, his now classic analysis of homophobic violence, written almost as a neobarroso treatise. Through his chronicles, interviews and articles on sexist violence, Perlongher inaugurated in Argentina a new field, later categorized as urban anthropology, the study of marginal territories for which his personal experience was the subject of investigation, the zone of articulation and the site of social transformation. These writings provide the elements needed for an analysis of fascism from a feminist and queer perspective. For Perlongher, the political alliance between locas of all stripes constituted a revolutionary cell, something that threatened the patriarchy. From this fundamental connection, the second edition of this book gave us ‘Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground’, a feminist essay on abortion (topic of urgent relevance in today’s world). ‘Cover Up, Girl’ is the title of an essay that denounces, not without humour, the maintenance of the dictatorship’s repressive practices even after democracy. One of Perlongher’s favourite phrases, ‘Cover Up, Girl’, should be pronounced with the tone of a provincial aunt. He was giving his female friends two pieces of advice: girl, dress with decency or you could get mistaken for a ‘whore’; and: when you do behave indecently, use protection (a ‘cover’ – saquito – was a condom). Néstor repeated this phrase in letters to his feminist friends, ordering them to fuck, like madwomen). If in his poetry the voice gives over to a transvestite desubjectification, this becoming can also be read in the unpublished ‘Brazil: The Transvestite Invasion’ (1985), which anticipates the emergence of a group that years later would cause a stir in international queer politics. Perlongher denounced the dictatorship’s repression,

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maintained even after the return to democracy, and questioned homosexual identity (an obsession throughout his work), such as in ‘Loca Sex’, where he introduces Deleuze and Guattari’s theory as an antidote to the fixation with identity, or ‘The Disappearance of Homosexuality’ (1991), his ‘goodbye’ text, which points to a new means of desubjectification: mystic ecstasy as a way to escape the self (something he’d previously sought through more orgiastic and less spiritual means). In this last line of production, the book includes a section entitled ‘Anthropology of Ecstasy’, which collects his reflections on Santo Daime and its mind-expanding mysticism. The ‘Muddy Baroque’ section shows another essential element of his poetry: the establishment of a contemporary Latin American canon, which stretches silver bridges between bodies of work, linking writers such as Manuel Puig, Leónidas and Osvaldo Lamborghini, Reinaldo Arenas, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Tamara Kamenszain, Anturo Carrera, Glauco Mattoso and Haroldo de Campos. This canon would prove to be of fundamental importance for posterior generations, who rediscovered Latin American literature as ‘insane writing’, as radical language. Under the scholarly-military title ‘The Argentine Falklands’, we find essays on the war that express notions of sexual and national identity, body and territory, notions that today would be considered queer and which are especially important now as the issue of the Falkland Islands is being revisited in Argentina and the United Kingdom alike. In these texts, as well as in ‘Cuba, Sex, and a Bridge to Buenos Aires’, Perlongher challenges intellectual leftist thought to dismantle its patriarchal foundation. The ‘Eva Perón’ section of this book is dedicated to another of Perlongher’s obsessions: the most important loca in Argentine history, its most powerful madwoman, and its most wanted body, the corpse of the nation. Glittering like a macabre gem, the scandalous story ‘Evita Lives’ is a classic among cursed, clandestine, censured writing. ‘Miscellaneous’ is a sampling of Perlongher’s literary texts, both prose and poetry, in which literature and history strike up a very unique relationship. Standing out is the now classic ‘Corpses’, possibly the most celebrated poem written during the Argentine dictatorship and the most iconic example of the neobarroso, displaying Perlongher’s poetic prowess in all its splendour. The complexity of Perlongher’s poetic-political thought discourages a reading of his work through generic pre-established

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classifications, but invites us to synch our bodies to the vibrations that undulate from his texts, connecting and activating zones of the collective political body. Streetwise philosopher, political provocateur, erotic activist, linguistic militant: Perlongher can ultimately be conceived as writing in an erotic-political form – a language of the trenches where posterior generations of madwomen will continue to build barricades and throw out grenades that may explode into a new language.

Prologue: Prosaic Perlongher1 Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria

Why would a poet’s prose interest anyone? Writers are assigned a specific genre and their incursions into other areas are usually considered minor or occasional unfoldings. While it’s true that Néstor Perlongher is remembered for innovating Argentine poetry, it’s also true that he tapped other veins in his quarry of skills. For those who followed the intellectual debates of the 1980s or gleaned nourishment from the untrustworthy grapevine of the newspaper stand, where cultural supplements ripened and fell, Néstor Perlongher’s name was a guarantee of risqué ideas, irreverent humour, partisan politics, linguistic sonority, ridicule for trite notions of democratic progressiveness, and insolent provocation. From the beginning to the end of his writing career, Perlongher displayed his talents as an essayist, and not only as a retreat or escape from his poetic work. ‘Truncated paths’ is how he classified his prose in an interview. The nonfiction genre in Argentina is a duelling pistol in whose butt Perlongher managed to make a significant notch. In truth, the most enduring essays were written under the shadow of threat. Over five decades, academic trends, institutional structures and the deterioration of the reader’s taste increasingly restricted the space allotted to nonfiction. Various movements aggravated the process, starting with the social sciences crisis in the 1960s, followed by This text appeared as the prologue to the original Spanish edition.

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the political urgencies of the 1970s and rounded out in the 1990s by the demands of academic theory and journalistic commentary, often one and the same. Taken as a given that each published essay had the last word, nonfiction in Argentina gradually became the precarious encampment of atypical thinking. And in this unusual style, Perlongher forged the works we’re interested in recovering. Perlongher’s ‘prosaic’ work centres around his political leanings, his sociological studies, his formation in urban anthropology; the curious groping that leads authors to express themselves using ‘the centaur of genres’ – the essay. He does not deal with a huge variety of themes, but each reflects a passion, and daring, disquieting opinions: neo-baroque writing and its origins and offshoots, sexual politics, gay identity, Eva Perón (a leitmotif), a political stance on the Falklands War and the ecstatic rituals of the Santo Daime religion. Of the abundant essays Perlongher published between 1980 and 1992, we’ve selected some of the most significant, but also the ones in which his style transforms arguments into poetry. In each of the thematic sections, the reader will find not only facets of Perlongher’s thinking, but also the evolution of his perspectives. In the section ‘Miscellaneous’ we have included some of the poems in which Argentine history or politics play a central role. Among them you will find ‘Corpses’, today considered one of the most important poems in Argentine literature. The prehistory of Perlongher’s best-known and most extensive essay, ‘La prostitución masculina’ [Male prostitution], taken from his doctoral thesis published in Brazil (‘O negocio do michê: Prostitução viril em São Paulo’ [Male prostitution in São Paulo]), begins on Lavalle Street, in the ‘movie house’ section of Buenos Aires’s city centre. In the early 1970s, Néstor strolls, trots, swaggers, cruises and drifts down this de facto pedestrian street, among taxi boys, pimps and gay men in various degrees of overtness. The opportunity to present an exhibition in the Centre for Art and Communication allows him to dust off an old idea: a photographic exposé complete with recorded testimonies from the young men who offer themselves up as live bait on street corners and risk butchery in nearby interiors. Néstor enlists his friends and members of Política Sexual [Sexual Politics] and the Frente de Liberación Homosexual [FLH: Gay Liberation Front]. They go out, cameras in hand, timidly trying to pass unnoticed as they aim a lens at their targets. Néstor strolls, chats with various taxi boys, approaches a man he’s interested in, sets aside his amateur investigation for the

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possibility of sexual encounter, gets lost in the city centre: it’s no longer clear if anyone is taking photos, the exhibition never occurs. But this dress rehearsal, this mise-en-scène of bodies on street corners, inspires Perlongher’s interest in gay prostitution as part of his array of intellectual interests. After cruising Lavalle in Buenos Aires, Perlongher followed the trail to the Brazilian hub for the sex trade, a place called Marquis de Itú. The former militant Trotskyist, former sociologist, Master of social anthropology, fixed his gaze on the streets. The street was where he practised his leftist political activism, his pioneering participation in Argentina’s first gay rights group (the FLH, active between 1971 and 1976). On the streets, he surveyed the gay districts of every city he visited and undertook explorations into the ritual experiences of an emerging Brazilian religion. Down these winding paths we search in vain for a fissure between the beginnings of the gay liberation movement and Perlongher’s later solemn criticism of ‘gay identity’. Desire – and not ‘gayness’ – was the anchor of his political perspective, in a period in which it was openly proclaimed that ‘everything personal is political’ but in which gays ‘didn’t exist’. Once, in the middle of a meeting of leftist activists, someone made a sarcastic comment about a young man with an ambiguous appearance: ‘Is that a man, a woman, or what?’ To which Perlongher was said to have responded: ‘It’s a what.’ This ‘who knows what’ invokes the amorphous and mutant silhouette of the black beast, target of moralizing campaigns that rained down on the population by the Argentine state, of which the reader will find here a costumbrista and conceptual portrait. Argentina, Néstor often said, is a paradise for police in which the only possible sexuality is sad or simulated, or else sordid. Identity, that ancient philosophical and governmental concern, has seen fissures form in its colonnade of unity, certainty, ego, sexualization, monotheism and hierarchy. The cracks, in the last hundred years, have begun to form around Nietzsche and Foucault and around anarchy and surrealism. But perhaps these days, the crusade against identity – or its analysis – is seen as suspicious, something ‘too serious’, even if liberationist or self-deprecating nuances are accepted. Academic and organizational agendas have managed to transform a political nuisance into a ‘cultural’ study, a flexible mould to fill with differences and tensions. It’s true that identity was a main concern during Perlongher’s lifetime. But the gay rights movement and its demand for social recognition seemed

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to him too comfortable and, in the end, suspicious. Like in a supermarket: every minority gets their own aisle. Perhaps Néstor was not immune to a belief, widespread in the 1970s, that there would be no individual salvation and no corporate immunity. The lease of an institutional space or ghetto was but a meagre consolation; the right to same-sex marriage, petitioned before the authorities, a whiny claudication. Néstor was acutely aware that the sexual politics brought to the forefront by the revolutionary pulsations were being hemmed in as an issue of human rights: one more instance of victimization, another plaque on the wall. He was of the belief that desire, whether hetero or homosexual, was not a tangible object but a force that could be used to break down the classificatory system of the reigning law – family-oriented and capitalist – used as the basis for social control: to Perlongher, desire was a crusade that aimed to penetrate the borders of conjugality, of sedentariness, of consanguinity. His guide was not Freud, or Lacan, but Gilles Deleuze, whose concepts he spun into gold. It’s through this appropriation – not simulation – that his investigation into male prostitution stands out as his personal nocturne. Perlongher read Deleuze – Anti-Oedipus – in a study group around 1975, a time in which he was gathering political knowledge. Non-academic reading; free from self-referential jargon, from expiry date. Deleuze and Guattari constituted an ideogram which conjured Eros in his death throes. But these books were not recipes: Perlongher read them with care and then he picked and chose items to carry with him as he explored the caverns of desire and the back alleys of the urban landscape. Beyond the polemics of methodology and theoretical ebbs and flows, we want to emphasize that Perlongher had a naturally radical temperament and that he was a keen observer of customs. In the end, the best polisher of a perspective is the sandpaper of experience and not the printed page. Perlongher had no first-hand knowledge, however, of Eva Perón, about whom he wrote a few poems and a blasphemous story that still today inflames the emotional and political membranes of Argentine mythology. The compilers of this book are aware that Argentina is not a place where one can poke around in erogenous zones and open wounds without suffering the consequences. While the figure of Eva Perón has already elicited quiet laughter in certain works of literature and film, some of them – such as Copi’s – vaguely dis­respectful, in the case of the story ‘Evita vive’ [Evita

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Lives], Perlongher has positioned himself beyond the twelve nautical miles of territorial exclusion. And although a writer may moonlight as grave robber, the halo surrounding this particular Argentine legend does not permit unauthorized exhumations. Because it wasn’t Perón’s Evita, of course. Perlongher’s Evita Duarte was a plebeian princess who descended from heaven to hand out, in place of blankets, packages of marihuana: Saint Mary Jane of Buenos Aires. His Eva was an unforgettable goddess, neighbourhood sweetheart, Peronist Amazon resisting with tooth and nail – tipped with Revlon – the ‘traitors’ who would grope her, an Eva come down from on high to suck a wart on the police chief’s shoulder and content to crash in any cheap hotel. Could Perlongher’s Evita be translated to film? A violent Eros would immortalize the montonera Evita, double disappointment of the ladies of the oligarchy, the Eva of the ‘counterculture branch’ of the Generation of ’73: the national Corpse, corpse set adrift, mortified immortal. Evita’s adoring public, in this story written in 1975 and unpublished until 1987, is the lower-class proletariat, the people Perlongher studied in the gay ghetto of São Paulo. This is not based purely on empirical observation: it is also a kind of political philosophy. The lower-class hero is always immoral and only revered at difficult moments in history or in popular legends. Néstor recognized, in the mass idolatry of the Peronist goddess, a politics of desire in its purest state: moral evaluations are set aside. He detected the same problem of libidinal politics – an issue so delicate it is still avoided to this day – in the popular fervour for the Falklands War, the platform on which General Galtieri held court. With a battering ram draped in witticism and insolence, the Falklands War is pummelled in the essays included here. It bears emphasizing that opposition to the Falklands War had not been widely expressed, making these essays even rarer. Perlongher’s stories and poems about Evita Perón and his texts on the Falklands show an open desire for blasphemy. And like any good blasphemer, Perlongher was aware he was insulting Argentine heroes, some of whom – such as Evita – he himself adored. What mark has Néstor left on those of us who considered him a friend? Poets, taxi-boys, university professors, gays, journalists, transvestites and feminists all gravitated to him and interacted with each other thanks to his presence, as many others would connect later thanks to his absence. Nevertheless, it always seemed that no one could keep up with him. Although he was always surrounded by lovers, friends, former friends or future enemies, he gave the

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impression of being as singular as an activist as he was as a poet, humorist or agent provocateur. One of the characters in the second part of the story ‘Evita Lives’ could be a portrait of him in his years as a sociology student: a leftist intellectual on the fringes of the gay scene, a spectator of the circuslike Buenos Aires hippie culture in a cheap hotel where they ‘weren’t campaigning, just trying to secure a peaceful place to trip’. The appearance of Eva Perón, and then the police, constitutes a disruption of this peace. Sex, drugs, politics, repression and rock’n’roll: the Molotov cocktail of a generation. We perceive Perlongher as a critical thinker, although we wouldn’t dare to simply plop him in the category of ‘intellectual’, not only because this label would be insufficient to describe him, but because there was something in him that bucked the notion. He didn’t want to abandon a radical political image even as he was immersed in a scene preoccupied with the ‘collapse of the grand narrative of Modernity’, the buzz of the Buenos Aires intellectual circles of the 1980s, forerunner, in academia, to ‘cultural studies’ and, in the public sphere, affirmative minority politics. But Néstor railed against ghettos, against the discrepancies between life experiences. Or against the fact that the world was one huge ghetto for anyone who had been exiled from their families, the church, from commonly held notions and customs. It is perhaps because of this that the deconstruction of identity became, within his work, an obsession. Did Perlongher perhaps ‘resolve’ the problem of identity in his final dive into mysticism? Did he make his foray into the religion of ayahuasca because he glimpsed in it an undulating freedom, a more powerful mode of corporal sensory reorganization? In mystic asceticism, the personal fuses with the divine; identity is no longer ‘political’ but transcendental, dissolved in an oceanic totality. He first tried to resolve the issue of identity through the orgy – in the times of ‘sexual liberation’ – flesh fusing with flesh. Then, through the religion of Santo Daime, identity gleamed, it became a flow of light. Flesh and spirit. The darkness of the orgy and the lightness of the sacred vision. In the end, obscurity is the ultimate fear of all Argentine essayists: the genre suffers, in general, from the regular (cyclical) obsolescence of cultural magazines. The majority of the writings that you will read in this book were published in journals and cultural supplements of newspapers where Perlongher practised his unique mode of intellectual intervention, introducing into the public debate issues that, in the early 1980s, were considered ‘novel’: marginal territories,

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nomadism, gay subjectivity, the strong link between desire and politics. All this is now a distant memory in the fragile intellectual history of Argentina. The other major theme for Néstor was the neo-baroque, a literary movement where he felt at home. Perhaps foremost promoter of the movement, he chiselled its contours in minute detail, as can be appreciated in the essays collected herein. Perlongher always rejected the communicational use of language; he preferred instead to glide along its sonorities and distortions, like a kayak pulled by the current. The sensual sonority of the text, the exuberance of the lexicon, the unshakable betrothal of argument and poetic effusion: these all allow us to take a large portion of his writings as a performance of linguistic operation in a trancelike state. Once concepts and theories sink their teeth into the flesh, they become style, and style is not a decorative element but life itself, and all of Néstor’s life was a long essay on desire. We would like to express our gratitude for the help, in preparation of this book, provided by Sarita Torres, Afranio Mendes Catani, Horacio González, Adrián Cangi, Paula Siganevich, Carlos Dala Stella, Cristóvao Tezza, Tamara Kamenszain, Paula Sibilia, Jorge Schwartz, Margareth Rago, Roberto Echavarren – Néstor’s literary executor – Paulo Martínez, Ricardo Antunes, Samuel León, Reginaldo Moraes, Daniela Chiaretti, Víctor Redondo, Vera Land, Martín Caparrós, María Moreno and Aurelio Narvaja, editor of this book, all of them friends and readers of Néstor Perlongher.

Sixty-nine Questionsfor Néstor Perlongher

1  What was the first thing you ever wrote? A ridiculous little poem about the Province of Buenos Aires, at seven or eight years old. Later, in high school, I won a contest with something loosely inspired by an album of Arab music. 2  Do you remember what your motivation for writing was? A certain mania for introspection. A lack of a lair of my own to hideout in, not being able to put up with the world. 3  Who was your first reader? Some (few) classmates from school. I was a little eccentric, I hung out with the girls, I didn’t get along with the boys. Writing, at that age, has something feminine about it. But my seduction was forced and implacable, I harassed my aloof readers. 4  What were the first comments you received on your texts? There were some teachers who encouraged me. My classmates at Avellaneda Commercial turned up their noses: poetry was for fags. At around fifteen or sixteen years old I started looking for more favourable circles. The Secretary of Culture in Avellaneda called my attention to the abundance of ‘eyelids’, ‘shadows’ and ‘pillows’ in my opening verses (a somewhat hypnotic effect). A poet, Héctor The journal Babel published in each edition a section entitled ‘The Sphinx’, which consisted of a survey of sixty-nine identical questions for each author. Perlongher sent his answers from São Paulo and they appeared in Babel no. 9, June 1989. Babel was published between 1988 and 1992.

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Berra, owner of a local bookshop, told me that my poetry wasn’t good or bad, just regular. And he let me participate in an adolescent poetry reading where I went onstage, like an anachronistic existentialist, dressed all in black. 5  Do you still have any of that early work? It must be around somewhere, things always get lost when you move. 6  What were you reading when you started writing? When I was younger, the adventures of Bomba, a sensual Tarzan of the Amazon. Later, anything I could get my hands on (which wasn’t much; I grew up in a house with practically no books – a book was just something that took up space); large collections of selected works, random novels by Somerset Maugham or D. H. Lawrence, huge yellowed novels published by Tor. In Jules Verne I’d skip the descriptions and read only the dialogues. Also, books chosen for their fascinatingly cruel images. Later, in high school, Güiraldes, Alfonsina Storni, Neruda (I remember I shocked the principal when I asked for General Song); Góngora was eye-opening. 7  How did you get your first books? Like I’ve already said, there was a certain aversion to books in my home. I found a way to get them through school, recommendations from teachers, on loan from an aunt who studied law. 8  What languages do you read? Spanish, Portuguese, French. Grudgingly, English. For poetry, almost always in Spanish, because it’s about working with the intimacies of the language. 9  Which authors were most important for your formation? Multiple intersections: we are a pastiche of echoes and voices, ‘collective agencements of enunciation’, as Deleuze would say, ‘an infinitely populated solitude’. But the ones who nourished me most – poetry is an elixir – were the surrealists (like Enrique Molina), Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ passing through Góngora and Lezama Lima (a true narcotic intoxication), Sarduy and, among the Argentines, my encounter with Osvaldo Lamborghini was decisive. 10  Who is your favourite poet? Góngora, Lezama Lima. But also Artaud. 11  When and where do you see other writers? Very seldom, when I travel to Buenos Aires, once a year. But I take advantage of the trip to see everyone at once. Happily, São Paulo is a fairly cosmopolitan city and from time to time someone comes to visit. However, I’m pretty isolated, I haven’t got involved in the local



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poetry circles – because, among other reasons, I write in unintelligible Spanish. This creates a problem, the lack of an immediate auditor, but it obliges me to polish and chisel away to the point of exhaustion or ecstasy. 12  Do you have friends who are writers? Who are they? Some, not many. When I go to Buenos Aires I always see Arturo Carrera, Tamara Kamenszain, Hugo Savino, Víctor Redondo, and the people at Último Reino, and other younger writers, who would make the list too long. I miss the social gatherings; you could say, conversation isn’t the most Brazilian institution, the bars don’t have tables, just a bar where you sit facing the barman to talk, surrounded by a horrible racket of radios. There’s not that same Argentine passion for polemics. In compensation, they also don’t police you with savage confessions or interpretations, there’s a certain distant courtesy. I correspond with some writers, or used to. I feel saudade for certain (disperse) encounters with Roberto Echavarren, Uruguayan poet who lives in New York. I talk regularly with another Uruguayan, Carlos Pellegrino, who travels often to Brazil. 13  Do you have any writer rivals? Who are they? I prefer not to know. 14  Do you belong to any group? In a fixed way, no. But I’ll drift through any group that might be alternative, anti-establishment (the ruins of the underground scene), nomad. Lately, less. My social ties have loosened a little in Brazil, where I feel the weight of my foreignness. 15  Who are your favourite fictitious characters? I’ll list the first ones that come to mind: Ubú, K., the Marquis de Sebregondi, maybe Larsen or Molloy, and among the most recent, Kitty from La luz argentina by César Aira. And I could go on and on – like with the Cadillac from Cobra – but it depends on the fickleness of memory, specific affections, insistent on fleeing. 16  What feminine character is closest to your ideal woman? Divine, from Genet. 17  What literary quote do you cite most frequently? One from Deleuze, which I cited earlier. One from Lezama Lima: ‘Full of desire is the man who flees his mother’. Several of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s lines: ‘I’ve never lacked for patience, arse, or terror’; ‘We will never be Vandorists!’ Tidbits of Sarduy: ‘The first thing needed to start a revolution is to be well dressed.’ And other little gems I pick up, and think might fit somewhere.

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Sixty-nine Questions

18  What are the defining characteristics of your style? A question from/for a literary critic. I’ll take a chance: a certain baroqueness (not saying anything ‘as it comes’ but complicating it to the point of contortion), effeminate or affected, and, at the same time, a willingness to let out a howl, an intensity. Rigorous form (voluptuous volutes) of a whirlwind. And always the challenge of losing myself in the somersaulting letters, the leaping effluvium, bordering on insane, nonsense. I already talked about a ‘baroque of the trenches’, grounded. Or neo-baroque, which sucks you into the muck of the Delta. 19  Which of your books is your favourite? Alambres. 20  How do reviews of your work affect you? I’m interested in them, since I tend to play with polysemy and they serve as reference points in the swamp. Of all the trips a person takes into their own texts, they don’t know which is the recurrent one. Criticism runs the risk of imposed over-coding, but it also draws maps, itinerant cartographies of the intangible. 21  What is the opinion about you that most bothers you? That the effects of a superficial frivolousness (an overwrought surface, shiny fabric, simulated polyester and corsets) are read, significantly, to the detriment of a supposed ‘profundity’ (which is nothing more, Foucault would say, than a smoothed fold in the surface). And, in that same vein, the inference or suspicion, false, of an ‘ivory tower-ism’ in this fleeting iridescence, indecisive and inebriated, that gives form (precarious, provisional) to Dionysian ecstasy or to Batailleian vertigo. Poetry is, I think, a ‘plane of expression’ where ‘harmony’ puts itself, you could say, to the service of unearthly convulsions, to the micro-tragedies of desire, without trying to signify them, but, at best, to trace, through the pain (pleasurable) of ‘the extraction of the stone of madness’ subtle lines of flight that intensify – sparkling as they reverberate – the quivers of the soul, the drifts (monastic?) of passion, the fits of rage or even stability. The opposition (or affiliation, depending on the case) to so-called ‘social poetry’ bothers me endlessly; it implies a complete reduction, a cardboard masonry, a certain legalist formality, that paves the paths of the whirlwinds of affect. And it bothers me that the writer who works on the fringes (against or behind meaning) is called ‘ludic’, which rhymes with ‘idiotic’. 22  What conditions do you need in order to write? Isolation. Slavish insanity (fingertips on keys). Silence. Guaraná, tea,



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cigarettes. Not to have too many things to do, especially not too much to read or write, because then the inertia dissolves into the immediate. Sometimes, to flip through some poetry books, or even previous texts, to get myself in the mood. To have a night without any urgent matters, no commitments. Time to waste on hollow dalliances. And, the most important thing, a strong dose of energy: aché (which means strength in African paganism). 23  What stages do your texts go through before you get to the final version? I always write on the typewriter (I still miss my broken-down Hermes Baby). I work in stretches, letting it flow, frenzied speed. A method (?) that’s a bit unusual: then I read and re-read infinite times to see what survives the countless pessimistic or sceptic glances. Very little remains: sometimes a single poem out of a series of ten or fifteen. Other times, less than that, one line, nothing. I don’t have a problem throwing out something that, even for the slightest reason, ‘doesn’t sound right’. And everything has to sparkle, iridescence. 24  What are you writing right now? A series of poems (relatively short ones for my habit) provisionally titled ‘Yagé’, inspired by my experience with Santo Daime (and partially indebted to Cuaderno del peyote [The peyote diaries] by Carlos Ricardo, despite not having a ‘descriptive’ intention, but a ‘therapeutic’ one). But they still need to go through a long observation period. Sudamericana is threatening to publish my Parque Lezama this year. And I have another collection of poems under review, Hule. 25  Which book do you wish you had written? I sometimes imagine books that never leave the shadows. This pull towards the unwritten can be a stimulus or a condemnation. But they’re vague daydreams that aren’t worth writing down, then they vanish. 26  What country would you most like to live in? Maybe Argentina, if it weren’t so authoritarian, hypo-sensual, decaying – or if it were, what a dream, ‘another’ Argentina, without resorting to (what a nightmare) Beckett’s The Lost Ones. Maybe in Bahía, Brazil, if there were a way for one to support oneself there without falling apart. Exile, although it does have its golden highlights, is deterritorializing. And you feel like there’s no way back, it territorializes in its deterritorialization, a fixed nomadism. 27  In what historical period would you most like to have lived? Let’s be delirious. The ‘Crazy Years’ in France. To be a shaman at the

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Sixty-nine Questions

height of the Afro-Latino candomblé kingdoms. During the Amazon rubber fever, like Fitzcarraldo. Further back, to participate in the Greek Dionysian rituals. As Lezama Lima said, writing through the cloud of vapours meant to help his asthma induced a kind of fabulous deterritorialization: ‘By merely closing my eyes and rubbing the magic lamp, I can revive the court of Louis XV [sic] and seat myself beside the Sun King, hear Sunday mass in the cathedral of Zamora alongside Columbus, see Catherine the Great strolling the banks of the frozen Volga, or witness an Eskimo woman give birth and then eat the placenta.’ (Another quote I repeat with pleasure.) 28  If you were sure you could get away with it, who would you kill? Anyone who – in an example of everyday fascism – tries to run you over as you’re crossing the street, an exhausting sport very popular in Brazil. And other fascisms less ‘micro’: shoot at the boots of the blue nightmare. 29  Who would you bring back to life? Incitement to the White Altar (simulated transmigration that can serve as a place of refuge like the protagonist of Virgilio Piñera’s Pequeñas maniobras [Small manoeuvres]). I would transmigrate, without hesitation, Camila O’Gorman; Zampi, an old gay Trotskyist friend of mine who succumbed to the lists of the disappeared; a couple of my sociologist comrades: Mario Isola and Ana Kumec, sucked down into the holes of the dictatorship; another friend, the doctor Marcelo García, who, in his ‘becoming-Joan of Arc’, faced down a train at the height of the terror (i.e., the dictatorship). 30  What historical military action do you most admire? The Crusades, a mass exodus. The raids in Ema the Captive. The Great Siege of Montevideo – but on the side of the Argentine Commission and the failures of Pardejón Rivera.1 Epic insurrections: the Paris Commune, the May 1968 events in France, the Cordobazo revolt in Argentina. 31  Which reform movement would you most support? Despite the bureaucratic chafing, the suppression of certain laws and ‘police mandates’ that inhibit (and repress) everyday freedoms, especially the right to move freely and the right to be different. In the case of Argentina, there are particularly unusual abuses such as the ‘criminal record check’ and the ‘Article 2 H’, which punishes erotic cruising. It would be a minor relief. 32  Who is your favourite character from Argentine history? The previously mentioned Camila. Gombrowicz. Tanguito.



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33  Are you or have you ever been active in any political movement? Which? At a young age, in the students’ Trotskyite movement and in the FLH. Without really being active (suspiciously ambiguous term), I try to stay up to date on the alternative movements of minority groups. I know that the current limits of politics are narrow and anachronous, but neither am I convinced by postmodernity’s bovine immobility of the masses, as Baudrillard puts it. The mutations that interest me are the more microscopic ones, at the molecular level, in a certain sense existential, while still collective, or, better yet, ‘neotribal’. 34  Do you have any obsessions? I think I had some, but they’ve lost their momentum. There might still be some traces of a special fondness, a certain desire to get swept up in a frenzy over something – fleeting exaltations. 35  What is your favourite painting? Liberty Leading the People, because of what I call the ‘Delacroix effect’: drunk on revolutionary passion. Seurat’s pointillism. Caravaggio. 36  What is your favourite smell? Musk. 37  What sports do you practise or have you practised? None. Traumatized by ‘Physical Education’ in high school, I can’t stand the gym or any kind of sport. 38  What is your favourite food? Sole with Roquefort. And a little rolled up pastry called pionono. 39  What’s your favourite drink? A good wine. A mazagrán from La Paz. But I hardly drink any more. 40  Do you have any vices or addictions? I wouldn’t call them that, just some slight predilections. It makes me think of something I once heard a taxi boy say: ‘I do it out of self-interest, so it’s not a vice.’ 41  What is your favourite name? That’s something that changes so often! Sometimes I like names like Diego or Gonzalo, or other Brazilian ones like Valdir or Djanira. But I’d have to stick, because of the classic jokes, with Rosa. 42  What’s your favourite joke? Something banal and really old: an inversion of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, where the latter, in contrast to the well-known version, hooks up in the middle of winter with a handsome beetle, who takes her on their honeymoon to Paris. The perplexed ant asks the grasshopper, while she’s there, to curse La Fontaine for her.

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Sixty-nine Questions

43  Which school subjects were your weakest? Mathematics (I had to memorize everything). There were subjects I detested, such as Accounting and Commerce (!). Curiously, Typing. 44  Is there any science that particularly interests you? I wish I understood more about modern physics, and linguistics. 45  What’s your favourite music? I like percussion: for example, Naná Vasconcelos. Other experimental Brazilian musicians: Egberto Gismonti, Hermeto Pascoal, Paulo Moura. 46  What do you feel when you sing the Argentinean National Anthem? It’s impossible to avoid some tickle, despite so much unrest, of patriotic exaltation. Or it evokes the gaze of the superintendent, getting out of her Fiat wearing a fur coat, stirring up the nervousness of the military-academic formation. 47  How would you define the Argentine identity? It would be a domesticated, doughy form of alienation, since one can only live, schizophrenically, outside the country. But also the velvetiness of streets and textures, an exceedingly rigid state of bodies whose emulsions are sticky with a familiar sullied smell: the smell of the self. An organic torpor, semi-animal, that leads you to lie on well-known cushions, even despite the Catholic nightmare and the parades of tombstones, slabs of khaki marble. It’s significant that in such a homogenizing and controlling society as Argentina’s the weirdos of all stripes are compelled to rub elbows in groups that mix the punks, circus defectors, coffeeshop nomads and the whole minoritary carnival, causing ungodly complications for the panoptic gaze (eyes of domestic servants, doormen, neighbours). The Argentina of my affection – excuse the pretension – would be the Argentina of these minor socialities – a kind of ‘minor Argentina’? – with its alliances, anguishes, expansions. It’s sad to admit how far we are. 48  Do you live with any animals? No. Although I do like cats. But I’d be afraid I wouldn’t know how to take care of them. 49  How do you spend your free time? Lying down, patiently still, flipping through an old newspaper or a light novel. 50  To what degree does your condition as a writer influence your relationship with women? It produces – or at least I imagine it does – a sensation of strangeness,



Sixty-nine Questions

9

as if they were before someone who, despite his insignificance, gives them the urge to reveal their secrets. 51  What movies have you seen several times? Visconti’s Livia, the Japanese Empire of Passion. Even Dwarves Started Small by Herzog. Fassbinder’s Querelle. There are several I’d like to see again: the German Coup de Grâce and the Polish Mother Jane of the Angels, among others. 52  What news media do you read? Folha de Sâo Paulo. 53  What do you live on? On a scant salary as a professor at the University of Campinas, one hundred kilometres from São Paulo. 54  What’s your relationship to money? Decidedly conflicted. I scrimp on little things so I can splurge on books. An unavoidable potlatch, I can’t manage the discipline required for austerity. And I never manage, because of this, to live more than a modest lifestyle, a constant becoming-gypsy. 55  How do you imagine your perfect moment? An ostentation of ecstasy. An instant – although perishable, persistent – of fusion, the leaving of the self. Rare gems of an intense duration. 56  What day of your life do you remember especially? I don’t want to reveal my secrets. 57  What makes you feel most embarrassed? Putting my foot in my mouth. Letting something terrible slip out. Or to be shy at an important event and fall into apathy. 58  What are you most afraid of? Terror. 59  What do you regret? Not having taken, when faced with dilemmas, faster, bolder decisions. Not gathering up, sometimes, the energy to work, out of tiredness, laziness, or just boredom. 60  Who do you dislike? Snitches. 61  What do you hate more than anything else? Sexism. Racism. 62  What would be your greatest misfortune? For the vein of writing to be cut open and bled out. Or the other extreme, a hermetic reclusion, in response to rejection. 63  What’s your main personality trait? If there’s not one self, if we’re all multiplicities, it’s hard to connect

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Sixty-nine Questions

the traits of a personality. They can be taken dispersedly; or also, by willingness of connection. Maybe, a certain passion for pushing limits, for leaning over the abyss, for going too far, but always carving – at least this is my aim – with the rigour of a goldsmith. 64  How many hours do you sleep? I sleep a lot, around nine hours a night. And sometimes I can’t resist taking a nap. 65  How would you like to die? Almost asleep, in the opioid-induced haze of a Chinese torture, with no pain, and without a hospital in the background. 66  Do you believe in God? Which one? When it comes to Judaeo-Christian monotheism, I’m totally atheist, or anti-theist: I don’t support the church. But ever since I moved to Brazil, I’ve been interested in the more or less syncretic paganism, such as African candomblé and, more recently, the Santo Daime religion, native to the Amazon, which sanctifies experimentation with the powerful ayahuasca (or yage), in a highly ritualized way, where mirações (vibrant visions) are set to syncretic rhythms or hymns, with strong influences from popular Catholicism. To give you an idea, the flamboyant church of Santo Daime in São Paulo bears the name ‘Flower of the Waters Eclectic Centre of Flowing Universal Light’. It’s an experience of direct connection with the divine, through the sacred drink. It makes me think, more than of God, of a proliferating multiplicity of divine entities that denominate, so to say, intensive states, symbols of orbits of intensities – like Lyotard detects in the polytheism of the Lower Roman Empire. The feeling is one of an ecstatic energy in motion. 67  What’s your motto? I can’t think of one. 68  What would you have liked to be? You become what comes to you. Some truncated paths: politician, journalist, maybe a prose writer. In a more radical plane, I’d like to be black. To betray the white race. Being is becoming: becomingblack, becoming-woman, becoming-gay, becoming-child. 69  What is a writer good for? For entertaining with magic, disfiguring, creating confusion, spreading the words of the tribe. In poetry you may hear an oracular echo, but it’s really the swishing robes of an erratic and polymorphic goddess. Modern poetry – a molecular network, a circle of stamp collectors – works directly on the plane of language, for language. To what degree could it not suggest, in a simplified way, a tension



Sixty-nine Questions

11

between force and form, between intense forces and materials of expression? The task of poetry is to aim at the heart of meaning, of codified, established meaning. How far does the emptying out go, in what vacuum does the void glimmer?

Desire and Politics

Cover Up, Girl

‘Towards evening, they dangle their still-ripening breasts over the iron lacework of the balcony so that their gauzy gowns blush to feel their nudity and, late at night, in the tow of their mamas – who are rigged in more netting and mesh than battle cruisers in full regalia – they strut through the plaza, so that men may ejaculate words in their ears, and their phosphorescent nipples blink on and off like fireflies.’1 Oliverio Girondo (1920) ‘Those who appear in businesses, plazas, or other public spaces dressed indecorously, or undress themselves in said spaces to below the minimum dress required by social decorum […] will be repressed through fine or arrest.’ Police Contravention Code Subsection no. 2-E (1946) Not everyone knows that in this day and age, if the girls of Flores2 throw out their breasts bit by bit, before a gentleman even has the chance to lean over and pick them up an officer of the law will Perlongher often wrote about police mandates – pseudo-legal instruments used by police officers as trawling nets to sweep the streets – something he himself had suffered and fought against. This article was published in Alfonsina in 1983 and signed with the pseudonym Rosa L. de Grossman. The journal was published between 1983 and 1984.

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Desire and Politics

appear. Similarly, the woman who dares to go to the market in any stage of undress will not only be subjected to the ridicule of the neighbourhood gossips: the blue weight of the state will fall upon her. It’s a known fact that a woman must not only be decent, but must appear so as well. In our prudish nation, jealous agents (jealous of what?) act as surrogate mothers, never ceasing to order us: Cover up, girl. To ensure compliance with the police contravention transcribed above, an official fashion bulletin should be circulated. On what basis do authorities determine whether an outfit is indecorous or not? Decide for yourself whether this category includes miniskirts and spaghetti straps – not to mention V-necks for good measure. What do the girls of Flores have to say about subsection 2-H (bane of gays and prostitutes), a punishable offence of up to thirty days’ imprisonment for ‘the persons of one sex or the other that publicly incite or offer the carnal act’ (signed into law 19 April 1949). Auditory ejaculators are also regulated by the catcalling subsection (2-B) – except, when a woman files a complaint, the officer responds: And what did you expect, dressed like that? We have to pray the girls don’t get it into their heads to go for a glass of claret at the posh La Molina Patisserie: they could get hit with ‘public drunkenness’ (to enforce this regulation, the legal requirement of ‘ingestion of alcohol’ is usually overlooked in the case of someone who is clearly ‘lacking funds of their own’). Stricken with panic, the woman might seek to cover herself using the coat of a nearby gentleman – fatal error: subsection 2-F punishes those who would ‘display themselves in public spaces dressed or disguised in clothes of the opposite sex’. Can’t they just slip back inside when they see the police coming? Not an option, as indicated in the text of subsection 2-G condemning: ‘prostitutes or their servants who provoke persons from a residence’. Even if they don’t charge money; it doesn’t matter. Let us take the case of Nélida: There was no intimate encounter with him, it was just friendship. Two plainclothes officers entered the bar and took us all to the station. There they ‘fabricated’ a record of prostitution for me because the man who was with me signed a statement that said he’d paid me. They put pressure on him by threatening to call his wife and tell her he was with a prostitute … Since then I’ve been ‘classified’ under 2-H.



Cover Up, Girl

17

And even if the girl never does anything to anyone, humming the lines from that famous tango, ‘Why should I care about your past, what you’ve done, what you will do’, it doesn’t matter – while they check for any ‘prior convictions’ she’ll be locked up for forty-eight hours in the shade of the blooming bars – and she won’t need to throw her body out bit by bit ‘to everyone who passes on the pavement’, because more than likely she’ll be ripped to bits right then and there. ‘We know your ways’, say Herzog’s dwarves. The girl might get sick of being taken as a prostitute in Buenos Aires and get on a bus bound for Córdoba – where since 1980 a Code of Offences has been in effect that avoids equivocations: Those persons who practise prostitution by offering themselves, provoking people, or causing a scandal will be subject to arrest and up to thirty days’ incarceration. It is understood that there is an offer of sexual relations if the woman (or gay or sexual pervert) appears in a public space in circumstances that pose a threat to public decency. In all cases, a medical venereal examination is required and, if warranted, hospitalization. (Article 22)

Each province has its own laws; the ladies of Córdoba can appeal (in the best case scenario) to a judge. But … it is the police commissioner or sub-commissioner who determines the ‘circumstances of decorum’, with three days allotted for resolution, twenty-four hours for appeal, and twenty days for the judge to decide. This means that any given woman might have to endure up to twenty-four days in jail, just because some suspicious officer casts his perverse gaze upon her … If, for ladies, modesty is of the highest importance, gentlemen must exhibit at all times the most ostentatious virility. ‘Meeting with a known pervert in the company of a minor’ (strolling past an elementary school, for example), could get you thirty days in the city of Buenos Aires (or up to ninety in Córdoba). To be considered a ‘known pervert’, it’s enough to have ‘a record’ or ‘reliable evidence undersigned by the director or section chief of the Centre of Investigations’ (Article 45 of the Penal Code). Your signature here, Sir? And just try to save yourself. If you want to stay safe, cover up, girl, always wear knee-length Chanel, a neat bun. Don’t ever loiter near the entrance to a bar. Or, even worse, don’t even think about stopping on the street to talk to someone if you don’t know their given name, surname, address,

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Desire and Politics

their mother’s hair colour and their grandmother’s petticoat size. The police could separate you and if you don’t know everything about one another, clink, you’re locked up. Don’t ever go out with a girlfriend either – don’t act like you don’t know what I mean. And, if you’re married, don’t go out without the kids: what could a mother have to do other than watch the children? And never forget what General Perón said: ‘From home to work and from work, home.’ What kind of work do you do, Miss? You’re going to have to come with me. To be continued …?

Loca Sex

‘Suffering is greatest before reaching pleasure.’

Dante Panzeri

When I returned to Buenos Aires, a few months ago, I was shocked by the constant allusions to homosexuality. On a wall in San Telmo a slogan promised: ‘We’ll rip you a new one.’ On the morning of 10 December, a group of feverish democrats harassed guards at the Casa Rosada with shouts of ‘You want dick.’ I take a taxi and the driver comments: ‘I bet the Falkland officers gave it to all those Gurkhas in the arse.’ The ghost of the Gurkha is resurrected by one of the Boys of War in an interview in El Porteño (Sept. ’83): ‘One of my comrades told me about the Gurkhas, they wore a pearl in their left ear or in the right, and the location represented either active or passive homosexuality’ (Pablo Macharowsky, class of ’63). In the same report another recruit hints that the soldiers had, beforehand, a certain training: When I was in Córdoba, before going to the Falklands, and they gave us a day off because they didn’t have any food for us, the ‘uncles’ or Perlongher published many articles in El Porteño as well as its supplement Cerdos & Peces. This essay was originally given at a conference in the Centro de Estudios y Asistencia Sexual [Centre for Sexual Studies and Assistance] and was published in the magazine’s twenty-eighth edition, in May 1984. El Porteño was published from 1982 to 1992.

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Desire and Politics

‘shirt lifters’, as they were called, would show up, they were these guys that would give you a place to stay and all the pleasures imaginable in exchange for a sexual relationship. I’d say you have to have a strong stomach to endure that but some situations will make you forget your stomach. (Marcos García, class of ’62)

It’s a fact, if you’re hungry enough, you’ll forget all about your stomach. A stroll down Lavalle will show us that, in the timid light of the recent return to democracy, desperate young men taken from home and plunged into obligatory military service post themselves on the corners, eyelashes curled like dapper young gentlemen. A ghost haunts our institutions: homosexuality. We’d have to go back to Freud’s Psychology of the Masses (1920) to root out homosexuality’s libidinous link to masculine institutions like the Military and the Church. It is a ‘sublimated’ homosexuality, to be sure, but Freud suggests that gay love is well adapted to such situations of masculine ‘collective bonds’. Boys completing their obligatory service in Pigüé or students at the seminary in Luján could do without Freud. Of course, the blossoming of same-sex desire is severely punished by divine and military law. The latter – at least this was the case around 1970 – condemned the active participant to a harsher sentence than that of the passive, under the pretence that the passive participant is ‘sick’, and therefore should not be held responsible. The active participant, on the other hand, is a criminal. That the preoccupation with homosexuality – and with morality in general – plagues our military, is a given. The first official mention of homosexuality appears, obliquely, in 1932, under the Justo dictatorship, as an ‘order of the day’, which accused suspects of paedophilia for fraternizing with under-age boys (fraternizing doesn’t mean sleeping with; it could mean having a coffee near an elementary school). Later, in 1942, the Military High School scandal shocked everyone. The revelation of cadets participating in homosexual orgies, secretly photographed, not only foretold the rise of the porn shop: it created a blemish that our leaders have been trying, ever since, to erase. By 1946, paedophilia was referred to as ‘homo-sexuality’ (hyphenated): Article 207 of the Federal Police Contravention Code of Offences prohibits ‘private meetings of homo-sexuals’; from around the same time comes the fearsome (for overuse) Article 2-H, which penalizes ‘inciting the carnal act in a public space’. Nevertheless, the notion of homosexuality itself is spelled out in the Code of Offences: whether a person is a gay



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or not is determined by ‘prior convictions’ or ‘the signature of the Department Chief’. The recentness of these laws refutes any claims that they are archaic and historic. It proves that police repression is not as spontaneous as it would like to appear. If it weren’t prohibited, would all the boys and girls go out and try it? We’ll never know: as of now you’ll get beaten for it. We locas know about suffering, in the Panzerian sense from the opening quote. The horrors of Argentina’s recent genocide – more hypocrisy of military norms: there are photos of Hitler cuddling little girls – exposed the nightmare of kidnappings and disappearances, which were not talked about before. Nevertheless, around 1969 (under Onganía’s rule), while doing my first field studies, a very well-dressed young man offered me a ride in his car. I gratefully accepted; there were two other men inside caressing each other to show that they were ‘in the know’. The outcome: three hours of panic and pallor. Stripped of my personal belongings, a prostitute gave me money to get back into town. I got off the train (I’d ended up in Olivos), and the cops stopped me. The suspected crime? Homosexuality. To talk about homosexuality in Argentina is to talk not only about pleasure but also about terror. The kidnappings, torture, robberies, incarceration, public ridicule and disgrace that subjects considered to be ‘homosexuals’ have traditionally suffered in Argentina – where harassing fags is a popular sport – predates, and perhaps helps explain, the last dictatorship’s genocide. Carlos Franqui says that in Castro’s Cuba the bloodiest battle was not revolutionaries versus counterrevolutionaries, but machos versus homos. Here in Argentina the machos didn’t need a revolution to kill the fags. And it has to be said: many of our common citizens, doughy, wellmannered, bowing and scraping, have been complicit in the daily nightmare, thanks to their prejudices, their hypocrisy, their refusal to acknowledge the issue. Let us remember what Evita said to Paco Jamandreu (as he tells it in his memoirs), when he called her from the police station: ‘That’s what you get for being a fag.’ But where is the pleasure? What should we think of the tough guys who kidnap a loca to ‘torture’ her? The officers who – it’s rumoured – take special courses to learn how to spot gays (and lesbians) by the thickness of their earlobes? What is it about homosexuality, sexuality in general, in Argentina, that makes actions as innocent as the brush of a tongue across a glans, a sphincter, capable of causing such an uproar – concretely, the erection of an entire judicial, social

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Desire and Politics

and familiar apparatus, designed to ‘go after homosexuality’? When in ’74 the fascist magazine El Caudillo proposed to ‘come down hard on homosexuals’, this ‘come down hard’ could be considered more than a slip. To give a personal example: my dad – because we locas have dads too – as I was in Brazil, a thousand kilometres away, lay awake at night (literally) worrying about what members of what black men might be profaning his precious son’s sacred anus – reserved only for poop. And my mum – what would a loca be without his mother? ‘Full of desire is the man who flees his mother’, says Lezama Lima – a woman who was proud of the fact that her sickly heart featured, as a rare case, in a medical journal, maintained that homosexuality was – like a goitre – an affliction. Well, I said to her, if you tell me your symptoms, I’ll tell you mine. We have no problem talking about pain, but pleasure is another matter. What is the logic behind this indefatigable obsession with the arses – or tongues – of others? Our chaste politicians are implicated as well. I remember the Peronist Youth of ’73 shouting: ‘We’re not fags, not cokeheads …’ Or: ‘For the fascist there’s nothing above / ripping open their arse with all our love.’ I identified so strongly with this slogan that I almost wanted to become a fascist myself … But I would’ve quickly run into – as I saw recently in Rosario – the outcry of the Decency League calling for a stand against pornography, which threatens the peace of the home … Oh, the horror! Immorality sullies us. I remember what an ‘active’ guy (vulgarly called a chongo) once told me: ‘I don’t ever turn over because I’m afraid I’ll like it.’ Sexual prohibition stokes the fear of a horrifying desire. It erects a police Paradise in opposition to a perverse Inferno. At the same time, it’s the very perversity of that imagined orgiastic hell that makes it so attractive. The antisexual paranoia makes us believe that, if our sphincter dilates or our nipples get hard, we’re ‘turning over’. We’ve gone over to the other side for good. Where will we end up? In the 1940s, Libertad Lamarque posed the question with her song ‘Fru Fru’: ‘Where is fashion going with so much innovation?’ Censorship feeds the illusion that something’s wrong with perversion and this ‘something’ is terrifying. Is it terrifying? What certainly is terrifying – palpable – is repression. It may be true that there’s pleasure in torture, but, as Sade himself said, ‘measure is required even in the depths of infamy and delirium’.1 If their passion was for piling up bodies, didn’t they get a little out of hand?



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Perversion is, in reality, the object of this ordering. The order not only represses, but also classifies. It differentiates subjects according to their pleasures: homosexual or heterosexual, vaginal or clitoral, anal or oral, penile or digital. That individuals are defined by their sexual orientation is a myth, but it’s an effective myth. But, to be sure, it hasn’t been in effect for very long: for example, the notion of homosexuality was literally invented in the nineteenth century – a product of medical knowledge combined with police control. I won’t attempt to enter into a theoretical debate on the concept of homosexuality. But the least that can be said about it is that it is very weak. It places under a common denominator an infinity of sexual acts that a person could carry out with members of the same ‘sex’ (although not always of the same gender). But, how does a committed same-sex relationship compare to a quick blow job in a subway bathroom stall? Additionally, sex, even when practised with the same person, is different every time – in this area routine is considered, whether homo or hetero, grounds for separation, legal or otherwise. So, when normalcy itself is questioned, it bears questioning as well the attempt to classify persons according to whom they sleep with. But what confuses things is that normalcy marches under the banner of heterosexuality, presented as synonymous with conjugal and monogamous love. This opens the way for a temptation: to defend ‘revolutionary’ homosexuality versus ‘reactionary’ homosexuality. Some facts, however, defy such simplification – the married fag, the guy who goes out with chicks and from time to time visits the transvestite hookers on Charcas Street, a transsexual who says of her lover: ‘He’s not homosexual, active or passive. He’s a man, all man: he likes women. I ask him why he’s with me and all he says is that he loves me’ (Shock magazine, Dec. ’83). Love, as seen by the romantics, bucks social conventions and classifications. But, one could argue, any man who has relations with another man is a homosexual, or a repressed homosexual. In truth, a large part of the gay movement (like the Grupo Gay de Bahía in Brazil) seems to be moving in that direction. And it seems almost logical: in the face of persecution, the instinct is to seek protection – in this case, a fortress of gayness strong enough to resist the tyranny of heterosexuality. If that’s the case, every one of us has to define ourselves, to ‘identify ourselves’, to ‘come out’ as either homo or hetero. This runs the risk of creating some gay utopia – a

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Desire and Politics

kind of mini-Zionism – which constitutes not a subversion, but an expansion of normality, the establishment of a kind of parallel normalcy, divided between gays and straights. It must be tempting to the straights, to rid themselves of the spectre of homosexuality, to tuck it safely away. This normalization of homosexuality creates, additionally, personalities and trends, the gay model. To be more concrete, a possible personality – the gay – becomes a model of behaviour. This normalizing operation pushes the already marginalized further towards the fringes, excluded from the party, the transsexuals, locas, chongos, and working-class gays must bear the burden of the most popular stereotypes of sexuality. Now, before addressing this issue, we must first overcome a more concrete threat: the cops. Kicking the cops out of bed, removing the police eyespot from the bedroom mirror, is an urgent necessity that should not fall solely on the shoulders of the gays. Ruth Escobar, a feminist Brazilian congresswoman, said during her campaign: ‘Women should be able to own their femininity, blacks to own their blackness, and gays to own their desire.’ Do gays have a monopoly on desire? It occurs to me that there is, in reality, a breakdown of classical normalcy, which the state’s ‘moralization by brute force’ is trying to contain. Women are essential to this breakdown, with their undermining of masculine supremacy. Guattari, co-author of Anti-Oedipus, talks about a ‘becoming-woman’ that gives way to all other becoming. Following this line of thought, we can rethink sexuality, whether homo or hetero, not as identity, but as becoming. Transformation, something that occurs naturally. Becoming-woman, becoming-queer, becoming-transgender. We’re presented with two alternatives: shed all sexual labels (gay, queen, trannie, bear, taxi boy, auntie, daddy, etc.) or build a normalizing model that immediately creates new exclusions. Loca sex, which we’ve employed as the title for this delirium, then, would be sexuality that escapes normality, that defies and subverts it. Locas dancing in the plazas, cruising abandoned warehouses, lining up in public restrooms. Talking about loca sex is listing the symptoms – penetration and ejaculation, erections, caresses, insinuations – of a fatal condition: one that corrodes normalcy from all sides; in the seduction of the doorman’s daughter,2 in the Falkland trenches, safe inside the security booth, in the churches of Córdoba where the locas prance proudly. It occurs, in its pedagogic-paedophilic



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version, in the unsuspecting ‘Hymn to Sarmiento’ which says: ‘childhood, your hope and your happiness’. We must be careful not to compress all the unique expressions of sexuality into one fixed personality: ‘the homosexual’. Instead, we must unleash all possible sexualities, make way for all becomings. An American writer speaks of idiosex: the notion comes from idiolect, a person’s particular usage of language: idiosex, particular usage of sexuality. That each individual may discover, free from classifications, their particular pleasure. My idea is not to remove gayness from the social field, to create for it a territory separate from the pure, the good, the martyrs and the illustrious. But to set sexuality free right where it is. To pull the bed out from under the covers (we can’t go from the jail cell to the nightclub without stepping out onto the pavement). And, like Mao said – although I think the context was a bit different – ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ (flowers of evil?). And a parting word: what we want is not persecution, incarceration, discrimination or assassination; we don’t even want healing, psychoanalysis, explanation, tolerance or understanding: all we want is to be left to our own desires.

Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground

Apocalyptic cries rise up from the democratic desert to warn of the horror: the Destape1 will destabilize us! The seismic metaphor (‘destabilization’, you might say: it moves me) replaces the fixation with pathology (the germ is a form of subversion). Everyone participates in the quaking carnival, their words mingling with the wild howl: mothers inspired by Delacroix walk hand in hand with anarchists and narcos, weepy fairies ride on the backs of abortionist divorcees. Pornography (see Gombrowicz) is as dangerous – perish the thought – as legalization of marihuana, Optional Military Service, as evil as abortion or divorce: all ills to be excised by the white-coated Mafia. It is a moralizing delirium: it aims to separate liberation from liberalism. ‘Now that we’re free, we must educate ourselves in order to use our freedom properly’, Papa might say, tucking away your exposed bra strap. Gathering all individual evils into one conspiratorial conglomeration, the spokesmen of prohibition caution against the horrors we do not want to confront – or even speak of. They inflate, in this way, This article was signed with the name Rosa L. de Grossman and published in the journal Alfonsina on 26 January 1984. It should be noted that the ‘Civic Passbook’ referenced was reserved only for women; the National Identification Document used by men was known as their ‘Enrolment Passbook’, an allusion to their enrolment in the obligatory military service.



Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground

27

the illusion of sin: something (it’s better not to ask what) is wrong with marihuana; something is wrong with homosexuality; if you get divorced, watch out, you’ll go completely over to the other side. Upon close inspection, it’s clear that there’s no cause for alarm, there’s nothing wrong. Each one of the ‘destabilizing’ crises has been raging for ages, and the seismograph has yet to burst. The very illegality of these ‘transgressive’ behaviours is what lends them their aura of enchantment. And the proliferation of prohibitions only serves, in the end, to multiply intimidation and terror (Corpses, corpses …). Couples form, separate, and form new couples with such frequency that matrimony (with judge and witness) could be simply done away with to give notary publics and confetti companies a break from their wearisome workload. Something similar happens with abortion: in practice, it occurs – although to the tragic tempo of clandestineness. And many of those who denounce it, irate over the murder of foetuses, clamour without scruples for the massacre of young soldiers, in the flower of their youth, in the trenches. There are even those who say that all drug addicts (or subversives, or gays) should be done away with. To do away with homosexuality, crowding the gays together in little cells doesn’t seem like the best method. ‘Unnatural acts’ have not ceased to be consummated merely because they are prohibited (not by law but by ‘police edicts’). If it were permitted, would we all rush to the nearest port in search of an infallible Gurkha? Marihuana has not disappeared either: just the opposite, its consumption seems to have increased since 1976 – when Isabel’s Parliament approved Law 20.771, penalizing possession. Prior to that it had been a minor offence, on par with ‘inebriation and other intoxications’. After the passing of the law, police raided hundreds of houses to root out a single joint – causing much more damage to the user than whatever effect was meant to be avoided. I’ve seen on the walls of Rosario messages painted by the ‘Decency League’ in condemnation of pornography. I’d like to see the country flooded with smut, so that these decent people could at least have an idea of what they are denouncing. Have they all travelled to Miami (or São Paulo) to see real pornography? What passes as porn in this country is so pathetic that a high school hygiene manual is more titillating. Ladies, don’t get too excited! The International League of Sin has yet to be established. We had a meeting planned, but most of

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the girls were stoned, others sodomized, the rest all had appointments with their gynaecologists. What’s worse, the ones pushing for Optional Military Service met up with the gays in the opium den and decided to change their demands: we’ll now be asked to show our Civic Passbooks.

Brazil: The Transvestite Invasion

An unprecedentedly perfect breast, swathed only in a sheer purple scarf, shimmies before the window of a passing Passat. The vigilant, lascivious driver lowers the glass and grabs the neon nipple, the better to lick it with his drooling tongue. This scene, shocking as it might seem, is commonplace in the nights of São Paulo’s city centre and in the vice districts, ‘bocas’, across Brazil’s major cities in general. The daring transvestite is not alone: she glides, on the prowl, among a multitude of comrades, each more extravagant than the next. One, a stunning blonde, adorned only by a fox fur hanging from her neck and winding between her legs (carefully covering the – empty? – space of her bulge), spreads the cheeks of her exaggerated family-sized buttocks as she kneels on all fours against a car fender. Another, wearing panties (those large women’s panties reminiscent of undergarments from the 1950s) emits a farting sound from her heart-shaped mouth, loud and squealing. A third is decked in a leopard skin slung diagonally across her chest, laying bare one glossy, bulging breast. A masquerade of fantastical fashion, plucked from a nightmare by Hieronymus Bosch or a serialized novel on surreal sexuality (this is why surrealism never caught on in Brazil; it’s not necessary, the country itself is surreal): the display of delirious attire, marks, with its turgid twists and turns, the entry (vaselined) to an infernal paradise, an abyss of immoral pleasures. Essay published in El Porteño, August 1985, ‘Cerdos & Peces’ supplement.

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Access to these cheeks, inflated like tyres (not a metaphor, the ladies inject themselves with industrial silicone – originally created as automobile glue – to appear rounder, fuller: after a while, the silicone leaks out, their cheeks sag down around their thighs or calves, giving them a monstrous appearance), costs several thousand cruzeiros, the equivalent of ten or fifteen dollars. But the price goes beyond the exchange of cash, beyond the scratch of pens on cheques (which circulate freely here): it is the price of leaning into the abyss, the price of risk, danger, destruction, of pushing the limit between pleasure and death where Bataille located sex as transgression, as potlatch (ritual sacrifice), as a ‘little death’ (climax). Climax lies inside the labyrinth of gleaming breasts, their fullness designed to distract from the rolled-up penis, tucked away like a precious parcel so that the surprise of its greasy head, beneath vaporous tulle, will be even more exciting. Approaching the adventure is, however, increasingly simple: the transvestites have become, by the points of their stilettos, denizens of the perverse tropical nights. It’s interesting to note how the invasion of transvestites has advanced. There have always been, in Brazil, transgender prostitutes. But their emergence en masse coincides with the glimmers of the desbunde (from the Brazilian bunde, meaning ‘arse’; the Brazilian transition to democracy), and constitutes, paradoxically, an effect undesired by its proponents. The currently fading Brazilian gay movement, at its peak (1979–81), initially condemned transvestites, whom they accused of giving gays a ‘folkloric’ image. The new gays wanted, by liberating their invisible sexuality, to step away from the feminine prototype that confined them to the grey area between ridiculous woman and failed woman. But in parallel to these conflicts – taking the streets, not only through activism and manifestations, but also through their frenzied cruising – the growing population of transvestites (so large that it has become a non-traditional product for export: Brazilian transvestites have been seen causing commotion in the parks of Boulogne) has gained ground. Armed with Gillette razors, the transvestites push prostitutes off their traditional patches of pavement – such as the Avenida Atlántica de Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, or the boca do luxo (zone of luxury prostitution) in São Paulo (the prostitutes’ defeat is verified by unlikely witnesses, like the anthropologist María Dulce Gaspar in her dissertation on the ‘boys of prostitution’).



Brazil: The Transvestite Invasion

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It’s obvious that this increase in supply of a femininity that is as exaggerated as it is ‘false’ must coincide with an equivalent desirous demand. Who, then, are the clients of these transvestites?

The clients Shy, often tidy men, bearing traces of their bourgeois and almost always conjugal normality (a discarded tie peeking from a suit pocket), the clients lie hidden in the ample mass of the very middle class which, publicly, is scandalized by the aggressive advance of androgyny. The ‘ladies’ are not content to display themselves only in the condemned vice districts, but rather fan out into bourgeois neighbourhoods: they’ve laid claim, for example, to the avenue that leads to the chaste University of São Paulo, and they make love (as well as war: fights among the transvestites are notoriously raucous) in the immaculate gardens of red-roofed stone mansions. Distinguished gentlemen – business executives, professors, bureaucrats, computer technicians, bank managers – set aside their ostensible morals as they slither along the slippery pavements where the transvestites stretch their venereal paws. The results of the sexual encounter often last long after the orgasm, spiralling into extortion: it’s a relatively easy task, not only because the clients’ status places them in guaranteed risk, but also because their subsidized lovers make use of convincing methods: it is sometimes enough to just wave an arm at the terrified petits bourgeois, an arm already lined with scars that the false women have inflicted upon themselves so as to evade, when locked up, the guards’ confiscatory aggression. And what is it that these micro-capitalist clients seek, in their daring incursions into marginality and the strong emotions of the lower stratum? The São Paulo Secretary of Security (1982–83) has manifested his concern: ‘I’ve been informed’ – he declared to the local press – ‘by confidential informants, that the transvestites’ clients seek out their masculine aspects, not the feminine.’ Perversion upon perversion, which, according to the police, makes the unsuspecting client more vulnerable to extortion (sphincters dilating at the confusing pressure of a fake breast). As consequence of this ‘confusion’, in the market of the transvestites, two parallel prices are negotiated: the client who wants to be sodomized usually pays double. But the contracting parties are, on this delicate point, extremely discreet. Through the window,

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passwords are exchanged: ‘With hormones, or without.’ It seems quite cryptic, but it means the following: the use of female hormones (which develops the breasts) weakens virility and potency. The transvestites, in order to maintain their supposed femininity without losing the lucrative charm of duplicity, resort to the dangers of silicone, taking the falsification of desire to a nonhuman level, wagering on death in the name of pleasure.

A Marica Is Murdered

The first thing you see are bodies: bodies smeared with gazes, leaving them glossy; bodies like layers of tulle ornamented with a quick quivering wink; the serpentine ivy of bodies entwined (draped in erection) around the corner lamppost; bodies, some fixed, tensed in their marble rigidity, mouths positioned in the preamble to panting, the arrow hitting its mark; other bodies, erratic, syrupy rails gleaming, spidery caresses along the curb of the well-trod pavement. Bodies prowling for pleasure which later find rigor mortis. Amid the swarm of rumpled sheets, the traitorous ruins of the celebration, the festive turned funerary: necks into which fingers have pressed too hard, torsos bludgeoned beyond recognition, bleary blue stains in the eye sockets, lips ripped open with a towel for a tongue, bullet holes, muddy boot marks on butt cheeks. A total transformation of the body’s state. Why must this journey be made from one shore to the other? Why must desire provoke (or even invite) death? Why must the drift of the turbulent nocturnal current brutalize the very thing – without minimizing its force or weight – so desirous of caress? Why must the penetrations of Of all the essays Perlongher wrote on violence against gays, this is perhaps the most literary. It was published in the journal Fin de Siglo, no. 16, in October 1988, and also in Communicaçoes do ISER year 9, no. 35, Rio de Janeiro, 1990 (‘Uma bicha é assassinada’). Fin de Siglo was published between 1988 and 1989.

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pleasure – friction shredding the (knotty) polyester nests – carry to fatal excess its perforating lore? Voluptuous volutes: a multiplicity of perspectives all jostling to peek into the dark recesses where the meeting between the loca and the macho turns fatal. ‘Homosexual Murdered in Quilmes.’ From time to time, the violent death of a loca, with macabre pleasure, saturates the sensationalist headlines with slime and soot, competing, in a nearby column, with the stats on death from AIDS. Both deaths are tinged, in the end, with a common tone. What imbues them seems to be a certain echo of expiratory ritual sacrifice. The murder of a fag is answered, in secret delight, with the ironic refrain: ‘It’s no crime to rob a thief.’ A few months back, a wave of gay murders swept through Brazil. Between November 1987 and February of the following year, a hot summer, a score of victims. As fatality would have it, among the dead were well-known celebrities (‘Wow, this fag was famous’, exclaimed an inspector over a corpse wearing only panties): there was a theatre director, a few journalists, fashion designers, hairdressers. AIDS, it seemed, with its bombastic campaign, wasn’t enough – the veritable ascent of Hades. Even more forceful methods were required. The gunning down of transsexuals in the murky alleys of São Paulo was fabulously attributed by police spokesmen to an AIDS patient out for revenge – but the crime had unequivocal paramilitary characteristics. In the same way that the death of a gay is almost unavoidably linked, at the moment, to AIDS, so police repression, as evidenced by these exquisite corpses, is associated with what the liberationist ideologues of the 1960s called homophobia: a strong fear of homosexuality in society at large. The cards are shuffled, you’re dealt an arse, shots are fired. Far from being exclusive to tropical pavements, the blood of gays also splashes cobblestones farther south. Who could forget the series of executions carried out in the final throes of Argentina’s last dictatorship, under the hateful glare of the lost Falkland fjords? Or, the drive-by shooting of transsexual prostitutes audaciously displaying their soft parts alongside the Panamericana Highway? Both cases beg the question: is it all a grand fascist scheme (like the Death Squadron or the Triple A)? Or, is it that a certain climate of contagious terror pulls at the already taut chains of the underworld, toppling its population into the abyss (‘when one person starts killing us, they all start killing us’, declared a taxi boy during the wave of crimes in Buenos Aires)?

A Marica Is Murdered

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In a little book recently published in São Paulo, El pecado de Adan [The Sin of Adam], two young journalists, Vinciguerra and Maia, went undercover behind the scenes in the gay ghetto, investigating the relationship between killers and their victims. Some of the murderers were almost certainly police officers or soldiers and several of the crimes harkened back to the Death Squadrons (the paramilitary commando teams focused on exterminating the lower class and intervening in the wars of the underworld). They involved hands tied behind the victims’ backs, mouths stuffed with towels, the defiling of genitalia or inscriptions carved in the flesh: all methods employed by the Kafkaesque machine. The investigation didn’t uncover any conspiracy, any organized plan, just a vague reference to a sense of justice being served. What justice was it in this case? First, what do we talk about when we talk about violence? Beyond the public’s outrage – which does not compensate, fully, their not so secret delight – it’s not productive to think of violence as such, as a fact in itself. Violence – says Deleuze referencing Foucault – ‘expresses well the effect of a force on something, some object or being. But it does not express the power relation, that is to say the relations between force and force, an action upon an action.’1 In the case of antigay violence, what force is involved? Put another way: what are the forces in conflict, what is the field of forces that affects the clash of the two? These forces converge in the anus; it’s all about the use of the anus. The privatization of the anus, you could say following Anti-Oedipus, is an essential step to establishing the power of the head (logo-ego-centric) over the body: ‘only the mind is capable of shitting’. With the blockage and the permanent obsession with cleanliness (the cottony fingering) of the sphincter, natural flatulence is supressed, sublimated. If a masculine society is – as Freud proposed in Psychology of the Masses – libidinously homosexual, the ability to contain the fluids (blue sludge) that threaten to dissolve all social masks will depend, in large part, on the strength of the muscle. To be shat upon seems to be the greatest danger, an irredeemable disgrace (in El Fiord by Osvaldo Lamborghini, not reaching the chamber pot in time unleashes the wrath of the Loco; Bataille, for his part, saw incontinence as the organic return to animalism). Controlling the sphincter marks, then, something like a ‘point of subjectification’. The centrality of the anus constitutes the continent subject.

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A certain organization of the organism, hierarchical and historical, has relegated the anus to the exclusive function of excretion – the anus does not feel pleasure. The western obsession with the uses of the arse smells fishy; remember the sacrifice (prior to their impaling?) of the Sodomites discovered by the eye of God. While the progression from Theology to Medicine as the science of the body has led to improved treatment, moving for example from flames to injections, sterile does not necessarily mean less hysterical and treatment is no less painful because it comes wrapped in thin, transparent latex. Hocquenghem’s arguments in Homosexual Desire, which looked at the tireless persecution of gays from the perspective of the sphincter (‘The homosexuals are the only ones who make constant libidinous use of the anus’), seemed to blame the orgiastic inflation of the gay liberation movement and its ‘true laboratories of sexual experimentation’ (Foucault), for having lost, in favour of libertinism, its validity. The spectre of AIDS has, in this day and age, reactivated our ancestral fear of fluids, terror over contact between semen and shit, the sticky pearl of life defiled by the vileness of faeces. Reactivating, in a word, the issue of the arse. ‘For the fascist / there is nothing above / ripping open his arse / with all my love.’ ‘Rip him a new arsehole’ or ‘stick it up your arse’; the poor soul who always ‘gets his arse handed to him’. When I say the word car, a car passes through my mouth. When I say arse … the anus, the cause of all this scandal (… if not to say desire …) rests on my tongue. (Speaking of bad punchlines, I can’t resist the urge to recount the plot of ‘La Causa Justa’ by Osvaldo Lamborghini: two men jokingly banter: ‘If I were a fag, you’d stick it right up me’, ‘If you were a fag, it’d reach all the way up to your throat’ – and other similar poetic phrases – when along comes a Japanese man, who mistakes the conditional mood for the present tense and, believing that every oath must be carried out, forces the men at knifepoint to make good on their word.) The production of intensities, affirmed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, defies, undermines and disturbs the organization of the organism, the hierarchical distribution of the organs in the doctor’s anatomical diagram. If someone passes gas, how much does it smell like the escape of desire? If desire escapes, building its own plane of consistency, it’s the plane of the body, the body of society, that will feel, on a molecular level, the vicissitudes of that escape.

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In short, the persecution of homosexuality inscribes a treaty (of hygiene, of good manners, manieras) on the body; tying up the arse is, in some way, tying the individual to civilization – Bataille would say ‘humanity’. Retain, contain. And if this anal obsession, link or ligament to the lingam, appears to fade in the face of the new gay ‘identity’, it is because this last form of subjectification shifts towards a ‘person to person’ relationship (gay/gay) which is, in the marginalized passions of the queer and the fag, anonymous sex in vacant lots, basically a relationship between ‘organ and organ’ – penis/arse, arse/mouth, tongue/cock, depending on the dynamic of the hook-up; this fits here, this is inserted there … Homosexuality, according to Hocquenghem, is always anal. Shitty fag. The gays lurking in the shadows of the erect pines, looking with the arse – eye of Gabes, the bronze ring – burying their spear in glandulous netherlands, modulating, with tentative step, fluttering lashes, a thread of drool, the serpent, the bet they’re sure to lose. The temptation to get lost in temptation: cruising into the centre, into the centre of the night, into the night and into the centre; to tango through abandoned outdoor spaces; crouching – with the cunning of the hydra or the ivy – in the gloss of urine from the ‘T-rooms’ in the feline furtiveness opening portals to desire amid the anodyne march of the cloned masses. If this desirous drift, this sexual roaming, takes the form of a hunt, it’s because the jungle is fraught with fatal dangers. It is this danger, this gaping abyss (‘I’ve never lacked for patience, arse, or terror’, says Lamborghini’s Marquis de Sebregondi), this dizzying delight – to leave: to leave oneself – this trembling, this reverberating glimmer, this sordidness, this extreme tension, this presence of death, which homosexual wanderings (curious seduction!), cruise defiantly towards – adorned with crest and plume, and full of cocksure pride – as much as they might claim otherwise; as much as they might regret it: they cannot glance backwards, or it will devour them. Let’s search for an example beyond the frenzied neon cruising: Hell Has No Limits, by Donoso. In a dusty Chilean brothel, a transsexual prostitute (Manuela) lets herself be seduced, fully aware of the danger, by a macho truck driver, for whom, after first rejecting him, she puts on her best red dress, which later serves as crown and shroud after she sullies the macho’s hair with her mucilage. Here, raw, intense desire challenges death; it is defeated. In less extreme cases, the tempting pull of the abyss – with it swirls and ripples – directs the gay’s nomadic drift. Isn’t there a kind

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of ‘leaving the self’ in that ‘cruising’ to see what might turn up? By some mirrored inversion, the law interrupts this searching escape, creating the false notion that what is being evaded is not death but arrest, thus dissolving (or disguising) the intensity of the escape and letting it pass as a mere transgression of the law. We’re both near and far from Bataille: near, because in him the law gleams as the creator of transgression; far, because the ‘organized disorder’ – the passionate vibrations, the wasteful loss of the jewel to the mud – doesn’t quite fit into the supposed reversal of the law, in relation to which it affirms the difference of an irreducible operation. Although the nomadic impulse is a form of escapism, this does not make it romantic – just the opposite: it is an escape from normalcy (a break from the discipline of family, school, work; in the case of thugs and prostitutes, a break from the demands placed on the body and, sometimes, on the personality, etc.). This opens onto a minefield. Let’s take the case of the taxi boys (called michés in Brazil), male prostitutes who give the artificial appearance of hypermasculinity as an outward denial of homosexuality, demanded by their paedophile clients who seek young, non-gay males. It is from amongst the ranks of michés and taxi boys, hustlers in America, chaperos in Spain, tapins in France, and the whole range of con-artist, lower-class, uprooted, runaway or simply confused boys, all passengers in transit through the pleasures of hell, that the very murderers of gays tend to be recruited. It’s as if the effort to sustain the burden of such a powerful representation – the weight of all machismo resting on the member of a fresh young adolescent – is inscribed, in a way more like Lamborghini’s carving than like Sarduy’s tattooing, so deeply on the body that it restricts its movement. Genet contrasts – observes Sartre – the rigidity of the gigolo’s body with the fragrant silkiness of the transsexual: ‘The turgescence that the male feels as the aggressive stiffening of a muscle will be felt by Genet as the blossoming of a flower.’ The mask of virility that the gigolo dons for the tournament of libidinous skill – the emphasized curve of the buttocks, the careful padding of the crotch, the voice drawn up from the balls … all this intense regulation of the superficial layers, occurs, so to say, ‘before’ the over-codification in whose name it is internalized and functions. If the gigolo’s marmoreal rigidity and flexed muscles seem to request – the smooth glide of a hand over the thigh into the depths of the sacred grotto, an overly affectionate embrace, or the budding of a certain love – microfascist outbursts, attacks on their clients and

A Marica Is Murdered

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providers in which the material gain of a robbery cannot explain the voluptuous cruelty of the violence, one can also conclude that microfascism is contained in each gesture, in each detail of the masonry of ‘normal’ masculinity distilled by the michés into a libidinous quality – habitually hidden in the sedentary figure of the heterosexual male – and uncorked in the orgies of the world of the night. ‘Machismo = Fascism’, read an old slogan of the tiny Gay Liberation Front in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the soldier-like semblance of the macho male is an indicator of the fascism that fills his head. And when he murders a marica he is trying to stamp out his own becoming-woman.

Lust and Violence in the World of the Night

A certain pious perspective, of Christian persuasion, pervades the discourse on urban violence. Even the well-meaning rail against it with the rage of someone who imagines some ‘social contract’ is being violated. This perspective overlooks, or relegates to the background, a fundamental issue. The succession of thefts, robberies, murders and all manner of larcenous behaviour that provides daily fodder for citizens’ paranoid nightmares leads, ultimately, to expressions of a more visceral violence, which intersects all social planes, setting against each other poor and rich, black and white, women and men, children and adults, and painting a picture of generalized social war. This never-ending war is disguised as political, hoisted up to the political plane, as Foucault would say, or better yet, the more mundane ‘micropolitical’ plane. The fact that this violence is swathed in paternalist gestures and marked by glacial distances doesn’t diminish the destructive quality of this hand-to-hand combat, which may end in death, but which is imaginarily situated outside the polished bourgeois strongholds, exiled (further feeding the paranoia) to the fringes of society. These fringes are well populated. The ‘settling’ means of control (in the nineteenth-century, spatial movement became social deviation, pathologized and censured by the police), with its ‘panoptic’ logic, tends towards obsessive identification and Published in Folha de São Paulo, ‘Cidades’ section, 14 August 1987.



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classification of underworld nomads. It’s as if the marginalized populations themselves were marking the differences (sometimes subtle) between them in some orgy of labelling, a baroque predilection for codification in the escapist whirlwind. What’s certain is that these marginalized populations, the poor, the juvenile delinquents, criminals, junkies, etc., are scattered across a wide range of micro-territories, sometimes thrown together in inextricable emulsions, which mark varying degrees of rupture from the social order. At the heads of these marginal trails, at the very point of bifurcation, is an impulse to escape. In a study of male prostitutes (michés), in São Paulo’s city centre, it becomes clear how this escape (from family, work, from rural areas, from the periphery, from poverty …) tosses masses of defenceless teens to the gluttonous jaws of nocturnal paedophiles. This creates the conditions for an obscure market, where young bodies interact with old, poor with rich, effeminate with masculine. However, this interaction, centred around bodies, doesn’t eradicate, like in some romantic fairytale, the clash of contradictions, the skirmishes of a dirty war waged in the realm of the sensual. This leery passion is not free from violence: it looms like a constant threat, embodied in heartbreaks that are far from lyrical – eighty gay men murdered, most at the hands of their paying lovers, in a span of three years, according to the calculations of the Grupo Gay de Bahía. Additionally, the very territory where these encounters are consummated comprises a kind of no-man’s land, populated by the immediate necessities of the various marginalized tribes. Whores, michés, transsexuals, pimps, thieves, and sundry underworld characters dispute areas of influence or alliance, with one constant presence: the police – whose position of exteriority and superiority to this ‘under’ world generates a web of complicities and vengeances. Traces of nomadism – criminalized and medicalized – survive in nocturnal dalliances, in the cruising for sex and drugs, in the shadowy illicit transactions that occur in the night, all of them military operations – armed or not – in the diffuse war waged in the basements of the social sphere. The mass media turns up the volume on these cruel crimes (and their cruel retaliations), creating a horrifying spectacle. A mythology of bloody bodies, raped, mutilated, is the highlight reel of the sacking and plundering of society. Perhaps through some mysterious connection – as Bataille believed – between eroticism and death, reinforced by the persistence of the

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images on the screens, this violence becomes paradoxically exciting. The violence is also desired. It would be a bit audacious to propose that this dark desire might manifest itself in the plane of bodily pleasure, slowing or intoxicating, in the voluptuous crush of bodies, the pull of the abyss that, in the frenzy of generalized violence, sucks the bodies down to their death.

Corporal Order

In the crisis of the AIDS epidemic, it’s hard to say what’s more terrifying: the devastating effects the disease has on the physical body, riddled with a succession of shocking symptoms; or the other, less ‘physical’ effects in the sphere of public opinion, which, while merely ‘discursive’, have as much impact on the contemporary codification of the body, its passions and its actions. The two spheres seem almost inseparable. AIDS touches on a sore spot in modern society: sexuality. The epidemic’s effects extend beyond its victims’ individual suffering to the body of society where waves of panic incite moralization and normalization of sensual unions. About the disease itself, there is still much to be learned. Nevertheless, we can already imagine the sweeping regulations that may be implemented under the terrifying shadow of the evil disease. Shadows are increasingly dispelled as previously ‘unmentionable’ acts are illuminated, out of medical necessity, by sophisticated torches that shine into ever more intimate nooks of sexual practices. The uniqueness of AIDS is not so much this panoptic curiosity, but the intersection of clinical knowledge and mass media. The effects of this diffusion along the threads of society most often create a kind of morbid fascination: the terrorizing imagery of marred bodies and Perlongher was a regular contributor to Folha de São Paulo, one of the most prominent newspapers in Brazil. This article was published in the ‘Trends and Debates’ section, 21 February 1987.

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crude descriptions of anal coitus detailing the depth of ejaculation, the vigour of fellatio, and the lethality of a kiss; all the particulars of these promiscuous men and their diabolical deeds. More than merely medical, the compulsory condom that contains the phlegmy spasm may belie some symbolic or transparent regulation of this passionate exchange of fluids. But this regulation of the body, meanwhile, extends. In the absence of a cure, ‘prevention’ is the only weapon to combat AIDS. To lessen the probability of the virus’s transmission, one must lessen the quantity, ubiquity and intensity of their sexual interactions. In light of the increased incidence of the syndrome, in the western world, among the ‘high-risk’ gay community, this implies intervention in the inter-masculine circuits in order to ‘sanitize’ or ‘disinfect’ the threatened population. Although the focus is mainly on the gays, the heterosexual majority is implicated as well, liberated women and libertine husbands urged to mend their ways. The ‘progressive’ approach, more rational and sensible, calls for a change in sexual habits and a transition to the more innocuous forms of ‘safe sex’. The other, more ‘conservative’ approach tends to transform ‘prevention’ into ‘repression’, either by demanding changes in legislation to halt the unregulated use of the body (still spiteful of the individual’s right to freedom of bodily pleasures), or through fits of ‘divine ire’ that rail against the ‘abominable sin’ of sodomy and indulgences of the flesh. In the times of the Spanish Inquisition, sodomy was considered – with good reason – ‘the vice of the clergy’. It would make sense, then, that the rising number of AIDS cases is of heightened concern for the church. While these two perspectives – the ‘progressive’ and the ‘conservative’ – may clash, they also overlap. As much as it may try to remain strictly scientific, medical discourse is not immune to the pressures and prejudices of society. This builds obstacles to treating patients, accentuated by the precarious public hospital system and the propagandistic nature of the campaign against AIDS. The constant flow of information and misinformation drowns out scientific assertions, further marginalizing gays and other ‘deviants’ (such as drug users), with ritualistic exclusion that includes ridicule, insult and eviction of all those found ‘guilty’ of being HIV positive. What is imposed, then, in the face of AIDS is a kind of corporal order, a medically prescribed regulation of sexuality, obstructing the labyrinths of passion that lead to sensory pleasure. In the process of medicalization and control of life, of confiscation and prohibition



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of death (the illusion of immortality subtly defeated), the aim is to block all possible points of escape, to fill in the fault lines where passionate encounters may spark. Or, maybe, among the affected populations, it’s actually a delicate balance between the sexual desire and the fear of death. In the end, the power of desire should not be overlooked if it means saving a life.

Avatars of the Boys of the Night

São Paulo. A certain nomadic pulse throbs through the city. A pulse that doesn’t usually manifest itself in the bright light of day. One must know where to find it, not in the glaring carnality of the city centre but in the muted margins, in the journeys into the night where they flash, always tentatively, their mysterious charm, a transparent swarming that almost manages to go unnoticed. A subtle line of black lights often marks these semi-clandestine outcroppings in the depths of the city’s shadows. However, this conjunction of isolated points of escape is reluctant to reveal the vastness of the subversion it avows. The torches carried by these urban nomads do not converge into a blazing bonfire, but remain a succession of pale flames, subtly recognizable symbols of a difference that, though radical, only ventures a weak glow of sombre smouldering embers. Some of these circuits operate wholly within broader patterns of circulation. But while linked with more generic and ubiquitous mechanisms, they are branded as disquietingly odd and remain This essay was written as Perlongher was finishing O negocio do miché and can be considered a miniature version of his thesis, an ‘authorial experiment’. It was published as ‘Vicissitudes do miche’, in Temas IMESC, vol. IV no. 1, São Paulo, 1987; as ‘Deseo y derives urbanas’, in Farenheit 450 no. 4, Buenos Aires, 1989; as ‘Avatares de los muchachos de la noche’, in Nueva Sociedad no. 109, Caracas, 1990; and as ‘Les vicissitudes des garçons de la nuit’, in Chimeres no. 10, Paris 1990/91, directed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.



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somewhat removed from the body of normal society. The social (or microsocial) practice of male prostitution occurs thanks to one such overlap: masses of underage teenage boys displaced by poverty and masses of gays trawling society’s margins for the slippery jellyfish of pleasure. In this search, a variety of social mechanisms enter into play. Desire, mobilized and at the same time reterritorialized by money, constitutes a reversal of the major binary oppositions that intersect and segment the body of society: oppositions of class (rich/ poor), of age (young/old), of sex (macho/marica), intensify differences in the production of pleasure. What is the business of the miché?1 How and where is it carried out? A perspective somewhere between impressionist and surrealist is expressed in the ‘slight nausea at the sight of the bodies lined up …’ (written by a character from the underworld of male prostitution). Many of us have passed them, without necessarily knowing the kind of transaction being consummated in that nocturnal circulation of bodies. The first thing you see is the exaggeratedly macho appearance: tight faded jeans hugging the sculpted virile spectacle; rustic fabrics, more opaque than shiny, clinging viscously to an accentuated protuberance: these overexposed bodies are a simulation of rigidity, of the various meanings of hardness. Beauty, in the rough circuits of street prostitution, is won not through exercise, but through hard labour, through poverty. What is being sold is a working-class machismo (machismo that would be, according to Bourdieu,2 constitutive of the classic opposition bourgeois/proletariat, assigning the latter to a feminine submission), these lined up bodies provoke (slight nausea) a sordid fascination, they convey in their rugged and cynical smiles the promise of a passionate adventure that defies, as it heightens, all risks. This spectacle is carried out at the intersection of multiple social coordinates. The zones of male prostitution constitute knots in a fluid network. Each zone is a micro-territoriality that forms part of another surface, wider and more diffuse. The size of said territory is evidenced in the urban space – viewing the city not only from the perspective of the architecture rising up from it, but also from the currents that circulate through it. On the empirical plane, the ‘miché zones’ of São Paulo’s city centre are located within the so-called ‘gay ghetto’. The misuse of this term is immediately discernible. While in North America it refers to residential neighbourhoods, in the case of São Paulo it is used to delimit zones of socio-erotic circulation and encounter. If the term ‘ghetto’ holds some ethnic

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connotation, the vernacular ‘boca’ (mouth) evokes orifices. Applied not only to the zones of prostitution – differentiating between boca do luxo (luxury) for high-end prostitution and boca do lixo (trash) for low-end prostitution – it extends also to other marginal transactions: boca do fumo (smoke) for the trafficking of marihuana, etc. The adjacency of the various bocas of the sexually marginalized (who threaten sexual reproduction) and the economically marginalized (who threaten social productivity) implies a link between homosexuality and marginalization that remains effective despite the modern-day demands for gays’ rights and dignity. The miché acts like a kind of bridge between marginalized groups, given his anchoring in the lower classes and his close relationship to delinquency. This relationship is not limited to the abstract, but is visible in the solidarities between various marginalized groups behind the bars of their local police station where they all end up, from time to time, under lock and key, sedentariness imposed by the judicial machine as punishment for nomadic excesses. In the intimacy of the jail cell, the criminals protect the michés (who, according to them, ‘are fighting the fight’) and the transsexual prostitutes protect the gays. The characters involved in this network of transactions begin to take shape. One must avoid the temptation to think of them as ‘identities’ and see them instead as points of calcification along the networks of flows (marginal paths and progressions). The nomenclatures are inscribed on the bodies, and associations proliferate from there, confounding sociological attempts to decipher them. Names – tickets of entry, more than ontological christenings – in practice carry a trace of insulting carnality: marica,3 miché, tranny, auntie, daddy, fairy, queen, gym queen, chicken queen, and the successive combinations and reformulations (so many nomenclatures in just a few square blocks!). This classification system is so baroque that the inflation of signifiers could be compared to the number of pagan deities in the Roman Empire, as recorded by Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy: ‘For each connection, a divine name, for each cry, intensity and multiplication brought about by experiences both expected and unexpected, a little god […] which in fact is of no use, but which is a name for the passage of emotions’4 – the incompatibility of simultaneous figures erodes any illusion of identity. When the genealogy of this classificatory dispersion is drawn, however, it becomes clear that the proliferation results from the clash of two models of masculine homosexuality, based on Peter



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Fry’s diagram:5 an archaic model, popular and hierarchical, which centres on the dichotomy between macho/marica (in which ‘the marica is lower than the sole of the macho’s shoe’) and another ‘modern’ model, more middle class and egalitarian, according to which the more effeminate gay no longer submits to a virile lover (who isn’t considered gay), but two openly gay persons are considered equal to another (gay/gay relationship). The miché occupies, in this theoretical framework, the masculine pole, whereas the transsexual – the miché’s polar opposite in the world of ‘male prostitution’ – would occupy the feminine pole. The expression ‘male prostitution’ seeks, precisely, to highlight the distance between the two poles. While the transsexual seeks an extreme version of femininity, capable, according to Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus,6 of activating a becoming-woman, the miché’s virility represents, if not an imitation, a paradoxical exacerbation of the majority model of the socially dominant Man, which corresponds to him anatomically. Between the two poles – miché/transsexual – are a thousand variations, referred to using nomenclature that delimits the degree of separation from orthodox masculinity: a fairy gigolo, a gay gigolo, etc. Again, these nomenclatures do not determine identities, but merely serve as nametags in the passageways of passion. In fact, a macho gigolo could become a gay gigolo by merely changing location. The variation could even occur in situ: ‘I went to a party with a client I was out with. There were a bunch of taxi-boys and fairies there. But I drank too much and I started to fairy it up, I started getting all effeminate and I turned into a fairy. Then the loca I was with started acting all macho and started fighting over me with the other michés who wanted to fuck me.’ As a general rule the michés are not or do not consider themselves gay; this denial, demanded by their clients (seeking boys who are not gay) is a large part of their charm. Any attempt to assign a social-sexual identity to the miché collapses in the face of their fundamental refusal to identify as gay. To define them, therefore, we must accept their heterosexual representation – as deceptive as it is demanded – despite the fact that their behaviour is, in the majority of cases, homosexual. Their proclaimed active position during coitus is taken as further proof of heterosexuality – but everyone knows that this insistent declaration can be waived for the right surcharge. Confused by the invectives of a client, angry over what he saw as the man’s profound gayness, a miché, portrayed by

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Damata,7 shouts: ‘Fuck! I’m going crazy! […] I don’t know what I am anymore […] If I’m a man or I’m a fag or what the fuck I am.’

Adrift The drift of the ego, of desire. The drift of those involved in the ‘homosexual market’ occurs not only at the individual level – through categorical inscriptions – but intersects the spatial plane as well. To drift along or ‘drag’ certain streets of the city, in search of a temporary lover, the show open ‘one night only’ configures the typical mode of circulation. It is, as Benjamin longed for, a form of ‘getting lost in the city’. The same Benjamin detects8 – in a poem by Baudelaire, ‘To a Passerby’ – like the glance of a flâneur detects – singularizes, confers – an object of secret desire, rescuing it from the anonymity of the crowded street. The street, ‘the microcosm of modernity’, becomes something more than the mere location of lustful circulation, of sexual deviation. Prostitutes and those ‘in the know’ explore, alongside other libertine flâneurs, the libidinal possibilities presented by the flow of metropolitan masses. The act of dragging, drifting or cruising the streets seems to involve a certain openness to something new, something unexpected, something adventurous. In the words of one male prostitute, ‘the street is where it’s happening’. What looks like wandering is not exactly random. A rational and organized ritual occurs beforehand: the partner is selected based on their perceived degree of desirability and dangerousness and, in the case of the prostitute, an estimate of the potential client’s financial possibilities. The nomadic passion we alluded to at the start of the text is expressed in this seeking mode of circulation. At the same time, this deterritorialization is measured and calculated. There are two major factors at play in this desirous drifting. On one hand, there is an open desire for sexual adventure and chance encounter; on the other, it is a discriminating desire, with each anonymous gaze employing a complex system of calculation of values. So, ‘cruising’ (‘everything is possible at any moment: organs look for each other and plug in, unaware of the law of exclusive disjunction’)9 is also calculating, it is also an automatic process of value attribution. Desire and self-interest, chance and calculation: the cruising gays and gigolos oscillate permanently between these two poles; any distinction between them, in practice, is frequently indiscernible.



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A certain sense of fundamental transience seems to underlie these activities. However, this transience should not be read as a lack of respect or desire for more enduring relationships, but only that the impermanence – as Hocquenghem notes – holds intrigue. In the mechanical agencement of the male member, the other is not viewed as a ‘personal identity’ but as a surface of partial contact, ‘organ to organ’; the body is segmented, certain parts are ‘isolated’ from the whole. In the world of male prostitution, the isolated object is generally the penis: ‘to seduce him, the man places his hand on the other’s nether regions to fondle his penis …’.10 An obsession with the penis, with penetration or fellatio, with the connections between penis–anus–mouth, endless passion-producing combinations of contact between the organs. An isolation from the rest of the body for pleasure ‘by parts’ creates the depersonalizing effect apparent in the escape from or rejection of identities and underlies declarations such as: ‘When I sleep with a miché, I’m not having sex with a person; I’m having sex with a fantasy. That’s what I pay for, to live out a fantasy’ (a client); corresponding to the words of a male prostitute: ‘When I go to bed with a client, I’m not me; I’m the client’s fantasy. There’s a technique for this, you let your mind go blank and capture the other person’s fantasy and work their body.’ ‘A tool for their pleasure …’

Escape and capture A double motion: on one side the vice districts, which are found in most cities – called ‘moral regions’ as early as 1920 by Park,11 who was preoccupied with understanding ‘the forces which in every large city tend to develop these detached milieus, in which vagrant and suppressed impulses, passions, and ideals emancipate themselves from the dominant moral order’ – configure a kind of point of libidinal escape where passions, instincts and appetites, uncontrolled and undisciplined, the wild impulses repressed or sublimated by urban order, will find their release. Simultaneously, these proscribed desires, exiled from society, will be labelled, classified and controlled, and repatriated as they are funnelled through the escape valve to the ‘moral region’. This perverse territory – where a police presence is always felt – is inscribed on the concrete materiality of the urban landscape in motion. The diffuse borders of the territory are marked by

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codes: the ‘territory-code’ formula, says Guattari,12 expresses the relationship between the code and the territory defined by its function: an ‘organized disorder’ – to use Bataille’s expression13 – that is not merely a perverse reversal of the law, but a series of vague, fluid and overlapping categorizations, each one acting as ‘operators of libidinal intensity’: itinerant territoriality, visible in the paths and intersections of bodies floating on the wings of desire. A dark territory: its desperate splendour, its secret plots and hideouts hidden in the heart of the night. A nomadic territory: cruising night-walkers, roaming searches for sex and drugs. These murky and illicit deeds carried out in the wee hours follow – according to Stebler and Waiter14 – the paths of ancient nomadism, now criminalized and pathologized to the extent that living on the streets, not having a fixed residence, is a sign of insanity or criminality. But this is also an artificial territoriality – in the Anti-Oedipus15 sense: the most unlikely families construct patchwork baroque structures, practical yet fragile, to block the paths of escape that threaten to destroy society. Underlying prostitution is an escapist impulse, sometimes sad but always powerful. In the case of the boys of the night, it’s an escape from family, work, institutional or even conjugal responsibilities. Masculine gayness, says Guattari,16 contains privileged points of departure from the social order, opportunities for opening up to a becoming-woman, a starting point for all becomings. Shadowy underworld, fleeting, elusive. There’s an initial movement of departure from the family constellation. Dazzled by the lights of the city centre, the boys, without really knowing what they’ll find, flock to the zone: When I started working in the centre (at 13 or 14 years old), I didn’t even know what sleeping with men was all about … I thought I’d have to pay and it would be too expensive. Soon I discovered the cabaret and started making dates. Then I got scared. In my head I imagined that it would be total freedom. But no: the queens are so stupid, they have their own rules, labels, you have to fit into their classification. (A young interviewee)

In the story ‘Galería Alaska’ (the title referencing a rough centre of prostitution in Rio de Janeiro), João Antônio17 paints a more brutal picture of the process. Coming in from the suburbs on ‘ramshackle buses’,



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the boys swagger into the Galería Alaska, convinced that with their physiques, their youth, their skills and resourcefulness, they’ll get the best women, nightclubs, ease and exuberance. And that the ladies, the madams that are looking for real men, will give them everything, even money. In general, however, the outcome is quite different and, desperate for money, the boys begin to sleep with paedophiles. It’s not only cash they’re lacking; they have no companions, no friends, or ways to meet people.

In the case of the boys of the night, poverty might be the factor that initially leads them down the road to prostitution. Economics, however, are not the only forces at play. One male prostitute admits: ‘It’s true I go out on the street because I’m broke, but it’s also true that when I scrounge up some money I spend it all fast so I can go back out on the street. Knowing I’m on the street because I have to be makes me feel safe, it excites me …’. Once they’ve entered the business, the miché’s path is nomadic, in several senses. Nomads, observe the authors of A Thousand Plateaus, have a territory, they follow regular paths, they go from one point to the other, establish positions; but they never stop circulating, drifting. The points are merely consequential: although the points define the trajectory, ‘the points are subordinated to the trajectory’. Though they may follow a path between two points, it’s the ‘entredeux’ that has the most weight, the between is what matters. The michés stand on corners, in plazas, bar doorways, etc. A typical posture: leaning against a post, two boys dressed in a casual style that at the same time oozes sensuality, watching the car traffic, waiting for someone to purchase their engorged genitals. But between one stop and the next, between one client and another, infinite pilgrimages occur, often in the company of their colleagues, comprising long workdays, eight to ten hours of cruising. What is the makeup of these nomadic bands? The male prostitutes don’t form groups, in the sociological sense of the term. They are informal, occasional bonds, created more through topographical proximity than by any kind of ‘friendship’ in the middle-class sense. The degree of consistency diminishes according to indices of deterritorialization and proximity to delinquency. It increases, for example, in the male prostitutes who work in the gay cabarets. These are fragile connections of a strong solidarity, minuscule exchanges of lovers, clothes, joints, ‘didactic’ information (‘a miché

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should never wear glasses’ or ‘a miché shouldn’t walk like that’) and of measured masculinity: ‘a miché shouldn’t move their hands when they talk; that’s what maricas do’ – and other advice of that nature. On the flip side of these ‘helping hands’, one hand conspires behind the back of his friend, betrayal is the law among the young Genetians. Turbulent passions – never admitted, always conspiratorial, tenuously secretive – flourish in the masculine mass of the boys of the night providing fertile ground for betrayal. ‘That story of sex between men, look, the michés get it on with each other a lot, they spend all their time talking about women, but they like each other.’ Precarious agencement, always in danger of dissolving, the apparent informality belies subtle processes at work – present in the ‘gaminos’ of Bogotá described by Mounier18 and in the ‘primitive’ societies studied by Pierre Clastres19 – that inhibit a stable consolidation of power. ‘Local mechanisms of bands, marginalized, minorities, which continue to affirm the rights of the segmentary society against the State’s organs of power’ (A Thousand Plateaus, ‘Treatise on Nomadology’).

Plotting bodies In the world of male prostitution, relationships are marked by exaggerated differences. Age differences: while the working boys tend to be between fifteen and twenty-five, their paedophile lovers are usually over thirty-five. Class differences: poor young men in the process of becoming further marginalized vis-à-vis middle-class clients. The major binary oppositions that codify society are sought out for lustful reversal. If this encounter recalls the ancient western tradition of paedophilia, it remits as well to a unique intersection of classes, manifested in some clients as a desire to shed their social status. The miché moves nimbly along ‘fissures in the social hierarchy’ (Duvignaud20), as evident in their discourse, where street slang is combined with academic and even psychoanalytic terms. A third oppositional relationship involving gender difference is inscribed directly in the sexual. The classifying rhetoric assigns roles that determine the position of the body: miché/marica = active/ passive. However, this denomination is fairly relative, since the ‘field of content’ (automatic agencement of the body) still maintains a



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degree of relative autonomy with relation to the ‘field of expression’ (discursive chains). Recognizing the relative autonomy of both planes implies separating practices from representations (‘objectivizations’, in the words of Paul Veyne21), that obliterate them without denying their functions as a ‘dispositif’. The anus is the central focus of the world of male prostitution (and, if we believe Hocquenghem, of homosexuality in general and of Brazilian homosexuality in particular). The importance bestowed on anal coitus is denoted by various factors: among them, monetary value, money being what defines the dynamic of the relationship; as a general rule, the active partner is the one paid and the passive is the one who pays. In practice, however, this rule is often broken as the bodies violate their own code of annunciation/enunciation. Even if the male prostitute ends up assuming the sexually passive role, they initially present themselves as active only to double the price when the roles are reversed. Remaining exclusively in the active role is seen as a safeguard against being gay, since their masculinity (evidenced by their willingness to work in the heterosexual market) remains intact. Following this same line of argumentation, if the macho is asked to ‘turn over’, his loss of masculinity must be compensated with a steep hike in price. The privileged position granted to the active role also acts to ‘hide’ or ‘disguise’ any hint of homosexual desire derived from sodomy, a notion roundly rejected. What is valued is not only the actual performance, but also the macho representation that the male prostitute maintains. This representation is, therefore, an energetic device: a circulation of immense differences on the surface of the organs. As Sartre observes: ‘The turgescence that the male feels as the aggressive stiffening of a muscle will be felt by Genet as the blossoming of a flower.’22 An immense difference that wields an arsenal of symbols, allegories, postures, gestures, in which the marmoreal qualities of the macho are highlighted: ‘Impenetrable and tough, bulky, tense, rocky, the pimp will be defined by his rigidity. His body, drawn upwards by the muscles, seems like a penis taut with the desire to pierce, to bore, to split, rising to the sky with the cruel and sudden sharpness of a steeple puncturing a cloud of ink.’ But the force of the representation may take precedence over the reality of the situation, as in a situation described by one miché: ‘I’m the macho even when I turn over.’

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A halo of sordidness surrounds the practice of male prostitution, produced by the valorization of conventional masculinity that discursively proscribes the anus as the erogenous zone and the participation in sexual relations that centre around anal stimulation. This is a tortured chiaroscuro, full of false poses, contradictory subterranean artifices, passions and encounters. Making the veils even hazier, this game of hysterical seduction centred around ‘the floodgates of the anus’23 – a supposed elision that in truth sparks a proliferation of allusions – seems to correspond to a certain attraction to the margins, where these practices lurk, thanks to the historical connection between homosexuality and delinquency. It is the convergence of homosexuality and delinquency that creates the violence typical of these clandestine passions. The temptation to commit a crime or draw blood may be justified, among the boys of the night, by declarations such as ‘he’s bourgeoisie and/or a fag’. It may manifest as an angry outburst over a client’s libidinous excesses, nightmares whose mode of egress is usually anal: Being asked to turn over isn’t the thing that causes the violence. Sometimes the miché intends to rob them ahead of time. But other times he’s really willing to prostitute himself but once they get to bed he has a kind of attack of guilt, he goes crazy, starts breaking everything, and could end up killing the client.24

Among clients, the lure of the abyss might manifest as a ‘taste for danger’ that creates, if not masochistic pleasure, at least a certain intensification of desire based on the transaction’s perceived ratio of terror/pleasure. Despite the similarities between the masochistic machine – also producing ‘bodies without organs’ of pure passion – and the terror/ pleasure duality, which intensifies the attraction of male prostitution, a manifest desire for pain is never specified (although yes, on occasions, a desire for humiliation). However, the threat of real harm looms over the interaction, despite conscious attempts to avoid it, product of an ‘unconscious device’ of uncontrolled expansion of risk. In this tug towards the abyss – which destroys the classic interpretation of prostitution as a simple interpersonal exchange – we sense a certain desire for loss, for gluttony, for exuberant expense, that creates, for the sake of increased intensity,



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a world of degradation and ruins; prostitution becomes something more like potlatch or nomadic pillaging. In these voluptuous volutes, which challenge death, we may decipher another line of flight: giving in to the ‘passion of oblivion’ which leads to the destruction of the other as well as the self. Male prostitution provides fertile ground for the blossoming of microfascism. Violence seems to be inherent to this transaction, as much as it is characteristic of conventional masculine paradigms. A desire for violence is expressed by the miché: ‘What the marica wants is to be raped’; as well as by their client: ‘What the marica wants is to feel like a woman being raped.’

Passions and codes On the fringes of society, impulses towards escape and rupture proliferate, symbolic of a dissident form of subjectivity, if we follow Guattari, who sees so-called ‘deviation’ as a sign of social deconstruction. This force is not openly articulated in the efficient war machine, but instead works in the shadows to sabotage the mechanisms of institutional normalization. We must, however, take a look at how, in the workings of male prostitution, the nomadic flows are captured and converted. This may sound paradoxical. Returning to Guattari: ‘By definition, urban nomadism is redeemable and irredeemable at the same time: it is completely redeemable by the system of vigilance and irredeemable because, in some way, it always manages to escape and recover other itineraries.’25 Let us take as an example the contract entered into here. On the one hand, it tends to be detailed and precise as it draws up, in parallel, a micro-code, created to capture each party’s singularities of passion and pleasure, in an attempt to ascribe a monetary value. On the other hand, this is a contract that seems made to be broken. There is a double tension expressed as dyads of desire/caution, chance/calculation: risky passion, codified passion. The extremely complex processes of perverse codification prove to be the challenge of organizing chance, since the charm of this interaction seems to reside in the thrill of adventure. Another duality: on one plane, excessive waste, desire for loss that does not allow reduction of the relationship between prostitute and client to a mere communicational exchange, in the structural

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sense. On the other plane, a proliferation of codifications, as outlined by Baudrillard,26 attempts to reinscribe the erogenous within a homo­genous system of signs. Baudrillard states that ‘desire is not fulfilled in freedom, but under regulation’. It is through desire’s inversion of regulation that the social order is distorted. Baudrillard’s ideas, read in the fickle light that filters down to the lower depths, indicate a connection between society and desire: the over-codification of society would be, in itself, desired. However, despite many efficient attempts at retention, some fluid still escapes. This fleeing fluid, which cannot be contained by social order, can be viewed from the perspective of the ‘socialness of the orgy’, as stated by Maffesoli,27 who, however, sees in the underground orgiastic network some link, also secret, to social norms. This society of ‘nomadic sex’ and drifting desire undermines, however vaguely, the conjugal and sedentary norms that would regulate the body. While they may be highly efficient, the mechanisms of reterritorialization remain incapable of snuffing out these many pale fires.

Postscript Since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, a powerful process has focused its energies on the increasing hygienic medicalization of existence. Contemplating the difference between the intense value attached to life in these circuits ablaze with internal violence and complex paradoxes, and the imposition of a clinical control over desire, which measures life through an extensive normative framework, we sense, in horror, the radical potential of pleasure writhing in these dark, clumsy, escapes. The investigation that served as the basis for this article was carried out between 1982 and 1985 in the city centre of São Paulo, Brazil. The present tense used in writing refers to that period. At the time, AIDS was only a distant threat in Brazil. In the years that followed, however, the spread of the disease drastically altered the scene. The change can be quantified: an abrupt decrease in the number of male prostitutes and clients and an increased tendency towards violence. The ‘bocas’ of prostitution have become ever more dangerous. The only ones brave enough to stay in the business, it would appear, are those who are already ‘lost’. This implies an exodus of erstwhile male prostitutes, fleeing in fear. The few who



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remain on the ‘scene’ tend to be the most marginalized. A move to armed criminality has emerged, since the advent of the AIDS crisis, an attractive alternative to ‘hustling’. Unavoidably, this modification has disrupted the analytical categories employed. To give an example, the concept of ‘desirous drifting’ sounds more than inadequate in the current climate of terror. I was reminded of Las Escaleras del Sagrado Corazón by Copi in which drag queens, transsexuals and a cohort of erratics, exotics, lowlifes and cops seemed to play at death with the tower of the majestic temple as their backdrop. Their challenge (courtly and coquettish) of death seems ridiculous or pathetic in light of the scale of deaths caused by the AIDS epidemic. Are we witnessing the death of homosexuality? The medical beast created in the nineteenth century, with its subculture and pretensions of fixed identity, seems to be an endangered species. Such an apocalyptic outlook can be tempered by consideration of the degree to which the organizations providing help to the victims of the scourge themselves employ, in a totally different way, some echo of the ‘tribal’ solidarity characteristic of gay networks. It could be stated, however, that homosexuality as a mass phenomenon – and specifically its more offensive and aggressive aspects, such as anonymous, promiscuous sex, characteristic as well of prostitution – is disappearing. A radical mutation of the sexual landscape seems to be occurring at such speed that models for analysis can’t adapt. As a hypothesis, we could point to a certain tendency towards the dissolution of homosexuality in society, towards seeing it as one possible erotic option and not necessarily a totally differentiated sexual and existential modus operandi. Speculation aside, it should be noted that the rapid modifications in the plane of sexual and particularly homosexual behaviour threaten to swiftly transform the present article into an archaeological artefact; like its avatar.

The Force of Carnivalism

What do we see at Carnival? On one hand, cascades of iridescent surfaces: strange and intriguing mingling of Augusta Street transvestites and Greek gods; poisonous reptiles with velvety leopard skins rising up over sphinxes and glittering pink unicorns posing as sweet carousel horses. A red dragon combines with the body of a large stuffed lion. On the other hand, feverish, almost orgiastic unions of entwined bodies, urged along by the irresistible percussive beats of a batuque; carnality bursting forth on provocative red lips inflamed by lust, challenging, with rhythmic dance, rhythmic caresses, monotonous routine gestures. Stuffing, a bulk of forms in quilted lushness, fabrics that simulate nudity, a layer of feathers adding a birdlike quality. Large birds made from the feathers of murdered flamingos, a genocide in the name of excess. A general climate of potlatch, debauchery, frenzy. An entire year spent collecting sequins, embroidering and brocading, painting phosphorescent Styrofoam, only to see it disperse in a momentary sparkling of glitter, a constant flashing of light that captures the eye of the dream. If the eye dreams a chain of images, what is it about Carnival that liberates the eye from that tedious trap? What attracts us to the This text was written in collaboration with Suely Rolnik and published in Folha de São Paulo, ‘Trends and Debates’ section, 16 February 1988.



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remake of the pagan celebration, beyond the Dionysian convulsions of the bodies and the proliferation of phantasmagorical scenery? These questions are generally answered, when they’re addressed at all, through a negative lens. The supposed ‘liberation’ is considered nothing more than an inverted reflection of the most trivial aspects. And the frenzied contortion of bodies is read as a provisional deregulation of desire for three days of folly. By this perspective, desire, although ‘rebellious’, continues operating within the norms. Or we may think something else: what Carnival expresses isn’t the denial of the dominant logic, but the affirmation of a different logic. In contrast to the view of Carnival as a mere inversion of established norms, it could be seen as a manifestation of an entirely different means of production of desire, transcending the impermanence of the paper streamers, continually disrupting the social fabric. Beyond what is visible to the eye, the immanence and permanence of desire are at work, a ‘moving body’ – possessed by the explosion of sensations. This is, itself, a field of perception of that permanent iridescence. At Carnival, it is through sensory perception that images, gestures and rhythms are expressed – creating a field of expression in which the simulated is immediately corporal. Carnival is characterized by the indivisible emulsion of an explosion of sensations and a multiplication of simulations. The field of expression is put to the service of desire. This fulfilment of desire, which we could call ‘carnivalistic’, invades the space – ludic and lewd – of Carnival. Ethereal rain falls on glistening hips, crowds of cross-dressers samba flirtatiously. At work is an entire minority modality of production of subjectivity; in the swaying maelstrom, existential territories are subtly plotted through fleeting affection as bodies make their way down the avenue, deterritorializing the dominant modes that are cruelly parodied. How does this inextricable interweaving of affection/expression, visible in the machinations of Carnival, configure (or indicate) a minority modality of production of subjectivity? A kind of subjectification imposes homogenization: a regimented ‘majority’ subjectivity guarantees a smooth exchange of bodies and goods. This representation functions by disassociating the impassioned, quivering body from the expressive material (gestures, signs, clothing, discourses, etc.). Deintensified, existential territories are constructed using only what is visible to the eye – and not what is felt in that maelstrom of passionate trembling. Sensations, deprived

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of the expressive materials they need to thrive, suffocate under the modes of expression brandished as legitimate. The problem here is not so much the transgression of conventional norms, facsimiles of expression, but the very mechanism of connection between intensities and forms. Carnival shows, we repeat, a different functioning of this decisive connection. Therefore, if anything is deemphasized at Carnival, it’s not merely the dominant modes of expression: instead, the very mode of production of subjectivity is questioned. What is deemphasized, in the end, is the direct association between affection and expression at the heart of the carnivalistic endeavour. It is this association that, beyond Carnival, threatens the world’s reverence of regulation. At a time in which the moral panic of AIDS places a straitjacket on libidinal contortions, tossing passion to the jaws of the law, the ‘spirit of Carnival’, in this culture of paranoia, offers ‘a glimmer of hope’. Nurturing this tenuous hope is not, at the moment, easy: with all its affirmative power, the bright floats of Carnival run the risk of being stranded, if the bodies that would carry them succumb to anaemic crisis, to sceptic depression, to confused excesses. The force of carnivalism must make way through this swamp.

Living-Room Deficiency Syndrome

Impeccable china cabinets, embroidered pillow shams, ebony tables so highly polished that not a single fingerprint is visible, morbid aquariums gleaming with chemical cleanliness, sofas so white that not even the shadow of these pages is allowed to fall upon them (lest the ink tarnish the perfect surface). Coming from Argentina, the obsession with spotlessness that commands Brazilian living-rooms is shocking. Outside, on the street, nomad masses rot among heaps of rubbish and clouds of poisonous smog. But, once past the doorman (middle-class buildings undergo a startling becoming-prison) ‘All Dirtiness Shall Be Punished’,1 as we enter an immaculate domain: ‘everything in its place and every place in its thing’. Order is born inside the home. Leaving public spaces to the flies – as Richard Sennett would say – a stark white sterility gleams in the privacy of the flat. It offers a retreat, the safety of the snail shell, a perfect example of the modern tendency to narcissistically limit one’s life to the confines of the ego and the individual body. Honour in homogeneity, what is tested in this tournament of minutiae is the positioning of the teacups, the geometry of the records, the transparency of the windows. And it’s telling that, in order to maintain this oppressive organization, the middle class must rely on a veritable army of domestic servants, whom they patiently instruct – so that the honourable cult of Published in Folha de Sao Paulo, ‘Cidades’ section, 11 August 1988.

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cleanliness may spread to their outlying homes and brighten their poverty – imposing a whole micropolitics of the residential space. It’s not merely the ladies of Satana who cultivate this spray-starched silliness. It could even be an ambidextrous academic, expert in existential nothingness, compensating life’s tediousness – rag in hand – by eradicating the dust tucked into a hidden corner, the slightest stain on the nightstand. A true obsession! It would be useful to measure – dare I say through market research – the scale of consumption generated by this mania for order in the room. A proliferation of paraphernalia and products designed to produce domestic paradise and the illusion of an infinite sterility: detergents, powders, soaps, degreasers, waxes, air fresheners, etc. It’s also significant that this domestic order is considered so natural, logical and implicit, when in reality it’s nothing more than authoritarian order imposed by the domestic powers, as arbitrary and unbearable as so many other orders, in the contemporary ‘panopticon’.

Minoritary Becoming

Conditions for a cartography of desire In a story by Borges, the emperor of an imaginary country orders a map so precise, such an exact reproduction to scale of the territory, that all social life comes to a halt as his subjects carry out the task. This is not the case with the ‘cartography of desire’.1 In the first place, it is not a matter of working outwards from a fixed point – the central eye of the despot – but of drifting: a drifting that surveys the flows of life in the territory, like a surfer on the waves of a sea of desire. At the same time, the work of the desirous cartographer doesn’t aim to fix, set, freeze the land he explores, but to intensify the very flows of the life of the inhabitants, charting territories as he traverses them. The resulting map, far from being restricted to physical, geographical or spatial dimensions (even if the imagined relationships remit – like Maffesolian ‘sociality’2 – to a land, a locus, that they nurture), is a map of the superficial effects (depths, according to Foucault,3 are no more than a fold and a wrinkle on the surface) or, as Janice Caiafa says of the punks of Rio de Perlongher wrote this essay for Félix Guattari’s visit to Brazil in 1981. It was published in El Lenguaje Libertario, vol. 2, edited by Christin Ferrer, Nordam, Montevideo, 1991. A shortened version was published in Revista de Crítica Cultural no. 4, Santiago de Chile, November 1991.

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Janeiro, ‘a cartography of concrete actions’.4 A navigation chart for a wobbling kayak travelling the turbulent current of a nomadic pilgrimage, avatars of the impulse to flee, the (short) circuits of reckless affection. A map that – according to the anthropologist Silveira Jr. – ‘would not be a mere copy of the phenomenon but the register of its functioning within its own movement …’.5 The copy as an arboreal form, from the ‘tree-root’6 diagram proceeding ‘as transcendental model and calque’; the map, on the other hand, a rhizomatic operation, functions as a process that turns the model on its head. To reproduce (according to a model) versus to follow, complicated twisting volutes, the paths of escape, according to the Deleuzian maxim: ‘In a society everything flees.’ The postulate of immanence informs, additionally, the positivity of social practices, taken in the positivity of its functioning and not judged negatively from an external, transcendent law. Characteristics of this cartography would be, then, multiplicity and simultaneity; a shape engineered to serve as a ‘molecular conjunction’ that Deleuze and Guattari attribute to desire. Accustomed as we are to narrative sequence and the centrality of logic, multiplicity is hard to accept. How do we open ourselves up to all possible flows when the imperial institutional framework teaches us to close ourselves off, to centre our lives around the despotic ego, to not let go, but to control ourselves? The conditions of this multiplicity, then, don’t relate only to the organization of texts, but affect their very production. A subject – or more like, a ‘subjective point’ – should not measure itself by the degree of localized control it exerts on its own desire, but by the intensity of the conjugations and encounters it is capable of. A ‘subject’ with no centre: ‘There are no longer any subjects, only dynamic individuations with no subject that constitute the collective agencies’, says Deleuze;7 compositions of force, nonsubjectified attachments, instantaneous individuations: the afternoon … an atmosphere … should be characterized not by an interiority full of guilt and complexes, but by an exteriority open to surfaces of contact, to the margins. To map, in the end, is to draw lines (lines of force of the socius, lines of group attachment, lines of fissures or voids: ‘I’ve seen the best minds of my generation …’8). Not one but many tangled, interwoven, overlapping lines: We have as many intersecting lines as the palm of a hand. We are as complicated as the palm of a hand. What we call by many names



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– esquizoanalysis, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagramism, rhizomatics, cartography – has no other objective than the study of these lines, in groups or in individuals.9

A cartography of ‘minor’ Brazil It’s precisely the preoccupation with escapes, with the margins, with deviation, that guides cartographic exploration. To chart is to travel. In this case, the cartography is the result of a real journey, carried out by the philosopher-activist-analyst Félix Guattari and the Brazilian analyst Suely Rolnik in the chaotic Brazil of 1982. This merits a bit of background. The dictatorship that began in 1964 (perhaps less bloody but no less authoritarian than Argentina’s) was in its final – although still lethal – throes. Brazil’s ‘opening’, along with amnesty for persecutors and the persecuted, began around 1979 and was in large part thanks to a variety of social movements that brandished the values of autonomy and the right to difference. The loudest examples of these rebellions happened (and, to a lesser degree, still exist) among the so-called ‘minority movements’: the feminist, civil rights and gay movements, the free radio movement, etc. – and more discreetly and clandestinely, by mutations observable in social customs, in the daily micropolitics of the ‘neotribal makeup’.10 A certain climate – you could say – of ‘existential evolution’ was perceptible in the ‘plane of expression’ (the proliferation, for example, of alternative and underground publications11) as well as in the ‘order of bodies’: Dionysian gatherings in the sinful shadows of the cities. It was in this context of pre-democratic agitation (prior to the first democratic election of rulers) that Guattari’s resounding tour occurred, as he interviewed, in several cities, all manner of autonomous dissident, alternative, libertarian and, in the end, political movements – since he inspired the integration of these minorities into the eclectic and thriving Partido dos Trabalhadores [Workers’ Party]. Over the topography of these encounters, the map of another Brazil was drawn: a Brazil of minority becomings – becomingblack, becoming-woman, becoming-gay, becoming-child, etc. – a Brazil of marginalizing and minoritizing processes, a Brazil of ‘non-guaranteed’ subjects (classically called ‘non-integrated’ subjects) mobilized in attempts at escape that traversed and agitated society. The desirous gaze is not fixed, but originates from a kind of

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‘active description’, designing the evolutions of journeys that may lead, in the worst-case scenario, to forms of institutional recapture or to the ruin of death. If one unquestionable merit of Guattari and Rolnik’s desirous cartography is its mapping of the ‘other’ Brazil in the chaotic ides of 1982, it’s worth asking, years later (initial publication being 1986), to what degree this Brazil – seething with small groups who saw ‘molecular revolutions’ as not merely a distant hope but an everyday possibility – seems almost foreign to us now. What happened, then, to the minority movements – for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights, among others – that once abounded, if microscopically, south of the equator?

Becoming and identity It’s not a morbid fascination for the exotic, nor some romantic or extreme liberalism, but, more precisely, thoughtful consideration of minorities from the perspective of collective existence. These minorities signal, exhibit and experience alternative, dissident, ‘countercultural’ modes of subjectivity.12 Their interest, then, resides in the fact that they open ‘escape routes’ that lead to the implosion of a certain normative paradigm of social personality. The overanalysed ‘system’ isn’t sustained purely by weapons or economic factors: a model of the ‘normal’ subject must be produced to support it. Additionally, we must not confuse ‘becoming’ with ‘identity’. These processes of marginalization, of escape, by different degrees, release becomings, (molecular particles) that set the subject adrift on the fringes of conventional behaviour patterns. According to A Thousand Plateaus, [Becoming] implies starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfils, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. This is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire.13

Becoming is not turning into another person, but entering into an alliance (aberrant), by contagion, an intermingling with difference. Becoming does not imply movement from one point to another,



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but a passage into the ‘inter’ of the medium – it is this ‘inter’ itself. Becoming-animal is not turning into an animal, but having the functions of an animal, ‘what an animal can do’ (like in the case of Hans-becoming-horse).14 Becoming is a molecular process, it mobilizes particles in turbulence, extracting them from the great molar oppositions. Where there were only two large molar sexes (you were either A or B, you were man or woman), there are a thousand molecular genders, in the realm of sensation, in the realm of desire. From woman as molar identity captured in the binary opposition of the ‘total’ sexes comes a kind of ‘microfemininity’, used to ‘produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular woman’ (movement and rest, speed and slowness).15 Becoming-woman is not an imitation of the woman as a dual entity, identifying, or turning into one. Deleuze and Guattari state: ‘We are not, however, overlooking the importance of imitation, or moments of imitation, among certain homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a real transformation on the part of certain transvestites.’ But, more than imitating or taking the feminine form, it is ‘emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity’.16 Molecular, minoritarian, ‘becomings, being minoritarian, always pass through a becoming-woman’17 – this is the molecular code of all becomings. Why? Because women – ‘the only authorized depositories for the becoming-sexualized body’18 – occupy a minoritarian position in relation to the paradigm of the majoritarian man – chauvinistic male, white, adult, heterosexual, sensible, family man, city dweller, etc. There is, or can be, becomings of man, but there is no ‘becoming-man’ since the man is the majoritarian par excellence, whereas all becoming is minoritarian. Majority and minority should not be taken as quantitative calculations, but as ‘degrees of domination’, determiners of a pattern through which differences are measured; it implies, in other words, a dominant mode of subjectification. The condition of forming part of a minority, in the sociological sense of the term, may create the proper conditions for becoming but doesn’t automatically imply a becoming – the white man’s becoming-black but also the woman’s becoming-woman. Homosexuality, despite all personological and Oedipal appropriations, reaches a ‘more molecular’ level, says Guattari, in which categories, groupings and specializations are not defined in the

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same way, and where fixed oppositions between genders are rejected and, instead, similarities are found between gays, transvestites, junkies, sadomasochists, prostitutes; between women, men, children; between psychotics, artists, revolutionaries.19 The practice of homosexuality, in the intensive plane of sexualized bodies, would be inseparable from a becoming-woman. A ‘becoming-homosexual’, for example, would take this corporal practice (marginalization, segregation and, above all, the differentiation that it implies) as a way to escape the reigning ‘should be’; linked to a certain axiomatic of the connections between bodies. In another sense, it could be considered that – in its interpenetrations, its mixtures – it undermines or disrupts the ‘hierarchical organization of the organism’, which assigns determined functions to organs.20 Something similar could be said about a ‘becoming-woman’ or a ‘becoming-black’: they wouldn’t be merely ‘awakenings’ but would instead subvert the exclusions, repulsions and hierarchical structuring implicit in the connections. These becomings would incite a certain micropolitics of perceptions and affect, given that they deal with segregations, divisions that intervene directly at the level of the body and desire. Although minoritarian, these processes affect society as a whole. For example, the fact that feminism is not widespread does not impede its discourse from sparking a series of changes on the level of concrete relationships between the sexes, changes that continue to proliferate despite the silencing of feminist activism. We could consider, for example, the relatively stable association among sectors of the Buenos Aires gay scene, much more cohesive than the Gay Liberation Front, dissolved in 1975. In the face of this still uncertain escape, two major alternatives appear: one configures an ‘entry point’ to a global shift in the whole order; the other runs the risk of crystallizing into a mere affirmation of identity. In this last case, what was once a point of break from established order becomes the demand for recognition from and within this same order. We no longer seek to create and expand territories that would acknowledge our existence, but would be content with any ordinary place in the concert of tolerated personalities and sit ‘mute’ in its corner. It’s that, once this ‘identity’ is ‘identified’, often ‘internally’, the rebellious urge seems to lose steam and the precarious conditions of integration into the capitalist circuits (like the industry of perversion in the concentrated paradises of the gay ghetto)



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become – death of the swan and song of the siren – an almost irresistible illusion. Guattari states: ‘Every time an issue of identity or recognition emerges, we are up against a threat of blockage and paralysation of the process.’ The sadness of this paralysis is not felt only on the ‘personal’ level (frustration, lack of motivation, apathy, isolation …): it also remits to operations handed down directly from governmental powers. In Brazil, the progressive emptying out of ‘organized minority groups’, after democracy was restored, their prototypes rapidly absorbed by the mass media, coincides with the creation of official ‘Councils’ (Feminine Condition Council, Black Community Council). Beyond their pressing issues, concocted from vindications and microscopic complexities, these organizations do little more than ‘retranslate’ their demands into bureaucratic rituals. In the case of the defunct S.O.S Muhler,21 the intended assistance aimed to converge with the politicization of misogynistic violence, the ‘Women’s Commissions’ once established, will suppose – without taking away from its efficacy – the resolution of such conflicts through penal overcodification. With homosexuality, a ‘less recognized’ minoritary, the demand for dignity has to be articulated, in the case of AIDS, in direct alliance with medical powers. It’s not, in fact, that the struggles have been paused; they have merely merged with the new institutional apparatus and this merging should be recognized.

The marginal personality It’s interesting how the very notion of identity is taken as a kind of ‘ideological smuggling’ by the social sciences into minority groups. An archaeology of identity – a necessary, albeit extensive task – would take us too far (perhaps to the very essence of being). One could, nevertheless, imagine that a genealogy of identity (for example, in the field of anthropology) would rediscover, from a distance, some of the fear the colonial administrators felt when faced with the ‘irrationality’ of the savage way of life.22 One of the solutions that has been widely applied consists, simply, in exterminating the different. Complementary to this is an underhand variety of ethnocentrism, which reinforces ‘my’ identity (as a white colonizer linked to the Colonial Government) and attributes a contrasting identity to the ‘other’. The difference is acknowledged, but at the cost of the

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translation of these singular modes of subjectivization to the code (logo-ego-centric) of identity. The transposition from the multiple to the one, like in Artaud’s travels among the Tarahumara or Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, shows that another modality of connection is possible: the liaison between the ‘crazy’ marginalized and the ‘primitive’ marginalized – expansive intensification of difference instead of an excluding segregation, eccentric encounter that dilutes and empties the centre. The traditional procedure of translation/reduction from difference to identity is not applied only to ‘non-western’ societies; it could also happen to the ‘internal minorities’ of industrial society. It would be a question of retracing the path from the 1920s and the Chicago School’s ‘marginal personality’ to the modern ‘deviant identity’. The change of signs indicates the shift from a sociology of norms against lawlessness to a model of society as a system of self-managed selves (egos). The price to be paid is the conscious construction of coherent identity in search of the dubious prize of an illusory recycling within the circuits of official order. Along this tortuous tour are the escapes, deconstructions and rejections characteristic of the heteroclitic margins. The fact that the agents involved in the vast ‘assent of the social’ (social workers, social psychologists, sociologists, social anthropologists, etc.) agree to some extent on the production of artificial modes of subjectivity means that some of their interventions (apparently neutral and voluntary) can be articulated through the abstract machines of over-codification ‘that carry out the disciplining of subjects through the means of the modern state’.23 Nevertheless, this ‘active lack of acknowledgement’, this attempt to homogenize and flatten out all singularities, cannot halt these molecular, microscopic processes: but it does manage, perhaps, to block their means of expression.

Mute passion In other words, I don’t think that this succession of escapes and becomings, forceful in the spring of the ‘opening’, have actually been stopped or stamped out by the conservative restoration of democracy under President Sarney. But dissidents seem to have somehow ‘lost their voices’. What’s happening now, if we believe Trevisan’s history of homosexuality in Brazil,24 has a fairly



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traditional plot: on the one hand, in terms of daily actions and passions, there are numerous desirous insurrections; on the other, at the level of circular discourses, a certain compensatory hardening tends to cut ties to mutating experimentations, turning on itself, seeking comfort in official or officious enunciations. A double phenomenon: savageness of daily disorder; asepsis of discursive order. ‘Maconha e briga’, as Clementina de Jesus would say, versus the civic virtues of moderation, conciliation, conformity. Signs of this discrepancy can be seen in a phenomenon which is often ignored, but which has occurred innumerable times in the history of Brazil: the fearsome ‘quebra-quebra’ (looting; literally: ‘break-break’). Guattari comments on the tremendous ‘quebraquebra’ of 1983 (in which a crowd tore down the wrought-iron gates of government buildings in São Paulo). Both he and the insurrectional guru, the Italian Toni Negri, see it as an announcement, in the long run, of a ‘new kind of autonomous-communist-anarchist movement’. Setting apocalyptic catastrophe aside, what’s certain is that these ‘savage’ deterritorializing confrontations seem to be proceeding in the form of a true ‘social war’ that devastates the streets of the tropics; week after week it claims its macabre quota of black teenagers. Scant attention is paid, however, to the ‘escape impulses’ underlying many of these processes of marginalization, a desperate yet eloquent desire to escape segregation and normative modelling. Only poets such as Roberto Piva seem capable of seeing – in verses such as ‘marvellous adolescents ignite reformatories’25 – the desirous content of these escapes. Some of these escape attempts have tragic results. Take the case of the teenaged Naldinho, who carried out a homicidal raid, shouting: ‘To escape, I’ll kill anyone who gets in my way.’ There seems to be a certain ‘passion for abolition’ which aims for destruction (and selfdestruction). These massive processes of marginalization cannot be attributed solely to economic factors and should not be considered only negatively for what they are lacking (lacking a home, a job, a ‘social position’, etc.), but also positively, in their deviation, their rebellious rejection of the discipline of work and family. It is something like a ‘nomad sociability’ that interweaves with the fabric of society. It’s interesting to observe that dissidence is often articulated on the plane of pleasure and bodily experience. A recent study on male prostitution in São Paulo26 shows an intimate (in the literal sense)

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relationship between perverts and felons, confirming Bataille’s suggestion27 of an ‘erotic exuberance’, evocative of animalism, present in the ‘non-guaranteed’ marginal man in contrast to the family values of ‘guaranteed’ workers, domesticated by civilization. Equally intimate is the proximity of areas of marginal experimentation, manifested in the toponymical: boca (mouth) used to delimit the hub of prostitution (bocas do lixo) as well as the zone where drugs can be acquired (bocas do fumo).28 Dissimilar protagonists of marginalizing and minoritizing processes (the margins defined by their relationship to the centre; a minoritary group creates its codes of self-reference) meet and form concrete social relationships. The desirous cartographer takes note of these connections which flow counter to the mass-produced masks of society, signalling points of passage, of articulation, of intensification.

Subjectification in crisis The link between cartography and micropolitics becomes more evident. The aim of minoritary micropolitics is not to freeze differences into static paradigms of identity, but to weave them into a version of subjectivity. If the crisis is not only political and economic, but also a crisis of modes of subjectivation, any break with the prevailing order would also break the subject’s ties of stability and support. Such are the pragmatics of the molecular revolution. But it’s not a problem of political ‘programme’. For this machine to function, it must be fed with efficient enunciations, concepts that are not ‘static’ but ‘nomadic’, capable of expressing the diversity of desirous deviations. Desire is not thought of here as something indifferent and flou, waiting for an over-codification to ‘symbolize’ it (converting, as Lyotard says, ‘intensive symbols’ into ‘intelligent signs’29). Desire is directly connected to the social, in its production, articulation and presentation. Desire – says Paul Veyne30 – ‘is the most obvious thing in the world … Desire is the fact that mechanisms function, that assemblages work, that potentialities … are realized rather than not; “every assemblage expresses and creates a desire by constructing the plane that makes it possible (Deleuze)”.’ How do we interpret the untrusting reticence of the ‘sociologies of order’ with relation to desire (arguably, a problem for



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psychoanalysts, who, for their part, would complete the division of labour, letting the social field slip through the cracks in the divan)? Should we, perhaps, suspect some correlation between the aseptic mould that shapes discourses on the ‘other’ and the growing industry of security, that transforms the city into a series of bunkers? Locking the wrought-iron fence and calling the cops might be the only response ideologues and administrators have to the process of marginalization that undermines order. Minority politics, in this day and age, should not be mistaken for the ‘ghettoizing’ affirmation of identity, accompanied by perfunctory calls for ‘solidarity’ with other minority groups, nor for the saving of seats (generally secondary) in the theatre of political representation, which results in notions such as: machismo is a women’s issue, racism is a black issue, homophobia is a gay issue. Without dogmatically denying the importance of winning certain legal battles, and without minimizing individual experiences of identification, the crisis (or even dissolution) of these movements, perhaps indicating fatigue of the identity agenda, could favour (optimistic social analysis?) freedom from the all-encompassing microcircuits via extensive expansion of differences, not only among ‘minoritarians’ themselves, but from the broader social field. After all, the radical nature of relational, sensual, nomadic and ecstatic experiences should not nourish only the cold marble of the cloisters. Rolnik and Guattari’s contribution, ‘desirous cartography’, is, in this sense, decisive. Its ‘semiotic effect’ invites a multiplicity of dissident subjectivities, of ‘thoughtless protestors’, and relates directly to our singularities and desires. Its diversity of discourses and becomings is an example of how this explosion of differences, this general mutation of thinking, of loving, of existing, is possible. Questioning ourselves about the conditions of its use, would, I wager, ‘get us into trouble’.

History of the Argentine Gay Liberation Front

The context In 1969, a group of gays gathered in a tenement building on the outskirts of Buenos Aires gave rise to the first attempt at a gay organization in Argentina: the Grupo Nuestro Mundo [Our World Group]. Its members, most of them activists in lower-middle-class unions, led by a former communist militant kicked out of the party for being gay, worked for two years to flood the editorial departments of the local papers with mimeographed bulletins announcing gay liberation. In August 1971, the collaboration between Our World and a group of gay intellectuals inspired by the American Gay Power movement resulted in the official Frente de Liberación Homosexual [FLH; Gay Liberation Front] in Argentina. The years 1969 and 1971 were not only important as milestones in the gay liberation movement; they also marked decisive moments in national politics. A popular insurrection in 1969, known as the Cordobazo since it began in Córdoba, overturned General Onganía’s authoritarian dictatorship. In 1971, an intense radicalization This essay, a historic look at the Frente de Liberación Homosexual, was included in the book Homosexualidad: hacia la destrucción de los mitos, by Zelmar Acevedo, published by Ediciones del Ser, Buenos Aires, 1985. Curiously, Perlongher never listed it among his published texts.



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occurred: leftist unions began to spring up, as well as antiauthoritarian student movements; and the liberal administration of General Lanusse began, which restored power to the Peronist party in the 1973 elections. Why all these references? Because the FLH was born in a climate of politicization, contestation, generalized social criticism, and is inseparable from its moment in history. Like the majority of Argentines at the time, they believed in ‘national and social liberation’ and aspired specifically to achieve broader rights for gays within this context. The group not only configured the reaction of the gay minority in the face of oppression, which the military dictatorship established in 1966 had taken to unprecedented extremes; it also embodied the desire for an ‘illuminated’ gay minority which would participate in a presumably revolutionary process of change, constructing a platform where their vital and sexual conditions could be laid out. The real need for freedom from machismo, deeply anchored in Argentine society, as well as the conviction that this liberation could only occur in the context of a revolutionary transformation of the prevailing social structure, were constitutive elements of the Argentine gay movement and reappear constantly throughout its history.

The formation of groups The first members of the FLH aimed to create an opinion movement, encapsulated within Marxist ideology. But in March 1972, twelve university students – known as the Eros Group – joined the Front, some of them already members of other leftist or anarchist groups, and they served as a revitalizing tonic for the movement, inspiring the group to reevaluate its initial aims. They also created a deep controversy, reflected in the first FLH Bulletin, published in March of 1972, where two opposing documents were published: one stated that the FLH’s objective was to get leftist political parties to include gay rights in their agendas; the other emphasized sexuality and spoke with scepticism about the supposed ‘fifty years of socialist revolutions’. The subtle differences did not hinder the creation of their Basic Points of Agreement, which served as objectives for the new movement. These were based on ‘specific democratic rights’ – the

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immediate cessation of police repression of gays, the repeal of antigay police mandates, and the release of imprisoned gays. The sexual oppression by ‘compulsive and exclusive heterosexuality’ was considered a product of capitalism and all authoritarian systems and brought the group into alliance with other ‘national and social liberation movements’ and with feminist groups. Organizationally, the FLH functioned as an alliance of autonomous groups which coordinated common actions between them. At its peak (September 1972 to August 1973), the Front counted up to ten different groups, each made up of around ten activists and a large cohort of sympathizers. The most important of these groups were: Eros, Our World, Professionals, Safo (made up of lesbians), Black Flag (anarchists), Emanuel (Christians), Catholic Gays of Argentina, etc. The Front’s activity was concentrated in Buenos Aires but had contact with sympathizers in Córdoba and Mendoza, and they carried out actions in Mar del Plata, alongside a local feminist group there. In 1975, a communiqué printed in a local magazine in Buenos Aires gave news of the formation of a Gay Association in Tucumán. The clandestine nature of the FLH made contact considerably difficult, since everything had to be done in person.

The tasks at hand To recruit new members, some groups held ‘information meetings’ attended by a large portion of the Buenos Aires gay scene. Groups of gays would meet in private homes and explain the general aims of the Front. From there, activists emerged. In addition to raising gay awareness, they also aimed for a certain degree of politicization, which kept some upper-class gays away from the Front: the movement was always extremely poor, with few material resources, composed mainly of middle-class and lowermiddle-class gays, with a few working-class and lumpen proletariat. In the safety of the meetings, individuals gave speeches on specific topics (family, guilt, etc.) and shared techniques for raising awareness – taken from feminism – that aimed to reveal common lines of oppression. From there, it hoped to transform this awareness of oppression into a force of revolutionary change. They rejected ‘closeting’ and pretending; they analysed the active mechanisms of marginalization and ‘ghettoization’ of gays.



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Other groups – such as the ‘Gay Professionals’ – devoted themselves to drafting theoretical documents and carrying out surveys on homosexuality, which, in the end, were never processed. Eros devoted its time to handing out pamphlets and painting public spaces, choosing 21 September – the first day of spring in Argentina – as the date for mobilization. The flyers usually included their slogan, which represented the movement’s ideology, ‘To love and live freely in a liberated country’, in addition to the anti-police chants. With these modes of street presence, the FLH sought to keep its message alive. Other slogans used were: ‘Machismo = Fascism’; ‘Machismo is Fascism in the home’; ‘For the right to use our own bodies’; ‘Let go’, etc. They sometimes sent care packages to incarcerated gays. To raise funds, they held large parties, in which they asked for contributions and shared materials. Each member contributed, additionally, a monthly membership fee.

Peronism and disenchantment In 1972, Peronism set out to win control of the government through democratic means. A large portion of the FLH identified with the populist discourse of the Peronist Youth Party and participated in their rallies. Before the national elections in March of 1973, the FLH expanded its network of political contacts but still only managed to be recognized – although not publicly – by the Socialist Workers’ Party. Nevertheless, they issued a declaration calling people to vote ‘against Lanusse’s dictatorship’ – a government that had in fact tolerated some liberalism, such as the opening of gay nightclubs and saunas, which were not exempt, however, from a certain degree of police harassment. The election of the Peronist party was met with excitement by the majority of the FLH, increasing their participation in public demonstrations. At one event, held at the College of Philosophy and Letters to demand freedom of political prisoners, the FLH’s support of the movement was announced, to murmurs of confusion from the crowd. A rock festival organized by the Peronist Youth confirmed the FLH’s participation in the Grupo Parque [Park Group], made up mainly of musicians who didn’t want to be marginalized from the political process. The group operated until the end of 1973 with

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members of the FLH participating in public forums in a park. In May 1973, the majority of the FLH – with some notable dissent – decided to participate in the demonstrations in support of the inauguration of the Peronist government, which took place in the Plaza de Mayo. One hundred gays marched, under a banner that reproduced a line of a verse from the Peronist anthem – ‘among the people love and equality shall reign’ – and other slogans that aimed to show the link between national liberation and sexual liberation. At the rally, the gay group was attacked by ‘right-wing’ Peronists and defended by ‘left-wing’ Peronists. The Front also participated in the march on 20 June 1973 to welcome General Perón into power, a demonstration that ended in what was known as the ‘Ezeiza Massacre’. These interventions garnered the FLH a certain amount of publicity; a sensationalist magazine – Así – published a front-page story about the group. In consequence, the fascist wing of the Peronist party papered the city with posters attacking ‘revolutionary Peronism, homosexuals and junkies’. Simultaneously, the raids of gay bars recommenced; gay activists were arrested and beaten by the police, some of their homes were searched. In a public report, the Peronist Youth denied the presence of gays among their ranks. At one rally, the Montoneros (Peronist guerrilla activists) chanted: ‘We’re not fags, not cokeheads.’ An abrupt rift occurred. It’s worth noting that, in the short romance with the Peronist left, the FLH was not granted, even once, an official meeting with the leaders of the Peronist Youth Party. Disenchanted with Peronism, the FLH tried to move further left. It participated – under a banner with the organization’s initials – in the protest against Pinochet’s coup in Chile (September 1973). At the demonstration, other leftist organizations moved aside in the ranks so as not to march too near the gays; finally, some communists and anarchists agreed to march beside them. In October 1973, the FLH, which had been allowed to rally on the microphones of a gay nightclub, was expelled from the club, accused of being ‘communist’. Shortly thereafter, this club – Monalí, in Lanus – was shot at by right-wing commandos, its customers were assaulted, and it was finally shut down. During the first half of 1973, the Front circulated, among certain institutions (the Association of Psychologists, the Federation of Psychiatrists, the Lawyers’ Association), a document calling for an end to the police repression of gays. They wanted to receive the support of these professional organizations for a presentation



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before the new government. But the rapid process of conservativism frustrated their plans. Towards the end of 1973, the FLH’s last hopes of halting the police repression of gays were finally dashed. Dealing further blows to any illusions of gay liberation, the police continued to round up gays. These circumstances showed the misplaced expectations that the FLH had placed in Peronism. This disappointment, compounded by the indifference of the great majority of the gay community in Buenos Aires towards the liberationist agenda, caused open hostility.

Somos journal At the end of 1973, the FLH decided it was time to pay a little more attention to the gay community, which it had neglected in its fervour for political activism. They began to publish the magazine Somos. Prior to this (June 1973), they had published one edition of the journal Homosexuales, but an article entitled ‘Machismo and sexual oppression’, in which, through a very interesting analysis, the author affirmed that the gay’s effeminate nature was the flip side of machismo, led a large portion of the activists to refuse to distribute it. The discussion over the terms marica and loca – revolutionary and pro-feminist terms for some, reaffirmation of oppression for others – consumed a large part of the movement’s intellectual energies. In December 1973, Perón – now president for the third time – launched a ‘Campaign for Morality’, to which the FLH responded with a flyer entitled ‘Aunt Margarita Channels Cary Grant’ – in allusion to Margaride, the Chief of Police. The flyer was received positively among gays and musicians. Around the same time, Somos magazine was launched, and eight more issues followed, published until January 1976. At its height, Somos had print runs of five hundred copies, distributed by hand. It was poorly printed – by photocopy – and aimed only to raise awareness. It included theoretical essays, reports, literature, etc. It was always published clandestinely. In some editions, the address of an American gay movement’s headquarters was used. It is perhaps more valuable as a testimony to the times than as a journal itself; its last number was an anthology of documents, practically incomprehensible for anyone lacking a background in gay political-sexual theory. One of the most brilliant initiatives was

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the publication of a list of terms used as euphemisms for sex in Argentina (more than a hundred), which scandalized readers.

Feminism and sexual politics From its start, the FLH was concerned with building good relationships with the two feminist groups that existed at the time: the Unión Feminista Argentina [Argentine Feminist Union] and the Movimiento de Liberación Feminina [Feminine Liberation Movement] (separated by personal and methodological reasons more than ideological ones). In 1972, a debate on sexuality organized by the magazine 2001 resulted in the formation of the Grupo Política Sexual [GPS; Sexual Politics Group], a kind of sexual liberation think-tank, which, beginning in 1974, expanded to include feminists and ‘enlightened’ heterosexual males. The GPS met weekly throughout January 1976, providing a platform for fruitful discussions; it also held conferences on sexuality and created a Commission Against the Prohibition of Birth Control – attended by feminists and socialists alike. It published a document, titled ‘Sexual Morals in Argentina’. When a group of gays were expelled from a Protestant college, they met with the director to ask him to reconsider the measure. In parallel, the FLH published a document – ‘Sex and Liberation’ – as a kind of theoretical compendium on the Argentine gay liberation movement. Based in Marxist theory, the role of sexual oppression in the maintenance of exploitation was analysed, and the FLH was defined as: an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian movement, that aims for liberation in one of the areas in which man’s domination of woman and of man is upheld, based on the conviction that no revolution is complete, and therefore successful, if it does not subvert the ideological structure intimately internalized by the members of the dominant society.

Repression and dissolution The government’s tolerance of right-wing commando groups increased after the death of Juan Perón and the assumption of



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his second wife Isabel, surrounded by fascist advisers. In 1975, the weekly publication El Caudillo – linked to the government – called for an end to homosexuality and proposed the lynching of gays, making open reference to the FLH. Around this time, a large number of the activists and sympathizers distanced themselves, and the group began to consider dissolving as terror took hold. By mid-1975, the Front had been reduced to no more than thirty members, who preferred radicalism over moderation. A study group on psychoanalysis was formed and what was left of the group became a purely theoretical movement. All around, political repression intensified; martial law had already been instated, in the context of the confrontation between the Argentine military and guerrilla groups. With some success, the FLH increased its international calls for intervention through various movements it had been wise enough to associate itself with – especially the most radical ones, such as the Italian FUORI group – to help spread the word about the repression in Argentina and Chile. Finally, as the Front was preparing a protest against Pope Paulo VI’s denouncement of homosexuality, a police raid dealt the movement another major blow. After the military coup in March of 1976, the last members of the FLH, locked in disagreement over individual responsibility with respect to repression, decided that there was no way for the group to continue, and, in June 1976, the Front was dissolved. Some of the activists fled to Spain and organized a new Argentine Gay Liberation Front in exile – lacking any representation, given that the original group had already been dissolved. The military dictatorship headed by General Videla carried out a systematic persecution of gays, which, in addition to impeding any form of organization, obliged gays to direct all their energies towards individual survival.

Epilogue In terms of concrete results, the Argentine Gay Liberation Front would appear to have been a complete failure. It did not manage to achieve a single one of its objectives, or to interest any considerable portion of the broader public in the problem of sexual repression, or even to raise awareness among the Argentine gay community.

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Nevertheless, for those who took part in the movement, it constituted an unforgettable experience; and it proved, at least, that a heightened degree of awareness is possible even in the context of a society as repressive as Argentina. From a distance, the FLH’s tendency towards hyper-politicization could be interpreted as a ridiculous position. However, it should be considered whether, in a society capable of creating such monstrous dictatorships, any minimally humanist proposal – such as the demand for sexual freedom – doesn’t imply a radical questioning of the sociocultural structures as a whole.

The Disappearance of Homosexuality

Archipelagos of sequins, headdresses of iridescent feathers (in each intrepid sway of hips, the gala of a hundred flamingos dissolves into pink dust), constellations of glitter masking faces, an entire masonry of kitsch, a feigned delicateness, a strident artifice: it all collapses under the weight (let’s call it) of death. Homosexuality (at least masculine homosexuality, which is what we’re referring to here) disappears from the scene it worked so hard to establish; it exits the forum, like the flick of a mascara brush over a crimped, caramelized eyelash. All this soothing mellifluousness of silk scarves and confetti intruding upon the conjugal peace of the bedroom. The girls (or the boys: oh, the girlboys), riding gazelles pursued by bulls, enter a battlefield of pillows filled with cotton candy. But deep down, always, like a trace of bile, all the stage props employed in the jokes about sexual identity collapse – let’s say, under the inertia of meaning, ostentatiously, but softly – a gentle fainting fit. The decline would be romantic if it weren’t so transparent, so obscene in its translucent mothballed polyester. It disappears, not This important essay, which reveals a transformation in the author’s views on the relationship between desire and politics, could be considered a kind of ‘goodbye’. It was published in El Porteño no. 119, in November 1991. In Brazil it was published as ‘O desaparecimiento da homossexualidade’, in Nós por exemplo no. 1, Rio de Janeiro, December 1991; in Boletim ABIA no. 16, April 1992; and in Saudelocura no. 3, 1992.

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by descending into the abyss from which it supposedly emerged in its scandalous liberation, but by unravelling in an almost horizontal decline, maintaining a certain minor existence – in a way, it’s clear, weakened, subtle as a puff of smoke – in a kind of quiet room next door – Virginia Woolf’s room, maybe, but silently, having renounced dramatic and emotional goodbyes. It’s necessary to clarify: what disappears is not so much the practice of the unions of bodies with the same sexual organs, in this case male bodies (and their parody, their denial, their groping of this given – as a gift – masculinity). What is gone is the celebratory air of culmination, the unending celebration of the emergence into the light of day, considered the greatest accomplishment of the twentieth century: the stepping out of homosexuality into the dazzling spotlight of the public stage, the splendid clamours of – as they’d say in Wilde’s time – the love that dare not speak its name. It has not only dared to speak its name, but has shouted it loudly. Over, we could say, is the homosexual orgy, and with it ends (perhaps its most jarring and radical expression?) the sexual revolution that shook the west in the course of this harshly criticized century. In a way, Foucault’s programme has been realized, stated – to the surprise of many and the shock of sexual liberation activists – in the first volume of History of Sexuality. The machine of sexuality, emptied, saturated, reverted, persists – although we begin to discern signs of subterfuge and subsistence through forced affiliation and submission to other more modern and powerful machines – perhaps on the cusp of its saturation, in a smooth decline. A decline so smooth that if one doesn’t pay close attention they won’t notice that it’s the decline of modern homosexuality. Because it exits the stage in a pathetic and terrifying scene: of death. There must be some plane – not that of causality – where there is proximity between the tousled exacerbation of sexual impulses (‘true laboratories of sexual experimentation’, as Foucault would say) and the emergence of mass death through AIDS, some imaginary, literary space, where this proximity becomes meaningful, without being obliged to fall into facile exorcisms of false piety. Somehow, there is a correlation. It will be up to historians to determine the power of the mortal outbreak in the historic becoming, to understand it. Those of us who are currently affected by it cannot ignore the sinister correlation between a maximum (splendour) of promiscuous, particularly homosexual, sexual activity and a sickness that uses the contact between bodies (and, in the west, homosexual



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contact especially) to multiply itself at terrifying speed, occupying a crucial point in the constellation of coordinates of our times, giving way to the attractive (thanks to its mysteriousness and ambivalence) conclusion of sex and death. One might think that the orgy has never reached such excesses as it has in modern times under the aegis of the sexual liberation movement (and more markedly the homosexual liberation movement). Foucault might’ve anticipated this inflection – which now seems to have been verified not only in the theoretical, but in corporal practices as well – as he shows us how sexuality has moved towards a point of unsustainable saturation, with the extension of the apparatus of sexuality to the most intimate pores of the social body. The social apparatus built around the AIDS outbreak paradoxically promotes planned sexuality – treated by the powers that be as knowledge – and marks the point of inflection and decline. It’s interesting to note the extent to which the modern values of the sexual revolution are so firmly established that our first impulse is to angrily denounce its reversal. We don’t see the historical importance of this revolution, we aren’t able to accept homosexuality as it is defined (or was defined up to now) by doctors, psychologists, priests, mass media, lovers and lovers of lovers – a large section of the homosexual movement defends the notion of the eternal and nonhistorical spirit of the homosexual being. Our homosexuality is a sexpol, or at least it presents itself as such, despite Reich’s homophobia. A political element, a sexual element. It shows similarities to Osvaldo Lamborghini’s El Fiord (but a Lamborghini without ecstasy). Is that right, without ecstasy? Thanks to Bataille, we know that sexuality (‘eroticism of bodies’) is one of the ways we may reach ecstasy. Actually, Bataille distinguishes three ways to dissolve the individual monad and recover our original indistinctive fusion with the divine: orgy, love, sacredness. Through orgy we may achieve the dissolution of bodies, but it is a fleeting ecstasy and egotism is quickly restored; the void produced in these perverse gymnastics is filled by the obscene personalism of the pure body (an expressionless body, or a body that is its own expression, or at least tries to be …). In the sentimentalism of love, on the other hand, the leaving of oneself is more enduring, the other weaves a time-resistant cape of erotic sublimation. But only through the dissolution of the body in the cosmic (the sacred) do we achieve absolute ecstasy, the definitive leaving of the self.

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We are too imprisoned by the notion of sexuality to be able to understand this. Sexuality is valuable thanks to its passionate power, for its capacity to produce tremblings and vibrations (would ecstasy be, on this scale, a kind of zero degree?) that are felt in the plane of desire. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way, as Reich would have us believe along with his entourage of nymphomaniac followers who may not fully agree with him but who are imbued with the spirit of ascendant sexual pleasure. It already sounds quaint. But think how much it has taken to get here, to reach the promised paradise of sexuality. AIDS, especially in the world of homosexuality (I’m thinking of Brazil, where many advances had been made, that is, where a considerable deterritorialization of customs was achieved; in other less audacious societies the disappearance of homosexuality might not be so clearly visible; in a process as subtle as suburban sprawl, it takes a long time to reach certain places, they still haven’t heard the news …), is another turn of the screw in the sexual apparatus, demanding if not total abstinence, at least the medically advised practice of clean sex, without risks, disinfected and transparent. I don’t mean to propose a ‘let the good times roll’ attitude where sex is concerned – heaven help us after all we’ve been through (suffered) under the premise of liberating ourselves – but to explain (affirm, confirm) the process of medicalization of social life. I’m not proposing (I confess it’s not easy) we go against the doctors, since medicine obviously plays a central role in the battle against imminent death. The panic induced by AIDS accelerates the ebb of the sexual revolution that was already under way in places such as the United States, where a return to chastity is on the rise. The movement was already saturated, a fact that seems inherent to the triumph of homosexuality in the west, caused by a fairly well-known process that doesn’t need repeating here. Let us remember that homosexuality has long been considered a medical beast, lest we forget its many incarnations from sodomite, to pervert, to libertine, to homosexual. Modern-day homosexuality is a relatively recent figure, which, in a period of a hundred years has experienced its rise to glory and fall from grace. What will happen to homosexuality, if she refuses to return to the catacombs from which she clamoured to be freed so her debauchery could shine provocatively on her flaming red lips? She is simply diluted by social life, unnoticed by everyone, or almost everyone. She becomes just another enigma, one option among many,



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something that inspires neither hate nor admiration. Not something special, something that could happen to anyone. Upon being made completely visible, the assault of normalization strips homosexuality of all mystery, turning it into something utterly banal. As much as we might try to change the terminology – as Deleuze proposed the notion of societies of control as a substitute for Foucault’s societies of discipline – it’s not easy to alter the course of such a profound reorganization, or attempt at reorganization of sexual practices, grievously indicated by the obligatory introduction of latex to the most intimate of passions. Homosexuality has been stripped of all mystery, making it completely banal. It’s not something we want to celebrate. It was fun while it lasted, but neither is it something we’ll mourn. In the end, homosexuality (the practice) has not been as marvellous as its self-interested apologists proclaimed it to be. There is not, in fact, one form of homosexuality, but, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, a thousand sexes, or at least, until very recently, two major incarnations of male homosexuality in the west. One, the Genettian gays, always flirting with masochism and destructive passion; the other, gays in the North American style, with their bristly moustaches, boxed into their abject individualist tedium (a replacement of normal marriage that manages to be even more boring). Bombarded by the campaigns for AIDS prevention, I would venture that many gays would prefer to cease sexual relations altogether rather than radically exchange their former practices for new ‘safe’ ones, that is to say using condoms. Homosexuality is emptied from the inside out, like a condom. But it wasn’t defeated by the repression that has so violently assaulted it (especially in the 1930s and ’50s, and, in the case of Cuba, still today: a torturous form of persecution that takes a fresher, more modern approach). No: the gay movement was a resounding triumph, it won the acknowledgement (not exempt from stormy or tortuous moods) of the right to sexual difference, waving the banner of the libidinous struggle of our times. We must recognize it and move on. The gay movement (not only political, but also an occupation of territory: a true Movement to the Centre) began to hollow out when the maricas became less flamboyant and, poutingly, began to integrate: the vast circus that lumped lovers of the identical with heteroclites, with delirious (and dangerous) marginalities, began to disperse as the manflorones gained ground on the social scene. The AIDS outbreak deals the final blow, completely changing alliances, parting the waters, the borders. Those infected with AIDS are

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discriminated against and excluded, but – we must remember – they are not only maricones. This stigma has more to do, it would seem, with their nearness to death in our highly medicalized society. The disease’s terrifying onslaught purges the swollen, festering pores of sexual perversion. We hear Divine’s (the great transvestite from Our Lady of the Flowers) laughter. Additionally, with the arrival of the unexpected guest (as Copi’s last piece is called), traditional societal bonds, already weakened by the fraying of the marginal ties we spoke of, finally break. AIDS has changed the coordinates of solidarity, no longer limited to the initiated, as they were called in times of gay persecution: the sickness has now overflowed beyond the gay sector, spilling out into all areas of society. In general it’s a certain kind of (mature) woman who sympathizes with the AIDS patients, while many erstwhile friends flee in terror. All this public promotion of homosexuality, so cumbersome and heavy that it has hit the floor, has not been in vain. It has dispersed the paranoid focus on sexual identity, bringing the famous debate over identity into the TV room, exposing the idiotic notion that underlies it; inadvertently favouring a certain model of androgyny that doesn’t necessarily have to do with sexual practice. Said another way: gays were the first to wear earrings; now a man can wear an earring without being less masculine. Although being masculine doesn’t mean much any more. In the end, the disappearance of homosexuality does not stop the becoming-woman heralded by feminism (another fossil in extinction): it consolidates and confirms it, more than radicalizing it, filing down its sharp edges. Now, the saturation (suppuration) of escape through passion that marked homosexuality with its trail of victims and its little tricks to defy death (let’s think of Copi, AIDS victim, his cohort of transvestites, gigolos, criminals and cops playing a lethal game on the steps of the cathedral; defying death has become impossible, something macabre and ridiculous). We must seek other forms of passionate reverberation – for example, mysticism – as a way of experiencing ascending ecstasy, at a time in which sexual ecstasy, thanks to AIDS, has become wholly descendant. With the disappearance of male homosexuality (feminine homosexuality, it should be clarified, continues to grow and expand but looks more like the incorporation of women than like Dionysian disorder), sexuality in general is increasingly less interesting. A century of celebrating has worn us out. It’s not a coincidence that drugs (its worst uses) are the focus of international attention. For



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better or worse, drugs (or at least certain drugs, the so-called hallucinogens) bring us close to ecstasy. As much as the ringmasters of history may hate it, it harkens back to a ritualized use that liberated bodies never intended (although Sade’s heroine warned us: ‘measure is required even in the depths of infamy and delirium’). We abandon the individual body. It’s now about leaving the self.

Muddy Baroque

Sandy Beaches to Muddy Delta

An introduction to Cuban and Argentine neo-baroque poetry An onslaught of folds, iridescent hems, magnificent draping, the neo-baroque unfurls upon Latin American literature; this ‘scourge’ of Lezamaesque creation undermines, corrodes – from the edges, but efficiently – the official styles of proper speech. It’s the poetry of José Lezama Lima, which culminates in his novel Paradiso, that incites the resurrection, firstly Cuban, of the baroque in these savage lands. Left for dead and buried in the nineteenth century – bulldozed over by neoclassical industriousness which exorcized the baroque as the epitome of improper speech – it begins to re-emerge near the end of the nineteenth century, when the term ‘neo-baroque’1 appears amidst the vegetative flourishes of art nouveau that aimed to challenge the success of bourgeois utilitarianism. Later, everything would be read from the baroque perspective: surrealism, Artaud … cubism, I dare say, could be considered baroque.2 This essay is the prologue to Caribe Transplatino. Poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense, a collection of poems selected by Perlongher himself and published by Editorial Luminarias in San Pablo in 1991. It was published as ‘Neobarroco Transplatino’ in the journal La Caja no. 1, September–October 1992. The journal was published from 1991 to 1994.

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Is the baroque something restricted to a specific historic moment, or do baroque twists and turns reappear in (trans)historic forms? It was a question obsessed over by specialists. Deleuze sees, quite rightly, traces of the baroque in Mallarmé: ‘The fold is without doubt Mallarmé’s most important concept, more like an operation, the operative act that makes him a great baroque poet.’3 A sense of sensitivity, a sense of collective spirit that sets the tone, ‘characterizes’ a period or a perspective,4 the baroque essentially consists of a certain folding of content and form. Forceful gales, fluttering folds – chiaroscuro splendour – the baroque form. It’s on the plane of form that the baroque, and now the neo-baroque, operate. But these swirling forms, full of voluptuous volutes, faintly Asian, enter the topaz void to call forth and manifest, from the turbulent darkness of veiled enigma, forces no less dark. The baroque – observes González Echevarría5 – is furiously anti-western, eager to engage in ‘bastardized” interminglings with non-western cultures. In its New World incarnation, the Golden Age baroque (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), encounters and emulsifies mestizo and Afro-Latino elements (contributions, reappropriations, uses) canonized, Lezama states, by the phenomenal works of Aleijadinho and Kondori.6 Where do the eccentric tendencies of the European and also the Latin American baroque originate from? It is a truly majestic deterritorialization. Lezama Lima said he didn’t have to leave his room to be able to ‘revive the court of Louis XV [sic] and seat myself beside the Sun King, hear Sunday mass in the cathedral of Zamora alongside Columbus, see Catherine the Great strolling the banks of the frozen Volga, or witness an Eskimo woman give birth and then eat the placenta.’ Poetry of deterritorialization, the baroque has always railed against and pushed aside preconceived limits. As it loosens restrictions, it desubjectifies. It’s the release from attachment sought by the mystics. It’s not poetry of the ego, but of the ego’s dissolution. It frees fluid verses (always flowing) from the romantic restraints of the lyrical ego. It favours immanence, and, curiously, this immanence is divine: it reaches for, joins with (constitutes) its own divinity or transcendental plane. The ‘poetic system’ created by Lezama Lima – transhistoric coordinates derived from the radical use of poetry as ‘absolute knowledge’ – could replace religion, it is a religion: an excessive, capricious and meticulous transcultural merging that gathers the mutilated wastes of the most varied literary and



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historical monuments and makes them dazzle. For Luis A. Villena,7 Lezama Lima is a shaman, his word has an oracular inflection, not a shaman of nature, but a shaman of culture: illuminated, prophetic even, Hermetic, a mystic trobar clus, mysterious in his methods, not always in his apparent results. The baroque divinity is a divinity in extremis: under the maniacal control of mannerism,8 the slithering serpent of an unchecked dementia. Sacred dementia: for the first time, ‘poetry becomes a vehicle of absolute knowledge, which aims to touch on the essence of life, culture, and religious experience, to poetically penetrate the entire reality we are capable of spanning’.9 The poetics of ecstasy: ecstasy in the joyful celebration of a phosphorescent incandescent language. The schizophrenic wanderings of the baroque man, static nomad. His are the most splendid journeys: Through the corridors of his home, moving from bedroom to bathroom, parading round parks or bookshops. Why bother with modes of transport? I think about planes, where the travellers may walk only from back to front: that’s not travelling. Travelling can be merely a slight movement of the imagination. Travelling is recognition, recognizing oneself, it’s the loss of childhood and the passage to maturity. Goethe and Proust, those men of immense diversity, hardly travelled at all. The imago was their vessel. Mine too: I’ve hardly ever left Havana. I have two excuses: every time I left my lungs worsened; and also, during every trip the memory of my father’s death loomed large. Gide has said that every adventure is a foretelling of death, an anticipation of the end. I don’t travel: that’s why I am resurrected.10

A certain tendency towards the absurd, a desire for the obscure, the extravagant, a taste for messiness that would seem kitsch or detestable on classical catwalks – it’s not an error or a vice, but a fundamental characteristic, a filigreed inscription, a certain textual intervention that influences the textures of Latin America. Textures because the baroque weaves more than a signifying text, a rhizomatic knitting of allusions that transform the language into texture, an embroidered sheet, something tangible, material, that can stand on its own. The Golden Age baroque practised a pulling down/demolition, a disproportioned and at the same time meticulous simulacrum, a decodification of the classic metaphors present in poetry prior to

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Petrarch. Metaphors to the second power: so that peaceful islands in a river become ‘verdant parentheses’ in the currents of a stream. At the same time, all this linguistic demolition and sabotage – poetry operates on the plane of language, on the plane of expression – celebrates, with the perfection of a golden monad, a carnival of rhythms and colours. Let’s say that the baroque is ‘constructed’ atop previous styles through a kind of ‘inflation of signifiers’, a mechanism of proliferation. It consists of – writes Sarduy – ‘obliterating the signifier of a given signified without replacing it with another, however distant the latter might be from the former, but rather with a chain of signifiers that progresses metonymically and that ends by circumscribing the absent signifier, tracing an orbit around it …’.11 Saturation, therefore, of ‘communicative’ language. Language, it could be said, ‘abandons’ (or banishes) its communicative function and spreads out like a viscous, iridescent substance that ‘shines from within’; ‘literature of language’, which casts off purely instrumental, utilitarian functions to delight in the meandering interplay of sound and sense – ‘poetic function’ that traverses the plane of established meaning, disrupting it, secretly, clandestinely, molecularly, to create a mirage of blinding, obfuscating plenitude, hindered and heeded by its own composition, but whose insistent obsession with folds, with draping, with twists and turns, lends it, like frivolous Argentine excesses, a stimulating, erotic contortion. Sensual potlatch of excess that is woven from ‘material textures’, a ‘theatre of matter’ (Deleuze): pulled taut and hardened through ‘hysteresis’ (the laws of hysteria), matter, elliptical in shape, ‘may be useful for expressing the folds of another material’. Impulsive, corporal material evoked and summoned by the baroque in its full-bodied corporality, saturated and distorted by heterogeneous inscriptions. To sedition through seduction. Baroque mechanisms disintegrate the intended unilaterality of meaning, embellishing threadbare charms through a sinful meandering proliferation of allusions and flourishes with heavy adornments that create a mask of grandiloquent splendour. The baroque machine launches a strident attack on the plane of signification, hanging its iridescent costume jewellery on the nodule of official meaning. It won’t settle for a mere substitution of one meaning for another; it multiplies the many rays of polyphonic polysemy, like in a game of double inverted mirrors (The double in the mirror, by Osvaldo Lamborghini). In the myopic view of anachronistic logos,



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it would be placidly reduced to a single significance. But instead, meaning unfolds over an associative and phonic network, in a rhizomatic, seemingly disorganized, asymmetric, chaotic manner. The reference alluded to is tucked away under a gleaming waterfall, and if meaning is lost, it no longer matters, the process generates a powerful force of forgetfulness: forgetfulness or confusion – as opposed to confession – of the illusion behind the elision. How does one make a church more baroque? ‘Fill it with angels in flight, glorious, hypnotic, whorls of clouds in ecstatic levitation, false columns or the timid gaze of Saint Sebastian riddled with exquisite pains …’.12 Everything floats, everything rises up in flight. The baroque carnival is not merely an accumulation of ornaments – of light bouncing off glittery veils. The weight of the rococo, contorted angels and virgins mounted on leaden dildos topple the edifice of the conventional referent – treating it like any other element. Like in Foucault’s Theatrum philosoficum, all that is supposedly profound floats to the surface; the artifice of profundity is nothing but another fold in the texture of the surface. Far from revealing the object that is named, baroque language, frothing and churning, aims to reupholster, envelop or luxuriously gift-wrap the object in question. The resulting fiasco does not merely imply a certain loss of meaning or thread of discourse. In these contortions, words materialize; they become objects, heavy symbols instead of placid prologues to the ceremony of communication. Hermeticism constitutes the poetics of the baroque, or better yet, the neo-baroque – writes Yurkiévich13 – making interpretation unfeasible: an unstoppable referential subversion occurs, an ineffable irreducibility, giving absolute autonomy to the poem. On the linguistic exchange market, where the signified is counted in legitimate and fixed signifiers, this causes a commotion, an uproar: like a gypsy caravan parading through the grey din of the Stock Exchange. It would be a mistake to write off this disruption as some formless chaos. Quite the opposite: codes become increasingly sophisticated, proliferating by ever more microscopic degrees. Poetry of the extreme, the summum of codes should correspond to the maxumum passionate energy spent in the frenzy of the act. And this minuscule multiplicity directs and mediates the oscillations of the rapid ebb and flow. The baroque machine does not advance, like Dadaism, on pure destruction. It does not raze the land it invades, but instead

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embellishes it with arabesques and leaves banners tangled in the horns of the European bulls. The new shoots of baroque arrive in Cuba via Spain, where they were reclaimed by García Lorca and the Generation of ’27, inspired by the three-hundredth anniversary of Góngora’s death. The emergence of Lezama, the great poet of Trocadero Street, had nothing to do with what was being written on the island but instead had a direct link to the European vanguard. The encounter between the young poets of Orígenes and Juan Ramón Jiménez thus becomes a genealogic event. Fostered by these aesthetic poets, the baroque takes root in Cuba. It’s surprising – notes the Cuban critic González Echevarría14 – that ‘the only country in the hemisphere that experiences a major political revolution, is the same one that produces writing which, from any commonly accepted perspective, is as far as possible from what could be conceived of as revolutionary literature’. This tension leads to major struggles that cannot be entirely attributed to literary subversion. Lezama Lima, who decided to stay in Havana after the revolution, would quickly become embroiled in silent conflicts with the regime, which denied him an exit visa. Like most contemporary Cuban literature, the Cuban baroque bloomed in exile, thanks, in large part, to the graceful prose of Severo Sarduy. It’s the very same Sarduy who launches into circulation, in his 1972 article,15 the term neo-baroque: debauchery, excessive overabundance, ‘a bulge in the topography, a shifting, thorny outcropping, made from mud’.

Neobarroco/neobarroso We use the terms neobarroco and neobarroso, the first a new incarnation of baroque, the second from the Spanish barroso, muddy. Why muddy? These panting contortions of language may sound overworked and futile (empty brilliance that fogs up the superficial frivolousness) to those in Argentine literary circles, untrusting on principle of all things tropical and inclined to adulterate with feigned profundity the melancholy of large distances of uprootedness. Borges wrote off the baroque with his celebrated sarcasm: ‘I should define as baroque that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody. […] I would say that the final stage of all styles is baroque



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when that style only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks’ (A Universal History of Infamy). This doesn’t mean that an impulse towards the baroque is not present in the writings of Argentine literature – and in Spanish generally speaking. Darío artificialized everything, and Lugones followed with his patient stringing together of mottled rhymes. The neo-baroque seems to result – it could be ventured – from the encounter between the baroque current, which has been, despite its silences, a constant in Spanish, and the explosion of surrealism. Someone should reconstruct (as Lezama did with Golden baroque) the unfoldings of surrealism in its Latin American incarnation, how it served on these untamed coasts to radicalize the project of de-realization of the official styles – realism and its derivations, like ‘social poetry’. In Argentina, the power of surrealism is clear, through voices such as Aldo Pellegrini, Francisco Madariaga and especially Enrique Molina. Lezama himself felt the impact of surrealism; it’s the framework over which he builds his baroque (visible in verses such as ‘a bridge, a remarkable bridge, it’s hidden …’). But Lezama makes sure to differentiate the procedures: what he does ‘clearly isn’t surrealism, because it’s a metaphor that glides, not one created through the fatal crash of two metaphors’.16 A figurative metaphor, making it impossible to stop the incessant glide of meaning, like a moveable unit. Returning to Argentina, many attempts were made to undermine the conventional meaning of things, hidden sometimes in a sentimental and expressive lyricism. The operation of estrangement, with archaizing nuances, is present in Macedonio Fernández, who codes nothingness in rhetorical effects. There’s no way to classify the significant permutations of Spanish in Oliverio Girondo’s En la masmédula, crossed, as Jorge Schwartz points out,17 with the concretist experimentalism of Haroldo de Campos. For his part, the previously mentioned Enrique Molina attacks dominant narratives and history itself, sketching with fascinating micro-points the poetic chronicle of the Camila O’Gorman tragedy. Neo-baroque poetry, following the ideas of Roberto Echavarren,18 borrows heavily from the vanguard, particularly the affinity for experimentation, but it is not part of the vanguard. It is lacking the sense of militant equalization of styles and the destruction of syntax (both factors present in concretism): it is in fact more a hypersyntaxis, similar to Mallarmé’s style. It attempts to both reclaim and

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appropriate modernism, recruiting Uruguayans Herrera, Reissig and Delmira Agustini, among others. There is, to be sure, an essential difference between these contemporary writings and the Golden Age baroque. Saddled to Renaissance rhetoric, the Golden baroque demands translation: it allows the possibility of deciphering the coded symbolism to restore the ‘normal’ text, as Dámaso Alonso did with the texts of Góngora. Neo-baroque experiments, on the other hand, do not permit translation; they may hint at it – says Nicolás Rosa19 – but manage to pervert it and in the end dispel it. Therefore, unlike the baroque of the Golden Age – which boldly pirouetted over a classic stage – contemporary baroque lacks firm soil under which to dig its maze of tunnels. Product of a certain dismemberment of realism, parallel to the erosion of ‘magical realism’ and the ‘marvellous real’, a diversity of significant writings emerge, more or less transparent, scattering the encampments of crystalline styles across the desert. The process of construction atop a previous style can be clearly seen in a poet whom we wouldn’t want to classify offhand as neo-baroque: the Argentine Leónidas Lamborghini. He starts out with a poetry of the social variety, which owed much to the populism of Evaristo Carriego and a bit to the simplicity of Baldomero Fernández Moreno, then he begins to ‘baroquize’ this substratum through metonymic saturation – a device especially clear in his Episodios, 1980. More radical is the experience of his brother, Osvaldo Lamborghini, to whom we wouldn’t hesitate to attribute the triumphant invention of the neobarroso style. His work could be considered the detonator of this literary current which baroquizes – or embarra, muddies – Argentine letters. While, like his brother, he had a background as a Peronist activist, Osvaldo Lamborghini comes into contact with a completely different vein, the emergence of Lacanism, inaugurating a heroic, almost pornographic period. In 1968, Germán García provokes a resounding legal scandal with his novel Nanina, censured bestseller which revealed the secrets of a small town, quaint in light of the sexual revolution. Published the following year, Osvaldo Lamborghini’s El Fiord – whose radicalism opens with the obscene birth of a despot and launches into the most ambitious of linguistic subversions – gives rise to the birth of a new style: ‘And what was all that noise if in the end the baby was so miserable – in terms of size at least – all that wailing, pulling out



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hair by the fistful and digging her buttocks hard into the striped mattress’.20 Continuing with this quick outline, it’s worth mentioning the writer who has the closest textual relationship to Lezama Lima or Severo Sarduy: Arturo Carrera. The Argentine neobarroso had, in truth, two births. One, that of El Fiord, the other, that of La partera canta: the midwife was clawed. Quaking in her boots. Listening to the aquatic hum that shook in that blessed womb. The forgotten coins and the frosted leaves. The frozen damp penetrating the furrows and burning and nourishing. The fields, for her, milky thoughts … and icy forceps. An unexpected Push in the tedium. A little suffocated cry among the clovers and another spirited gaze and ‘screamed’ on the ruined anvil of the inkwell.21

How do we define this, which is not a vanguard, and not even a movement, but just the deleterious trace of a literary current that encompasses, in the words of Libertella, ‘that movement common to the Spanish language, with Caribbean nuances (musical, graceful, complicated, artificial, picaresque, converting the baroque into an argument – “anything to win”, says Severo Sarduy) and with other nuances in Argentina (rational, sarcastic, witty, nostalgic, sceptic, psychoanalytic?)’.22

Carving/tattooing The relationship between language and body, between inscription and flesh, creates an array of tensions in the contemporary neo-baroque. With the Cuban Severo Sarduy, directly linked to Lezama, the inscription takes the form of a tattoo: With so many cocoons in flower, so many golden locks and Rubensian buttocks around him, the cipherer is in such a state that he no longer knows where to knock his head; he tries a brush stroke and gives a pinch, he finishes a flower between those edges most worthy of guarding it and then erases it with his tongue to paint another with more stamens and pistils and changing corollas.23

The author is, for Sarduy, a tattoo artist; literature is the art of the tattoo.

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For Osvaldo Lamborghini, on the other hand, more than a tattoo, it involves carving, the carving of flesh, the scraping of bone. See this excerpt from ‘El niño proletario’: All the things I’d done to him, in the waning afternoon sun, blue, from the blows. I opened a double-lipped canal in his left leg so deep his hideous and no-good bone was exposed. It was a white bone like any other, but his bones weren’t alike. I slashed open his hand and saw another bone, his joints tensed, knuckles grasping, mired in the mud, as Esteban agonized to the point of pleasure.24

These two poles of carving/tattooing, encompass a variety of neo-baroque writings or, it would be more generous to say, many neo-baroque paths in Latin American poetics. It is definitely not a school, but some common characteristics may be seen. A certain deterritorialization of slang (the way, in Maitreya, an Argentine chongo emerges from the waters of the Caribbean), which corresponds, in part, with the dispersion of the authors: Sarduy in Paris, Roberto Echavarren and José Kozer in New York, Eduardo Milán in Mexico, etc. The Cuban Severo Sarduy, whose greatest contribution to literature is his novels, recovers, in his book Un tesigo fugaz disfrazado, the classical forms of verse, emptying them (or filling them?) with a sometimes playful sensuality. His compatriot José Kozer practises a kind of narrative suspension that seems to owe much to a Proustian tone. The other extreme of the neo-baroque is marked by similar writings that have been called ‘pure poetry’, like the work of Eduardo Milán, whose conciseness contrasts with the proliferation of other poets. In this respect his work is similar – at least in its brevity – to the harmonious folds of the Argentine Tamara Kamenszain. The Uruguayan Roberto Echavarren, on the other hand, is characterized by long poems, where a certain erudition intermingles with colloquialisms of a narrative in ruins, which manages, in its apparent disorientation, to recover the gains of other waves. More than an exhaustive list, this is a rough cartography of the length and breadth of the neo-baroque, whose borders are so diffuse that a detailed mapping would be impossible. There are, of course, other neo-baroque poets – or poets who work in a vein similar to this resurrection of the baroque – in other Latin American countries. I could mention Coral Bracho in Mexico, Mirko Lauer in Peru, Gonzalo Muñoz and Diego Maquieira in Chile, where the novelist



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Diamela Eltit also stands out. In Brazil, Haroldo de Campos’s Galaxias could be considered as a budding baroquism, similar to Paulo Leminsky’s work Catatan. Other poets shine also on the muddy shores: in Uruguay the dazzling sparkle of Eduardo Espina (his collection Valores Personales from 1983) and the enchanting Marosa de Giorgio. In these lands dwell, also, the young Peruvian Reynaldo Jiménez, who resided in Buenos Aires, and whose work, though brief, is a delicate tight-rope walk across the hanging nets of language. If the Golden Age baroque, as we said, is constructed on classical soil, the neo-baroque lacks, due to the diversity of contemporary styles, a smooth surface to sink into. It is built, then, on any style: perversion – you could say – may bloom in any corner of literature. In its Argentine expression, neo-baroque poetry is up against a tradition of hostile literature, anchored in the pretension of a deep realism that usually ends up splashing in the barroso waters of the muddy river. From there, the parodic nickname neobarroso for this emerging phenomenon. The baroque: irregular pearl, nodule made from mud.

Foot Fetish

Tracing Glauco’s path (or, rather, retracing) would, I thought, be a good way to start this essay. It’s a path that crawls, dog-like, past a series of humble homes. But the trailhead has a sour smell: the path evokes the feet that tread it. Maybe this is the point. The soursmelling text, the muddy path, the saturated soil, the slime stuck to the worn heel. To the laces and buckles. The tainted text is read (like cold alphabet soup lapped up by a dog). Offensive smells. Emissions – ‘a body odour that knocks you over’ – inspiring and inciting (a flow of viscous poisonous energy), trembling and shivering from those who would curl their nostrils or lower their gaze. A greasy exchange that produces a multiplicity of microdevices, grids, lines: like the famous and buttery madeleine, whose flaky aroma as it descended into the teacup awakened the affective memory of Proust’s childhood, time regained, recovered sense of smell – less contaminated than the visual and auditory. Smell like the vaporous (think Vick’s Vaporub) form of a strongly libidinized energy fuelling the machine of recollection, of thought, of fantasy. The boor who operates the texts of Glauco Mattoso is immersed This essay appeared as the epilogue to Manual do Pedólatra Amador. Aventuras & leituras de un tarado por pés [Manual of the amateur foot fetishist: adventures and readings of someone really into feet], by Glauco Mattoso, pseudonym used by Brazilian writer Pedro José Ferreira da Silva. Published by Expressão, 1986. This text was dated September 1985.



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in the efficient inscription of its fragrance, the dregs of the urinals where the philosopher (Michelet?) was inspired to challenge the contortions of his time. In Manual del podólatra [Podophile’s manual] the stink impregnates less subliminal passageways. This ‘direct action’ of desire, pornographic (‘Let’s get down to business!’) also manifests itself in the gestures of the reader. The hand creeps not towards the heavy and leaden forehead, like the thinker, but towards the coarse frenzy of the zipper. Glauco Mattoso doesn’t confess, as Genet does, that ‘I write while I masturbate’. But he recounts that on his lustful journeys he masturbates while he reads, or he reads in order to masturbate. The temptation of masturbation becomes irresistible. A smooth sliding, and the seminal drops of the reader stain the tattooed page – still wet inscriptions – of the one who writes what is read and masturbated on. Is this masturbation disturbing? Is the reader disturbed while he masturbates? Or does it cause a warped remorse, as felt by the damsel who gives up her labours (or flowers) as she squirms under the purring silks? Or better yet, the damsel who passes gas? Al pedo. These footnotes are al pedo. The Argentinian expression – which uses the word for fart (pedo) to mean ‘in vain’, ‘á toa’ – is obscenely graphic: the desire to shit reduced to futile flatulence, the force of the unexpected eruption lost to the air. It’s not surprising that the stench of feet evokes shit (or the typewriter that is spurred into action by this stench). Glauco Mattoso does it himself: the coprophagia of his Jornal Dobrabil (rejection of erection, of rigidity, in favour of the fleeting, the foldable) hides – or vehiculizes – a deeper fervour: a foot fetish. THE FOOT: kitsch fetish. The exaltation of rococo futility that reaches its textual climax in the romantic ecstasy of La pata de la gacela [The gazelle’s paw]. But things quickly become more serious, the footprints are deeper. From the delicate heels of Louis XV, to the washbasins of Versailles, we move on to the guardsman’s boots, the footballer’s cleats, the labourer’s muddy sneakers. The fetish seems to lose its utilitarian function, past its prime, rotting away in the mirrored case of a toy store, shattering the mannerist glasswork. In this escape from the miniature doll’s house (worship of the small feminine foot: think of the cruel Chinese methods of binding the pained feet of young girls; you could imagine, through Lyotard, that, just as the Greeks prepared the sodomization of their boys, so the Chinese prepared the conditions for their torturous podiatry), the rotund, masculine foot – largeness legendarily associated with

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the penis – stomps, like the rooster before the hen, with the weight of (desired) power. ‘You walk and walk and in the end you shop Sadima’, said a strident advertisement from my youth in Buenos Aires. Today a stroll no longer seems so innocent: Glauco’s sharp odour disrupts it. In this wandering search for Sadima (a defunct furniture shop; furniture equates to bed: ‘Let’s take this to the bedroom’) there is a flattened materiality. No symbolism. Warm pressure, a painful pricking (tired muscle, swollen sole) in the feet of the walker. The libidinous nature of this recurrent adventure, on foot, would be more apparent to someone, like Glauco Mattoso (gay flâneur), who cruises the circuits of the trottoir [pavement]. Let’s imagine, through Baudelaire, read by Benjamin, the wandering of the desirous gaze that inserts itself into the impassive flow of the homogeneous multitude. In the same way that Glauco’s startlingly pornographic work advertises its services, the gaze of the flâneur interferes with the circulation of the masses in the urban landscape. This interruption could be diminished by a certain perverse neutrality, of which the author is proud. His malicious candidness does not impede him from giving himself over to the laughable effects of his onslaughts: the surprise of the unexpected (kicking the foot of the distracted man to make him trip and fall) is constitutive of his procedure. Just as the gaze of the wanderer is pleasant (and affirms the drifting drift, a kind of art for art), so the hunting methods narrated by Glauco seem inseparable from their practical results: the hand grips the turgid penis. The temptation of masturbation is – once again – irresistible. We read and we write in a state of almost hysterical exacerbation. Benjamin again (commenting on Baudelaire’s poem ‘To a Passerby’): What makes the body twitch spasmodically – ‘crispé comme un extravagant’, as stated in the poetry – is not the excitement of a man in whom an image has taken possession of every fibre of his being; it partakes more of the shock with which an imperious desire suddenly overcomes a lonely man.1

Surprise is a trait of the nomad. What does this have to do with memories of the walker dragging along, pretentious postmodern hero? We may perceive, in the progress of his march, a double movement of desire. The first, characterized by expansion and diffusion, awareness (and, therefore, its adventures and forays) into



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different tastes, smells and humours (and, in the end, also loves). And a second movement, which aims at specialization, progressive singularization. The perverse, as libertine as it is Sadic, revisited by Klossowski (Sade, My Neighbour), is condensed (pistol or arrow aimed) in the automatic – and in the end apathetic – repetition of a single gesture, in the systematic and minuscule exploitation of a specific pleasure point. Spatialization (the path through territories and bodies) / specialization (the erection of an ideal point of maximum pleasure). We’re not dealing with abstract speculation, but with real world experimentation. The tension between the nomad space and the perverse species that trail several paces behind. These memories of a paedophile are presented as a ‘desirous archaeology’. Its objective is to stir up the origins, the circumlocutions, and the scales of desire, the podophiles (and the neologism is not without an association, very pleasant, with idolatry: the podophile, it could be said, is the lover of feet), recreated through experimental culmination: feigned loss of the perverse beckons from the anonymous and indifferent space of the public mass. The agencements of desire are experiential and concrete, but more importantly they are obscurely anchored in the immutable law of a prescribed unconscious. And these agencements, connections, links, articulations – insist Deleuze and Guattari – move directly through the social field, eroding social institutions. Mischievous desire stalks the family home: the semiotic fusion between stench/ fucking a double transgression, or a multiplied transgression. This fucking that stinks turns to waste, like cold leftovers, discarded and abandoned: stomped so its juices may be secreted and distilled. Here, the sultriness of smell is perhaps connected to the exceptional development of the olfactory sense of a person with limited sight, someone segregated from the rituals of virile infancy due to their lack of vision, his lively yet insufficient vision flattened under thick lenses. This person of (limited) vision smells fishy, is unacceptable, defined by eccentricity (arrogance as Lezama Lima’s mother would call it). Being able to see only very close up, the gaze becomes microscopic: it sees desire in the folds and relief, where others see only contemptuous, insignificant dust. Glauco Mattoso finds pleasure where it is recognized only as unwanted and disgusting. Pleasure of waste, which is not – at all – contempt of pleasure (‘Shameful pleasure’), as Glauco would say; ‘Pleasure yourself freely’, Mattoso says.

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It is pleasure from contempt: the pleasure of another’s power over me, but not over my pleasure. Pleasure is disdained when the actor/author loses control over the mechanism, as in one of the linguopedal episodes (case no. 27). Put differently: another’s power over me is my source of pleasure (‘erotic condition’, Freud would call it). The macchietta of the other’s power: that is what brings me pleasure. The fact that the other’s power can be faked (and that this does not take away from its realness) doesn’t necessarily mean that all dispositions of power are falsified. On certain occasions they might seem more intense (or real?) when they operate on real wounds. It’s not a golden rule, but the usufruct of an inferior status, in terms of social situation, favours the libidinization of hierarchical inequality (or vice versa). Could the act of gaining pleasure through oppression be facilitated by the fact of being objectively oppressed (with all the nuances that the application of this heavy sign brings with it)? Like Trevisan from the seminary in En nombre del deseo [The name of desire], Glauco, in Manual, holds a relatively inferior status compared with the exultant virility of the offensive macho footballers. The genesis of this status is complex. Whether due to his vision problems (where some psychoanalyst might interpret severe conflicts), or because lustful smells contaminated his becomings, guiding him directly downwards (the pull of the abyss: the shoe pleasantly sinking into shitty mud and descending by degrees into degradation), what’s certain is that Glauco gradually acquires a certain eccentricity. This (partial) condition of eccentric, marginal, should not be taken as a tendency towards socioeconomic marginalization; it is a more specific marginalization, of a sexual nature. A kind of wall (although not necessarily visible or transparent) is built around the social demarcation and distribution of perversions. Perversions are not presented here – as Marcuse would’ve liked – as condensed incarnations of libidinal resistance (in terms of mobilization of the principle of pleasure) to the ‘superego’ domestication of the ‘principle of efficacy’. What’s curious is to think how this distribution of perverse passions is processed socially. It’s as if they were concentrated in certain subjects, which begin to run a ‘perverse race’ to assume an ‘identity’ – which, in the case of Glauco, is progressively particularized – without implying that these flows of desirous connection stop spreading through the social body, through the multiform, multicoloured bodies of the mass.



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This position of marginality that the author occupies is not measured by socioeconomic coordinates, but by libidinal coordinates, with reference to the rules that order and classify passions. In this sense, the pervert’s eccentricity remits to his proximity/ contiguity/proclivity to a point of rupture from the social order – in this case, in the directly sexualized plane of norms that regulate erotic exchanges. A certain rejection of these rules is mirrored in the inversion: things are taken the other way around, backwards. This reversion was already practised by young Glauco, when he read ‘backwards’ (in search of excitement) the wicked warnings in Dr Caprio’s ‘sexual hygiene’. These points of rupture are points of escape from the social order. Escapes (not always radical) that are usually literal take the form of wandering in search of the desired object. The encounter might occur by chance – but it’s an objective chance, like the surrealists’ chance, or the chance of the ‘accidental’ encounters in the bars of Cinelandia in Rio. In any case, it’s chance that is provoked. Programmed coincidence, the scene of desire seems prefigured to capture the instantaneous occurrence. An example of this mode of actualization of a desirous ‘fantasy’ can be seen in one of Glauco’s most violently sensual moments of fiction: the encounter with the microfascist gang from Mackenzie College. ‘I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity’, says Glauco – to which I’d add: ‘to actualize my desire’. Spatialization and specialization then are not opposing movements, but simultaneous. An almost banal ascertainment: as the body of the desirous becomes positioned in relation to other objects (which might be shoes, socks, not only feet but their noxious vapours), the directionality of desire is delineated and perfected, becoming more precise and precious. This double procedure should not be imagined as part of a totalizing, teleological ascesis. Quite the contrary: as successive desirous articulations are set to work, different zones are eroticized – a dislocation by erogenous zones, not merely by the body itself, but also by the bodies of others and not the things that these bodies touch or impregnate. There is no ascending unilaterality in the becoming-desire – as Glauco himself seems to believe at times. The archaeology of the podophile could, with malicious ingenuity, be read as a kind of ascension of idolatry. He recognizes, however, the absurdity of the notion of libidinal missionary work. In reality, it is an exploration of routes (again walking, the slimy floor scratched by the tongue,

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the tongue of seven tongues), whose ultimate finality is ambiguous, contradictorily defined by the same subject who removed it. For example, in the final dialogue, Kazuko (the overwhelming memorialist mania of proper nouns) focuses on the contradiction between the erratic mellifluousness of his linguopedic profession and the ideal of a stable and monogamous relationship. This tension intersections the entire trajectory of this errant desire that is (objectively) sedentary. We may travel in memories. Territorial dislocations (like a move to Rio de Janeiro away from family), and also dislocations of the very desire of the body, the acts that fill the imaginary album of perversion. The whole book is focused on illuminating the dark foot of this desire. But the path passes through a multiplicity of practices and experiences. Variations of oral and anal sex, sadomasochistic, sometimes interchangeable positions. What’s more: when Glauco interrupts the narration of his adventures to insert bibliographic or ‘theoretical’ sections, he’s highlighting another element of the machinery. Reading is also an instance of drifting, an example of the actualization (late, savoured, almost diluted emergence) of pleasure. The body not only makes, but also ‘makes up’ the mind. This does not imply ignorance of the powers of sensation. On the contrary, Glauco takes the time to unmask this misunderstanding, attributing a basically moral motivation to the perversion: It wasn’t a mere fetish, something cold and inert to artificially fill the void of frustrated fantasy: the recent filth, the moisture of sweat, was the smell of the most palpable trace, the freshest clue, the truest sign of life. It was the smell of the spiritual communion between my passion and the entire body of one who fits into another who licks. (‘Dos olores chulos’ [Two cocky smells].)

However, in tracing the twists and turns through which the realization of this ineffable pleasure is achieved, some social agencements enter into play. Certain romantic traits of unearthly passion may make us lose sight of the circumstances in which these shifting fits of rage occur. In the annotated memories of Glauco Mattoso, however, the points of intersection between the major social devices of domination and oppression can be seen clearly (their incessant filmic flows bombard, assault, the unconscious), and they are made more perceptible thanks to these ‘literary’ cuts, spasmodic fits on the divan as one confesses to the cabinet of another who reflects.



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The modalities of this desirous connection are multiple. Binary oppositions (of the type rich/poor, strong/weak, masculine/ feminine, master/slave, warden/prisoner, executioner/victim) overcodify the social field in its entirety, and you don’t have to walk far to trip over it. In Glauco’s base instinct, however, these oppositions of the molar order (macroscopic) are appropriated, put to the service of the molecular (microscopic) production of a pleasant sensation. On one hand, it is revealed that the power relationship is one of desire (and along this road we find La Boétie’s desire for subservience). However, the opposite could be considered: that these desirous escapes (expressed, for example, in the sexualization of the relationship between executioner and victim: in Genet, the boy who has an erection when they spit in his mouth and the brilliant panorama of the love between prisoners and their guards in the homosexual concentration camps in Castro’s Cuba, as told by Reinaldo Arenas in Arturo, la Estrella más brillante) are recaptured and put to the service of social institutional machines. Homosexuality is not subversive in itself, as an anatomical act. The mere exercise of its practice does not determine a priori its micropolitical meaning. We can’t turn to the medical-biological model of sexuality. We will always have to pay attention to the social coordinates negotiated in the union of bodies. Glauco’s text is particularly interesting because it is directly anchored in a complex and efficient device: the desire for domination. It remits to the question asked by Reich, one of the battle horses of Anti Oedipus: ‘The masses wanted fascism, and that’s what needs to be explained.’ But fascism doesn’t circle Glauco’s erotic orbit only as a latent ghost; it appears manifestly in the discourses of several of his massage clients. We remember the Nazi who believes in natural superiority or a talent for leadership, and the ineffable Fernando, absent-minded executioner who evokes, in his reappearance as a voluntary slave, the abuses rained down by the Brazilian CCC anticommunist brigade. Glauco is suggesting: the social mechanisms of power, oppression and repression, in the end, are nothing more than the roads travelled by pleasure to reach its destination. The sensual prison scenes, of torture and humiliation, reveal a libidinal side. Society, as smelled by Glauco, is in this sense almost Sadic: the taunts endured by the hostages in the isolated castle in The 120 Days of Sodom were the product of the master’s sexual pleasure.

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This abrupt sexualization of social relationships is not merely imaginary. In the Mettray Reformatory (in Genet’s Miracle of the Rose) the ‘older brother’ had the right to sodomize (or ridicule) the younger as part of the attributions of his ‘title’ – artificial recreation of a family in which sexual tension, conventionally hidden, is made explicit. Submission to the despot is not merely suffering, nor martyrdom replete with Christian moans. These moans – under the veils of piety, guilt, self-pity – merely mask, under a cascade of pained tears, a secret (but vivid) pleasure. To acknowledge this pleasure through pain as a right to pleasure strengthens not only slavish chains, but also a certain form of desirous reappropriation of this conventionally oppressive vehicle. Deleuze shows that the sadomasochistic couple is impossible (there’s the old joke: the masochist tells the sadist: Hit me; the sadist responds: No). There is an ‘active masochist’ (the one who suffers) who drives the ritual (the passive masochist would be, in turn, the one who deals out the punishment). Independent of its varieties (active and passive roles can be reversed, as Glauco shows again and again), the masochistic machinery is ritualized to the extreme. This ritualism is incarnated in an administrative-bureaucratic form: the passion of registration. Classically, this register is part of the contract that sets the limits of the relationship (which in the case of Masoch is written). But the podophile obtains his own data. The form is a field study, sociological perversion – more similar to the systematic survey of the friends of the major gay coquettes. Glauco’s methodology is curious, because it utilizes urban tools: post offices, telephones, subway stations, etc. Such sophistication provides double benefit: achievement of the demanded pleasure, and the more literary pleasure of its register. The experiment of the linguopedic massage is done, explicitly, to be recorded in this book. Throwing out the rule book of podophilia (aberrant neologism, bilingual monster), one might wonder if the letter of citizenship implies some form of identity. This ‘podophile identity’ could be created – as Foucault would have it2 – as a game, an always provisional distribution of positions in a sensual interplay. However, more harshly, it can be represented as a kind of internal incarnation, born of the recondite darkness of the being. In Glauco’s text, the podophile’s identity is ludic as it relates to sexual intercourse itself. However, the ghost of a certain totalizing or interior identity looms at times – likened more easily to the militant



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inflation of gay affirmation and its vices than to the foot fetish. This molar identity materializes – the conjugal illusion emerging dressed in white – in the monster of loneliness that frightens gays. Without judging the justness of this threat, it’s necessary to point out that if it weren’t for his celibacy, Glauco’s linguopedic investigation would be much more complicated. The tension is paradoxical: a nomad, deviant, promiscuous practice of partial contacts (foot/mouth), coexisting with the illusion of stability, the search for the definitive ideal companion. One should ask to what point, in truth, the constant search for this impossible love doesn’t inspire the frenzy of the search itself. One last paragraph about AIDS. It’s interesting how the despicable Glauco perverts the medical discourse – introducing a logical argument as a preamble to the massages. This parody of clinical terminology resists the terrorist battering of AIDS. Since podophilia doesn’t imply seminal fluids, it might be a good alternative in the face of the syndrome. Charged to the virus’s tab, perversion propagates – in the same way that decent gays use the disease to defend closed relationships. The insistence on sealing the borders of this new desirous territoriality sounds at times a bit extreme. Therefore, Glauco only mentions, in passing, that some two or three times he’d been able to move from the toe to the penis, from podophilia to fellatio. However, the delicious circumstances of this journey (turned dangerous due to the AIDS outbreak and a virulent moralism) are not prohibited. Here we might make the same criticism of Glauco that he made of the author of Papillon: ‘It’s just now that it was getting more interesting.’

Baroquification

A pagan carnival erupts in the heart of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso. Suddenly, amid the tumult of the fifes, he saw an enormous phallus advancing, surrounded by a double file of aristocratic Roman ladies, each carrying a wreath, which, with the gentle movements of a dance, they were depositing on the tumulus where the phallus was quivering as it advanced. The glans was a dry carnelian red. The rest of the knob was formed by the leaves of a spikenard painted white. The scandalous multiplication of solar reflections fell on the whitewash of the glans, turning it in such a way that the conical carnelian casque seemed to be entering the houses or beating the cheeks of the maidens, who had just discovered the questioning insomnia of nocturnal perspiration.1

The irruption of the baroque masquerade mimics a phallic triumph. It is important to consider the meaning of the parody. It is not an imitation, but more like a simulation.2 The parody establishes, with respect to the parodied object, a harsh, critical distance. Under the guise of grotesque, exaggerated imitation, what’s carried out is destruction through derision of a certain smooth naturalness of expression. The baroque apparatus dissolves the supposed unilaterality of meaning through a proliferation of allusions and details Extracts from an essay published in Folha de São Paulo, ‘Folhetim’ supplement, 11 March 1988.

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whose heavy excesses impose their grandiloquent splendour on the rugged charm of what, in that voluptuous volute, it masquerades.

Anti-western It is not without reason that baroque is declared to be the most scandalously anti-western artform that has been derived from the west itself. This merit does not emanate only from the baroque’s extraterritoriality – blooming in marginal zones, Italy, Spain, Latin America. Revolutionary for its marginality, its eccentricity, its excessiveness, baroque is in fierce opposition to the discursive rationalism that dominates the west. In the nineteenth century, the high-class divertimento – rejected and systematically misunderstood – was abhorred, mocked and taken as the epitome of bad writing. A certain strain of baroque would remain, however, in the interior of the languages. The literary vanguards of the beginning of the last century dedicated themselves to regenerating the baroque. At a certain point – states Lezama Lima in ‘Baroque Curiosity’ – the baroque became a trend, as prolific as its artifices, broadening its territory to unprecedented degrees: [T]he paintings of Rembrandt and El Greco, Rubens’s feasts, Philippe de Champaigne’s asceticism, Bach’s art of the fugue, a cold Baroque as well as an ebullient Baroque, Leibniz’s mathematics, the ethics of Spinoza – there was even a critic who, outdoing himself in the art of generalization, claimed that the earth is classical and the sea is Baroque.

Lezama Lima himself is a product of this baroque inflation. If we accept that baroque stylistics depend not only on individual innovation but also remits to a certain ‘collective spirit of the time’, how should we read certain baroquizing sources that are expressed primarily in the literary, but that allude – like Kepler’s eclipse ‘prematurely’ to the baroque ellipsis – to a cosmology? We don’t really know if it is a baroque period, or if it is the baroque that ‘makes’ the period. The baroque style not only disciplines and disperses ornamentation; it also constructs a kaleidoscopic vision, which does not impose its own preconceived notion of unity on the fragments it finds. This doesn’t mean that the baroque leaves these pieces to their own devices, but that it arranges them in its own way, privileging

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filigree and cascades of vaporous tulle. It’s a vision that sees brilliance and at the same time shines with brilliance onto what it sees: it shines on what it sees shine. Something like a maze of black lights, discernible and insinuated, checkering parts of the bodies, sensual and lustrous surfaces. The four lances were borne by naked maidens and youths, and at each pause they would caress the ascending spiral of the phallic serpent. […] Astride the bulls, winged youths were dancing and anointing the horns, which were decorated with leaves and bees.

Continuing to quote Lezama, the baroque is A black bow the size of a giant bat almost covered the vulva, trembling at the bulls’ bellowing, but the shadow of the animal that is enemy blood would hide the circle of flowers each time the bulls took a step, and the carnelian casque advanced, surrounded by shrieking phallic dwarfs.

Demented language How did this chamois-clothed anchor moor its orgiastic shadow to the dominant styles? It is well known that the Golden Age baroque executed a multiplying decodification of Petrarch’s poetic discourse. With Petrarch, a certain rooting out of poetic language begins, rotating around itself, like a planet that breaks from its orbit. Like the baroque, this language inspires insanity, becomes a demented language (losing all referential capacity, signalling the abyss between words and being). This deterritorialization is carried out through metaphoric multiplication. Góngora starts from the metaphors used in the stilted poetic code of the period and multiplies them exponentially, remetaphorizing them. This artifice complicates, but also affirms, the possibility of decodifying the cyphered symbolism of baroque allusion to restore the ‘normal’ text. A technique masterfully employed, on Góngora’s poetry, by Dámaso Alonso. However, the translated version is only one more version. The machine of metaphoric multiplication advances one step further as it builds, through successive decodifications, a supplementary decodification, achieving its mission.

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Newly muddied In contrast to the Golden Age baroque – which traces long pirouettes over a classical stage – contemporary baroque lacks firm soil under which to dig its maze of tunnels. Product of a certain deconstruction of realism, a diversity of significant writings emerges, more or less transparent, scattering the encampments of crystalline styles across the desert. The neo-baroque – a term popularized by Severo Sarduy, but which first appeared around 1890 – becomes ‘muddied’ as it slides down the shores of the River Plate Delta to Buenos Aires, like the Duke of Sebregondi, ‘active homosexual and cokehead’, stumbling through the swampy estuary.3 The neo-baroque doesn’t function as a unified structure, as a school or stylistic discipline, but plays at parody, carnivalization, derision, in an open field of constellations, over (or through) any style. Leónidas Lamborghini serves as an example, as he moves to the baroquization of Argentine social realism through metonymic saturation, producing a ‘baroque gauchesco’ style. Perversion may blossom in any corner of literature.

Corporality How does one make a verse sensual? How does one produce sensuality in language? The obsession with the corporality of the word was already present in writers prior to the baroque. But baroque corporality adorns the body with reference to so much refinement that it becomes buried under the weight of its treasures and crowns. Of the shipwrecked pilgrim from Góngora’s Solitudes we know very little. We delight in the celebrations, mythological disquisitions, the intimate iridescences of the landscape, the secret virtues of the fauna. This pilgrim succumbs to the weight of the verbal potlatch and becomes insane, a schizoid. Isolated on an unknown isle, surrounded by a ‘humid temple of Neptune’, Góngora’s castaway is part of the imagined relationship between sailing and insanity. Relationship between the nomad and the lunatic, echoing from the depths of time and granting an element of aquatic escape to the ritual of embarkation.

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Kitsch, camp, gay There is something baroque in this insane flow. Something very easy to understand, because baroque nomadization usually occurs, paradoxically, in situ – like in the case of Lezama Lima, who practically never left Havana, coming and going from the bookshop to his studio, shrouded in a cloud of vapours that were meant to help his asthma. Frequently, the figures on the Gobelins upholstery that covered the back of the piano chatted and gossiped amongst themselves. This flow seems to reek of perversion. ‘Paradiso would be, by order of adjectives, a baroque, Cuban, and homosexual novel’, writes Severo Sarduy. He also said, in Buenos Aires, in a sudden outburst, that the baroque is ‘kitsch, camp, and gay’.

Cuba, Sex, and a Bridge to Buenos Aires

And lastly: A bridge, a remarkable bridge, it’s hidden waters boiling, frozen, surging against the last defensive wall to ravish the mind, the single voice crosses the bridge again, like the blind king who, unbeknownst to him, has been deposed and he dies mended tenderly to the allegiance of night.1

Perhaps the soft death of this dethroned king could be associated – taking advantage of the polyphony – to the ‘lyrical ego’ whose dissolution was decreed by Girondo’s ‘pan-sex/pan-ego’. Agencement of multiple connections that subvert, in the tangle of heteroclite resonances, the order of the discourse. ‘New writings’ resist submission to the ‘law of transgression’ that marks the borders of a school. In this way, the effeminate Cuban neo-baroque may connect writers from diverse backgrounds, such as Leónidas Lamborghini, The conflicted relationship between the Cuban Revolution and its sexual politics was dealt with several times by Perlongher. A version of this essay was first published as ‘O neobarroco a e revolucao’ in Folha de São Paulo, ‘Folhetim’ supplement, 6 July 1986, and later in Argentina in Tiempo Argentino, ‘Cultura’ supplement, 10 August 1986.

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whose writing stems from a kind of epic populism, deconstructed in ‘Episodes’ (1980), through the use of metonymic excess. The distortion of canons of conventional textual transmission may blossom in any corner of literature. Meanwhile, this ‘perversion’ of good writing (clear, crystalline) seems radical in its elision and fragmentation of the lyrical self. It veils the text’s ‘personal’ subject (the endeavour reduced to one more verse). There is also a difference between the so-called Cuban neo-baroque – which could be extended to include what could be called Argentine neo-baroque – on the one hand, and the baroque strictu sensu of the Spanish Golden Age on the other. Góngora’s poetic procedure leaves room for ‘translation’ to a more conventional meaning. This would be, says Sarduy, indication of harmony ‘with the homogeneity and the rhythm of the exterior logos that organises it and precedes it, even if this logos is characterised by its infinitude, by its inexhaustible unfoldings’. Just the opposite, the contemporary ‘baroque’, the neo-baroque, breaks all illusion of translatability to a final meaning, reflecting ‘the disharmony, the rupture of homogeneity, of the logos as an absolute’. Beyond the violent declarations and the diverse stylistic resources, this ‘cave writing’ configures – states Libertella – a ‘compulsive moment of resistance to any frivolous exchange’. It would constitute ‘terrorism to the courtly manners of western poetry’. Sarduy also hints, in his way, at a certain subversive impulse: ‘the baroque makes a metaphor of the challenge of the logocentric entity, denies any establishment, makes a metaphor of order, the god is judged, the law is broken’. Now, recognizing that the Cuban neo-baroque (from the original Orígenes group to the modern-day exiles) played an important role in the launching of this literary subversion, which cuts to the core of socially dominant significance and meaning, an uncomfortable historical fact must be faced: the followers of this ‘literary revolution’ were not accepted by the heroes of the social revolution (which demands uppercase letters: the Cuban Revolution). It was a painful process: let us recall Lezama Lima (a kind of insular Borges) who lived his final years in ‘internal exile’: he was forbidden to leave Cuba, as he bitterly recounts. Similarly, other writers who could be included under the neo-baroque umbrella – such as Sarduy, the poet José Krozer (who left the island at a young age), the narrator Reinaldo Arenas (who, however, declares himself an eclectic) – are currently exiled. Cuba is written from outside Cuba.



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It’s clear that there aren’t many neo-baroque authors among the many exiled Cuban intellectuals. Their exile is inscribed in a more general and polemic question: the Cuban government’s treatment of cultural dissidents (literary, journalistic, cultural, etc.) whose connections to the counterrevolution are debatable. We’ll limit ourselves to the best-known cases that had the most impact on the resurrection of the baroque on the tropical island. Many reasons could be found to explain a certain aversion to the Revolution on the part of the baroques. The Orígenes group – led by Lezama Lima and Rodríguez Feo, among others – was a kind of tropical Sur, complete with the nostalgic irony of loss, futile aristocracy, and the community of a secret desire, evidenced in the title of one of the group’s publications: Nadie Parecía [No One Seems]. But, Cabrera Infante adds, they all were … When Fidel’s army burst victoriously into Havana in 1959, the Orígenes held a position of prestige among the local literati, which they’d gained through supplicant pilgrimages to the offices of the capitalist leaders. They were not easily satisfied: in one of these visits, the overweight Lezama – a famous glutton – loomed over a cake proffered by some forgettable functionary, a buttercream offering to the bards, until someone shouted in amazement: ‘Lezama, you’ve eaten the whole cake!’ After the Revolution’s triumph, those who survived the mass exodus of the wealthy class were left with large crumbs. The first waves of exile also left many vacant seats in the academic and cultural apparatus. Some of the former members of Orígenes and Nadie Parecía, divided by successive disputes, would compete with the intellectuals who had assumed, in the early years, a certain professional predominance thanks to the weekly publication Lunes de Revolución, among them the novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Despite the obvious discrepancies between the ‘ivory tower’ of the decadent movement attributed to Lezama and his acolytes, and the Trotskian surrealism of the young revolutionaries of Lunes, both bands ended up suffering, to different degrees, the taste of exile – whether ‘internal’ or ‘external’. These movements occurred in the midst of an intense political battle between different sectors. Events quickly unfolded on several fronts. In the dispute for university positions, accusations of homosexuality were thrown around as a way to disqualify rivals. They even stooped to carrying out grotesque popular trials where everything down to a suspicious glance could be judged. The

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archetypal machismo of Cuban society became a revolutionary value. Beyond the biblical ire incited by sodomy, this machismo used the doctrine as a means of legitimization. The homophobic tradition of Marxism starts at least with Engels (who, in The Origin of the Family … condemns the abominable vices of the Greeks and other barbarians). This heavy prejudice is softened in the social democracy of the German empire, influenced by socialist feminism and the first gay rights movements. Despite his chaste objections, Lenin repealed, in 1918, the Tsarist laws that condemned sodomy, a measure that coincided with a semi-dissolution of marriage, reducing it to a mere formal registration. But in 1934 Stalin would restore the old injunction, which was maintained into modern times in the Soviet Union. The progressive stiffening or ‘Stalinization’ of the Cuban Revolution, spurred on by the US attacks, drove the leaders to root out the ‘moral scars left by the defeated capitalists’: prostitution, homosexuality, drugs, bohemia, etc. The effects of this campaign were powerful: around 1962 the gay poet and playwright Virgilio Piñera was apprehended in a massive roundup of ‘undesirables’. In contrast to the discreet Lezama, who carefully hid his secret adventures from the eyes of his adored mother, Piñera had a more flamboyant nature, which ended up costing him prison time, public humiliation, loneliness and silence. The war against the queers and weirdos in general was not restricted to courtly corridors. Around 1964, concentration and forced labour camps sprang up, under the Orwellian euphemism UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) [Military Units to Assist Production], where the religious, the gay, the marginal and the generally condemned were imprisoned. The unlikely Ernesto Cardenal, Minister of Culture for Sandinista Nicaragua, recounts these horrors in his book En Cuba [In Cuba]. It would appear that these camps were closed in 1967, thanks to some external protesters (including Sartre). The programme was a glaring failure: prisoners committed suicide or deteriorated to the point that they were unrecognizable – not, however, without satisfying their libidinous impulses with their guards, as recounted in the lovely novel by Reinaldo Arenas (Arturo, la estrella más brillante) [Arturo, the brightest star]. Police persecution, however, persisted. Tensions also worsened in the intellectual field. The audaciousness of Lunes de Revolución irritated Castro’s government. The imminent



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rupture was accelerated through debate over a movie by the young Orlando Jiménez Leal (who would later film, with Néstor Almendros, the corrosive Conducta Impropia [Improper Conduct]). The banned movie, entitled P.M. (Post Meridiano), was a collection of vaporous vestiges from Havanan nightlife. Intellectual control and sexual repression seemed to go hand in hand, perhaps proving Reich right in his belief that the debate over sexuality was at the heart of the cultural debate. Between 1959 and 1962, Lezama Lima was vice president of the UNEAC (Unión de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos) [Cuban Writers and Artists Union]. Thanks to his position, he managed to evade the censors and to publish, in 1966, his masterpiece Paradiso, whose famous eighth chapter, overflowing with homosexual references, greatly offended modest socialist virility, and it was deemed necessary to exorcize the demon. Conflicts intensified, culminating in the scandalous ‘Padilla case’. The collection of poems Fuera del juego, by the often provocative Heberto Padilla, was banned, for supposed counterrevolutionary allusions, and the author was compelled to renounce his work. But the honourable Lezama Lima refused to legitimize the charade, despite the delicious chocolates and cigars officials used to tempt his insatiable gluttony – according to the scene as narrated by Padilla himself. In April 1971, the First National Congress of Education and Culture, held in Havana, officialized the segregation of ‘eccentrics’; homosexuality was defined as a ‘social pathology’, and measures were recommended to ‘heal its concentrations’ and ‘control the deviation of isolated cases, always in the interest of education and prevention’. Also prohibited was the presence of homosexuals in the ‘formation of youth’, in areas of education and the arts, and queers were banned from holding diplomatic or cultural offices. In this moral climate, José Lezama Lima died in 1976. His old ‘enemy’ Virgilio Piñera followed him three years later. Loneliness and stigma had brought them together (there’s a moving poem by Lezama: ‘Virgilio Piñera cumple 60 años’ [Virgilio Piñera turns 60]). Their dark dispute revealed incompatible inclinations: the erudite Lezama Lima, affable, crookedly desirous of effeminate young men; the plebeian Virgilio, who refused to barricade himself, as his obese rival did, behind the façade of his family mansion, but rather wandered – without so much as a book, he had them all ‘in his head’ – from pension to pension following his terrifying, nomadic passions, through the sordid rituals of the underworld. And this

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same underworld is targeted with systematic zeal by the so-called Operation Triple P (Pimps, Prostitutes and Paedophiles), one of so many failed attempts. It’s enough to invoke the campaign of proletariat familiarization and moralization, studied by Donzelot, in France of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which relied on the participation of socialists, communists and even anarchists (with campaigns against prostitution, alcoholism, venereal diseases, etc.) in the construction of a proletariat family (or ‘identity’). This moral strictness sometimes transcends materialist atheism and becomes confused with Christianity. One example is the model of the ‘New Man’ envisioned by Che Guevara, which exalted Christian values such as abnegation, etc. Globally, the adherence to the socialist discipline of labour proceeded from a kind of ‘somatic regeneration’ at the level of the body and its encounters. On this plane, the task laid out for the new moralizers was arduous. Let us recall that the multiracial Cuban society is fairly similar to that of Brazil. Before the revolution, the ‘bacchanal’ was exploited by the ‘gringos’. Havana was ‘Miami’s brothel’. However, this trade only affected a superficial subsection of a wide network of erotic sociability that proliferated scandalously in spite of the proverbial ultra-machismo of the Cuban man (or, maybe, as a result of this decried manliness). Anthropologists talk of ‘hierarchical models of inter-masculine relationships’, where the macho’s masculinity is untarnished as he makes the marica submit. Despite the equestrian demands of these positions, the system facilitates multiple exchanges and entanglements. Corrective morals were concerned with blocking the ‘escape route’ that initiated processes of rupture from the order of familiar sexuality. In a certain sense, the antigay campaigns of the Cuban Revolution (culminating in the mass exodus of 125,000 ‘undesirables’, some 15 per cent of whom were gays, from the port at Mariel, to shouts of ‘Pin pon fuera, abajo la gusanera’, in 1980) were not merely applying the sexual ideals of ‘real socialism’. They were also carrying out, in fact, a process of systematic repression of erotic differences similar to what occurred prior to the ‘coming out’ in the 1960s, in many western countries. For example, the mass extermination of gays (along with Jews, gypsies, dissidents, etc.) by the Nazis created ‘legal’ weapons of repression that were maintained and perfected after the war: the McCarthy-era fervour in the United States in the 1950s, where disguised cameramen and police officers waited at the urinals – penis in hand – to catch unsuspecting gays; and, more



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recently, in Argentina, where sexual persecution, present since the 1940s, furiously unleashed its moralizing frenzy in the shadows of the last dictatorship, under the guise of ‘police mandates’ that were preserved perfectly intact after the restoration of democracy. Of the 1980 disaster, the Cuban government has said that the persecution of gays was a ‘mistake’ of the past: despite still rampant machismo, a certain tolerance now reigns. And while they may seem moderate compared to previous punishments, current laws, incorporated into the Penal Code in 1979, show the reality behind this reflective rhetoric. These laws punish with three to nine months of prison anyone who ‘displays their homosexual condition’, in addition to invoking the ambiguous classification of ‘menace to society’ as an excuse to ‘re-educate’ pimps, prostitutes, vagrants, addicts, and to correct antisocial behaviour. They are significantly similar to the laws of ‘social threat’ imposed in Spain under Franco. They are not much different from repressive ‘legal’ practices that discourage dissent in other Latin American countries – in our own Boer Republic, the ‘incitation of the carnal act in a public space’ condemns the lustful to ‘between thirty and ninety days of incarceration’, a difference only measurable in degrees of shadow. Even in the United States, home of Gay Lib, sodomy constitutes a crime in half the states. It’s hard to know what is really happening in modern-day Cuba with respect to the degree of repression of homoerotic encounters – a sensitive issue. Observations made by travellers would lead one to infer that – as a result of ridicule, an almost classic tale is played out: the extinction or invisibility of classic Cuban loca, effeminate and flamboyant, the replacement of the old ralajo with the discretion of the modern gay. Faced with the impossibility of eradicating passions deeply rooted in the history of the body, a less ‘transgressive’ prototype, the neat, aseptic, well-mannered gay, is grudgingly accepted. Only a broader opening up of the Cuban regime would permit, eventually, a closer observation of the articulation between erotic constructions and more global socioeconomic transformations. Additionally, the Cuban leadership’s apparent change of position on homosexuality, if it is anything more than superficial, should not impede, but should instead incite, a deeper investigation into the macabre episode of the gay concentration camps and other abuses. Returning to Lezama Lima and the neo-baroque, the official reprobation seems to have lessened there as well. Recently released

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was a careful edition of the ‘poetic works’ of the Etruscan of Old Havana, as Lezama Lima liked to call himself. However, the more provocative Paradiso, its first edition out of print, doesn’t seem to share the same fate. Now, beyond the specifically political and legal conflicts, we must wonder to what extent it’s not an issue of style that causes the bureaucratic aversion to Lezama and his friends. In addition to the baroque’s eroticism – in conflict with the principles of labour and utilitarian morals – the proliferating and heavy pomp of the ‘irregular pearl’ clashes with the serious, austere and realist style of the Revolution. The ironic exuberance, the infinite wordplay, the tropical schemes that distort the illusion of a singular meaning, with a definitive directionality. The baroque artifices feign meekness as they pass the prude customs agents, smuggling, in the heremeticism of their feigned disinterest/ casualness, a corrosive and risible criticism. Let’s take, in conclusion, as an example, the words of Severo Sarduy, in ‘De donde son los cantantes’ [Where the singers come from], the entrance of Christ (Castro) into Havana: A black girl came running at full speed, a banner flapping behind her in the wind, her tiny feet could only barely be seen thanks to her white socks, sticklike legs moving at full speed […] holding up a banner that read INRI, she said: you’re finally here. We’ve been waiting for you, her eyes watered, she lost her ability to speak (‘She’s overcome by emotion, fainting, like she’d just seen Paul Anka!’ Help), she made some gestures of excitement, took several steps towards Him and collapsed …

Cornered by the crowd, Christ … felt viscous hands caress him and on his thighs, wet lips, mollusclike. Their banners and shafts blocked out the sky. They surrounded him like a fence of red lances. He couldn’t breathe. He swam through their bitter vapours. The truth is that he wasn’t made for the proletariat. It suffocated him …

Dress Straps for Puig

Faced with the temptation to take up a pencil with a flounce (any homage to Puig must be done with a flounce) and take a stab at Puig’s works and the writings on his works, his notes and the notes on his notes, the temptation to take an academic approach (route lined with thick-lensed wisdom where one must tread delicately and uncertainly), it seemed to me preferable instead – so the homage wouldn’t lose the bitter flavour of fresh yerba mate, so that the water wouldn’t get cold from the frigidity of distance – to adopt the air of a distracted reader, one of the girls on the corner in Flores (because an homage to Puig must necessarily be done in the feminine) or, as Puig would say, a loca from the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood, dated aesthetics, the gleam of lacquered celluloid, smoky surfaces, sepia records framed by the strident pestering of the radio, tango chatter, infinite chatter: cataract (cascade) of familiar images and sounds, a living-room imbued simultaneously with familiarity and subtle estrangement that turns things over and empties them out: vacuity. An ambiguous cosmetic vacuity, Puig’s ‘girly handwriting’ traces (or encircles?), with flat arabesques, something like an aesthetic of banality. Mimetic art, his manner of not weighing down daily circumlocutions, but of letting them flow in their subtle linearity, This essay was read in an academic conference on the work of Manuel Puig. It was published in Babel no. 6 in November 1988.

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lends his work (or bestows upon it, circumlocutions of the creator) the surprising charm of a profane aesthetic, a beauty that has fallen, perhaps forever, at the knees of the artist and writhes across the filthy cracks in the parquet, an unpretentious, peripheral beauty. To return to the idea of banality, to free this fixed ‘state of things’ from any trace of sarcasm, I refer to one of Michel Maffesoli’s ideas about the sociology of the mundane. Through seemingly directionless conversations in the shade of the grapevine, the intimate consistency of life is knotted together – not secretly but requiring a certain attention to capture it. This substance has no other ‘meaning’ than this letting be, than this ‘being together’, than this experience of the present. An aesthetic of banality, we said, given that this experience of being present cannot be separated from form. And here, a turn of the screw: given that in this being without rhyme or reason, in this talking to talk, in this living for living’s sake, we get a glimpse of Dionysian energy, an impulse towards fusion, and at the same time, of deconstruction, ripping apart, ecstasy. Nothing seems farther, at a glance, from Puig’s work, than this idea of ecstasy. However, let’s take a detour: do these neighbourhood or ‘neighbourhoodized’ lives merely reflect alienation, the machines of radiophonic and cinematographic over-coding, or do they hold in their grip a quivering vacuity, folding in on itself, an irrefutable iridescence, the gleam of a cricket, the mysterious nooks and crannies of a French twist, the hairpin that holds up a chic bun? This is why – at the risk of sounding absurd – I dare to call this gleam of sexuality a Dionysian current running through Puig’s work, obliquely, giving it this subtle twist of estrangement I spoke of. It might seem incomprehensible that a work anchored in this ‘aesthetic of banality’ (forgive the awkward insistence) could awaken, in a country as hyposensual and hypersensitive as Argentina, the fury of the censors and, beyond that, a certain shrugging of shoulders, a lack of recognition, an ‘it doesn’t move us’. I’d say that it moves us too deeply and therein lies its value and power. The surface ‘with’ which he works is, let’s say it quickly, the media. Echoes of telenovelas, radio novels, photo novels, modern (?) versions of the melodramatic novel, or modern only in the chronological sense, preserved almost intact, embossed by the vertiginous velocity of the transmission, the contamination, the contagion. An ‘institutional’ molarity of agencement, perhaps, but agencement nonetheless: polyphonic, saturated by the molecularity of the time, the microscopicness of the trivial plot.



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While the cosmetic triviality of the writing uses the discursive superficiality of the media and everyday language, it does not evade important social conflicts or issues. Quite the opposite, but it addresses them – and this might cause confusion for the inattentive reader – from the perspective of ‘mass mediatization’ and its banal predominance in our daily domestic discourse. To put it another way, it takes them as myths. However, Puig explores (and how!) the sutures, hems and cross-stitches, the points of rupture in their most sensitive spots. Slimy triviality, anal banality. The blue sludge that swallows the characters in The Kiss of the Spiderwoman, along with a great passion for politics, avatars of the sphincter. Does this evoke a certain vague Lamborghinian atmosphere, a kind of fjord, decorated like a kitsch living-room, filled with tacky knickknacks? As if the weight of the childlike society could reduce, or code, to a yard of some tulle, the gleaming abyss that – we repeat – should not be seen, should do all it can to pass unnoticed. Confronted with a constellation of possibilities, Puig – it could be said – focuses on the worst: on nothingness, on the hollowness of the fallen but dignified hair curler; in this peculiar emptiness – contrary to what some might expect – nothing is missing. It’s as if the cheap synthetic fabric, set ablaze by some ignition of the water heater, melts and fuses to the skin, inscribing itself on the surface. Master of the fray, Puig never loses the thread, nothing escapes his eye trained to capture every minute detail, an excess of detail, a naive attention to detail, like the tidy kitsch of a neighbourhood hair salon that hides – barely noticeable, deep down – a trace of faded baroque. Not exactly baroque in form and far from golden, but a slight hint that remains in microscopic detail, so feminine, typical of the neighbourhood seamstress; it reminds me, from a distance, of Sarduy’s mulata protagonist in Gestos: ‘The first thing needed to start a revolution is to be well dressed’. Insistence on the aesthetic – the aesthetic of the dress strap – which holds everything up. A minoritary harlot, hair-pinned curls, polyester jacket crinkling distractedly through the dusty neighbourhood or town. The voice of a woman, a woman’s tongue, minoritary speech, a weaving of ‘common spaces’ – path laid with linoleum, with packing paper – we no longer hear the fine sharpness of the impertinent little voice, saying what’s unsaid. A meeting of the marginalized – the paedophile and the revolutionary – in the spidery kiss of the flat bedpan.

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Revolt of flat language, surging forth with a cacophonic glimmer, a howl, embroidered in gold lamé, sautéed in sepias or other forms of knowledge – necrological bibliography, dead archive – cited in the footnotes. An ordinary dress strap, without any adornments. An homage to Puig demands glitter, polyester streamers, carnelian tulle hemmed in satin, always hemmed. By which to hang, like a calendar of suburban debutantes, glowing garlands.

 lows in the Fjord. Baroque and F the Body in Osvaldo Lamborghini

‘We will never be Vandorists’ Risible or ridiculous (but also pathetic), the grotesqueness of El Fiord defies (or overwhelms) the fabulous conventions of the fantastic (a certain ethereal floating in a mythical space which, in broad strokes, we agree to call grotesque), anchoring itself in referentiality, excessive, extravagant – curiously, more ‘political’ than explicitly historical. In the tight twenty-seven pages of the first edition of El Fiord we witness the birth, ripping and tortuous, ‘anti-natural’ of a ‘new writing’ (in Libertella’s sense). Tinsel is hung over the discarded emblems of a shared history, the pages aspire to rip (in the partying, in the panting) the ‘exterior’ (‘real’) context it belongs to. A secret text – the repercussion of this jocund libel, subversive erosion in Argentine literature – is still accompanied – as it should be in a culture abundant with writers, eager to spy on the scribe – by a reticular mythology (I say reticular because it acquires its voluminous phantasmagoria in the heart of the literary network, which Lamborghini called, in ‘Neibis’, ‘salon’: Echeverrian breezes Perlongher wrote essays on many writers considered part of the ‘neo-baroque’ movement. This is one of the most detailed and was published in Cuadernos de la Comuna no. 33, Puerto General San Martín, Santa Fe, November 1991. It was republished in Diario de Poesía in 1995.

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that haunt the butcher). As he tells it, the copies of the first edition (until recently the only edition) of El Fiord (Ediciones Chinatown, 1969) almost succumbed (to flames? to flushing?) in the midst of the panic that followed the prohibition of Nanina, the scandalous novel by Germán García. This provides the backdrop for the appearance of El Fiord. It has to do with a whole movement or flow of writing that coalesced in the pages of Literal magazine. Osvaldo Lamborghini took it upon himself to clarify, defensively, in an interview in Lecturas Críticas: ‘I wasn’t in Literal (with Luis Gusmán and Germán García); I made Literal with Germán García.’ El Frasquito by Luis Gusmán, Nanina by Germán García, El Fiord (followed, in 1973, by Sebregondi Retrocede): all are books that serve as iridescent examples of this new trend. Beyond the theoretical points of departure that the many volumes of Literal proclaim, we make out, as a common trait, a tendency towards the sexualization of writing: Nanina narrates scandalous erotic adventures in a small town (perhaps ‘heavier’ than the ones that, around the same time, Manuel Puig parodied); the title of El Frasquito [The Jar] – an underworld saga – alludes to the receptacle in which the crooked tango musician protagonist of the novella stores drops of his semen, to give as an offering to a mother, recovering from an abortion, to shouts of ‘Look, girl, I jacked off for you’. If El Fiord is a window display of pornographic aberrations (a theme that his last productions, such as ‘El Pibe Barulo’ and ‘La Causa Justa’, included in Novelas y Cuentos, and other unpublished works, take to the extreme), its originality comes, as we’ve already hinted, from its saturation of activist slogans, from many quarters, of the day. In a harsh article on the poet of ‘Soré-Resoré’, Germán García confirms this: the ‘vibe’ in the 1960s and the first half of the ’70s (until the coup in 1976 ‘ruined everything’) consisted, in his words, of political terrorism and sexual perversion. In this confluence, the gaping abyss of El Fiord is opened. But there is another very important element: the notions of Lacan, still in their heroic period, before they became predominant in Argentina, which relegated desire (although riddled with Phalluses, Lacks and Mistakes) to the swamp of Mamarian Oedipus, à la Melanie Klein, trapped the hyper-psychoanalysed Argentinians in the stupors of a refined yet ineluctable adaptation. These literary styles also clashed with the demand for a disciplined formation in the pews of the official psychoanalytical societies (the dissidence would reach an extreme point: the fleeting Freudian School of Mar del Plata, founded almost



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solely by Osvaldo Lamborghini, who signed himself as a ‘transvestite and woman with a penis’). In this context, and with El Fiord at its heart, we can throw out two main lines around which we might wrap the ‘pugnacious’ tinsel of this work: a political line and a sexual line. (We are as far from the grotesque style as you can imagine, although the work does include some of the elements housed in this vague category – such as the mix of codes, more carnivalesque, and the positions of bodies; above all, corporality). The political line – its horizon fragmented, shattered by the diversification of its emanations or incrustations, maintains, however, a certain ‘revolutionary’ flow, visible in the liquefaction of the language, in his work with language – is the revolution, the idea of revolution. The novella narrates, or rather empowers, the avatars of an insurrection, of an uprising. Terrorist. As the Marqués de Sebregondi says: ‘I’ve never lacked for patience, arse or terror’. The other line, sexual: slashes all the avatars. It would perhaps be tedious to recount them here, since they are all better expressed physically. Provisional summary: the violence of authority – of Loco Rodríguez – operates, administrates, satiates himself, in and on the bodies. The rebellion is advanced by the sexual: it’s the protagonist who, after fucking his master’s wife (if it weren’t for the accumulation of chaos and commotion; ‘everything to fuck’, ‘to fuck over’, lends it a slight Oedipal slant), the master is literally shat upon, which triggers the final collapse (in this shitting, we get a whiff, again, of the idea that rebellion occurs on the corporal plane, that everything always remits to this corporality, here, in the work, vain and dismembered – explicit dismemberment in the quartering of the toppled leader). We see how the two lines converge, are inextricably entwined. To support the uprising, they construct revolutionary slogans, taken word for word (here, the ‘literal’ effect); imperialism is a paper tiger – like Rodríguez, despite his beautiful streaks of real flesh, he was entirely ‘a sparkle of fraud and neon’, as we’re warned in the first paragraphs. But there is also another plane – which, if it was missing, would shatter the spiralled glass of El Fiord, turning it into a clumsy Reichian remedy. We may allude to this other plane with what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘the plane of consistency of desire’. In this case, it serves as an intermission, shedding light, through puffs of smoke, an assembly of metal workers with ropes around their

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neck, a reference to Vandorism, the pirouetting profundity of the irreducible. The plane of desire in itself, which is not resolved except in its own culmination, ensures that desire is not the desire for an object, which surges from an omniscience or ‘split’ subject, and, as Deleuze says, from the ‘inter’, the fluid magma of connection and agencement – I associate it with the surprising eruption, again literal, of the fjord into balls of fire interrupting a banquet of sedatives (the protagonist points it out, through the window, to Carla Terón, just as she’s about to ingest an entire box of powerful sleeping pills). There’s a phrase that sums it up: ‘void and nodal point of all the opposing forces in tension’ (which surprisingly appears in reference to what occurred ‘after Huerta Grande’). I’d like to propose as a hypothesis that it is this eruption of the plane of desire that disrupts and deranges the writing, marring it with criss-crossing paths, nooks and crannies, weaving it into a dense tapestry that never repeats, every sentence remitting to another corner, as if there were a desperate obsession with tying all threads to the largest quantity of elements possible. In this way El Fiord practises a shocking baroquization – shocking because it does not appeal to the conventions of poetic ‘rumbling’, constructed with the materials of conventional poetic language; however, it also occurs, in the whirlwind, of these twists. This effect of baroquization passes for a certain ‘horror vacui’ or fear of nothingness. Tightly woven tapestry, which does not gleam with the splendour of sheers and velvets, but distorts into frothy rage, spitting, buckets of blood and shit, dicks. And here we must ask the question: is Lamborghini baroque? The stupidity of this question – since it would seem that we couldn’t be further from the baroque as it is conventionally understood in this grotesque style marked by estrangement – offers the opportunity for a pirouette: wouldn’t Lamborghini be more like – if the parodic neologism fits – not neo-barroco, but ‘neo-barroso’? The overwrought and prolific convergence on (let’s say, even, the demand for) profundity, which, drowning in its literary abundance, by the operation of simulation, sloshes, like ‘The Proletariat Boy’ in a bog of bloody mud. It’s as if Lamborghini noticed, pulling out the bottom and turning it over, a desperate need for narration, for ‘telling something’, which in texts like ‘La Mañana’ disappears before our eyes – something that abounds in the novels (or at least certain novels) in Argentina. Now, in El Fiord this referentiality, this narration, is taken to such delirious extremes that the flat land



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(what he calls, brilliantly, perceptively, ‘the plain of the joke’, in ‘La Causa Justa’) is eroded, undermined, sabotaged, exposed (‘some little half-formed thing, floating, virtual’, one of his poems says). The sense that something lies in wait, sharpening its claws, elevates the story to a literariness that the verbal lightning releases from the tedious corsets of the allegory. In El Fiord we can see how the effect of this baroquization functions as a carnivalization. The carnivalesque is apparent in grotesque strokes, in paintings with a wide brush, in names that sound ridiculous (like the women’s names) and even more ridiculous, or intriguing, when they ignore the ‘rules’ and reveal their ‘true’ names – another mutation, in spite of ‘identity’ (Lamborghini rails against the insistent, phantom or puppet of ‘monosexuality’). But this is perceived when the effect of carnivalization invades the interior of the words themselves, the syllables (example: ‘obliged’ replaced with ‘ofucked’, when the ideologue is corrected). This exaggerated carnivalization becomes, in turn, baroque, when it radicalizes the mixture of codes, as explained in ‘Los Nombres de la Negación’, epilogue to the first edition of El Fiord, written by Germán García and signed with the pseudonym Leopoldo Fernández. Analysing an extract from the book, García explains: Planificate: term taken from sociopolitical jargon Ladino: taken from gaucho slang Imminent: adjective overused in journalistic jargon Chata: a word used by old ladies

And further down he concludes: ‘Through a mixture of codes, through contact with these leftovers, the author is trying to wake up the words, to shake the other from the drowsiness of routine, of sentence order, which is nothing more than a world order.’ We could say that the mechanics of El Fiord are put to the service of subversion of the language: and that perversion is a resource used by this subversive enterprise. Still unanswered is the question we posed previously: is Lamborghini neo-baroque? To answer this, we must revisit a tension that plagues the great authorial alliance which Libertella speaks of: that movement common to the Spanish language, with Caribbean nuances (musical, graceful, complicated, artificial, picaresque, converting the baroque into an argument – ‘anything to win’, says

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Severo Sarduy) and with other nuances in Argentina (rational, sarcastic, witty, nostalgic, sceptic, psychoanalytic?).

This inflation of the language draws inspiration in the ‘fat writing’ of Lezama Lima, the pivotal point of iridescent emanation. The thread is pulled at one end by the writing as tattooing of Severo Sarduy, and the writing as carving of Osvaldo Lamborghini. Let’s compare two extracts: The phalanxed pyramid penetrated abruptly, a lusty fairy, between the dripping gluteals. The great magnate felt a burning stake, a thousand dazzled formic little seraphim, or rather the assault of drilling darts escaping a smoked wasps’ nest. With the grunt of a Hittite mask and closed fists, he jumped from the table, pushed from behind by a cleft-footed demon. (Severo Sarduy, Maitreya, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine) All the things I’d done to him, in the waning afternoon sun, blue, from the blows. I opened a double-lipped canal in his left leg so deep his hideous and no-good bone was exposed. It was a white bone like any other, but his bones weren’t alike. I slashed open his hand and saw another bone, his joints tensed, knuckles grasping, mired in the mud, as Esteban agonized to the point of pleasure. (Osvaldo Lamborghini, ‘El Niño Proletario’, in Sebregondi Retrocede)

Differences of opinion about what constitutes textual violence, transmitted through parody, formulated by both writers in Lecturas Críticas. If, for the Cuban, parody evokes: ‘A little Fellinian orchestra, with broken tambourines and guitars filled with water, beachy and cheap, playing variations of circus music: a deplorable metaphysical reversal. The Bakhtinian carnival enthrones a laughable king …’. For the Argentinean: ‘We have to see who we might parody. In a certain sense all literature could be classified as irreverent. A writer never talks about stupid things. One of the most difficult tasks is to remove the artist from the role of idiot which he’s been placed in.’ Coming to our aid, an outburst from Germán García: all parody is odious. A party of hatred, of cruelty: words are not written about the body, but inscribed on the body. Repeated carvings as an aesthetic procedure, evoking inscription of the letters, through ritual cruelty, on the bodies of the ‘primitives’, as they were considered by Pierre Clastres. We must not seek in El Fiord any mercifulness,



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any ‘humanity’; conjured instead are hallucinations, a terrorizing parodic nightmare. This recurrence to the hallucinatory can be linked to another ‘primitive’ figure: the shaman, who in his induced ecstasy gives oracular, poetic interpretations of the world, of things. El Fiord could be taken as a premonition: it smells, visualizes, intuits with devastating lucidity the whirlwind of horror that was preparing to rush headlong at Argentina. To the ‘idiotic’ question, posed with threats of microfascism (or fascistoide, like the references to the Falangist GRN, Guardia Restauradora Nacionalista), which contributes to the repulsiveness of El Fiord, the repugnance, ‘pugnaciousness’ of questioning whether ‘the concentration camps really existed’, combine in the text to create something dramatic, overacted, in the end grotesque, humiliating. In this way, the journey of the narrator’s ‘woman’ from the bottom of the fjord with her hands between her teeth evokes the warlike images of the real-life Falkland fjords, echoing in the distance. Militant saga, El Fiord pulverizes a mythical place (that is to say, it creates a myth, a ‘symbolic’ plane, in order to shatter it) which nonetheless rebuilds itself in the mythology adorned with, strange compensation, rarity. It’s said that the text circulated among the revolutionaries of the Cordobazo uprising. Its reading provoked the same incitation, perhaps, as the blood-curdling descriptions of the torture in the dungeons which the Marquis de Sade shouted through a tube, provoking the crowd that would take the Bastille. If I say that this mythical plane is pulverized, it’s because – we insist – without taking away from its repercussions, its resonance, which are, of course, desired, El Fiord is played out on the plane of language. Any patent and potent subversion will necessarily affect language. The author of the book’s epilogue talks of ‘writing of destruction’, which is not, he clarifies, ‘destruction of writing’. The attack is directed at the heart of signification, revealing the sad state of conventionality and vacuity of the sign. But, returning to carnivalization, baroquization operates by minorization of all languages, of all voices: upon weaving them into the filthy tapestry, they are set, like jewels, encrusted in mucus. Writing, as Foucault says in The Order of Things, places the attention on itself. In El Fiord, the key word is gilded. Words of order: their abundance is not only anecdotal (although meriting attention is the intricately contorted path through the acronyms and slogans ranging from the far right to the far left, on the torsos of the unionists); it reveals a functioning of language as

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‘word of order’, in the sense used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus – in short, the nucleus of language would not be the communicative exchange of the liberal structural model, but its production of the real. From there, significantly, El Fiord takes the slogans chanted in the struggle ‘seriously’. A Nietzschean vision of life as a constant struggle. From there, protest constitutes a way out: ‘And we went out to protest’, reads the last line. It is the libidinization of simulatied activism (a simulation, says Deleuze in Logic of Sense, is different from an imitation: an imitation identifies itself with the essence of the imitated object; a simulation, on the other hand, simulates only the pure exteriority, as it simultaneously undermines and destroys its essential identity, the ‘law of the father’). The networks of El Fiord come together to form a degenerate saga. This is clearly seen in the degenerate Marquis Sebregondi, and his criminally perverse journey, his turns with the tinkling of incrusted bullets and caws of his gay lover. In the Marquis we can even see the shadow of a threadbare Gombrowicz, who ‘arrives, recedes, and arrives’. Daniel Molina wrote that Lamborghini is ‘backward writing’: the afflictions of the ‘prototraitor’ (recall the permanent tension in Argentina, and especially within Peronism, so beloved by the author, between ‘loyalty’ and ‘betrayal’) are joined with the passion (also sadistic) for sodomy. As another element taken from the lumpenproletariat – something that should be dealt with carefully, so as not to fall into a watereddown sociologism – is constant flight. In Argentine literature the working class figures as a limit: we could mention Arlt and the lesser-known Carlos Correas (‘La Narración de la Historia’, Los reportajes de Félix Chaneton). If Arlt writes with a certain ‘realism’ – however overflowing with anarchic excesses – and Correas shares a certain common tone with the literature of Contorno, it’s in Lamborghini that this flight disrupts not only the orbits, but also the mouths, fingertips, heads. That is to say, it is written in flight, in lower-class flight, a degenerate drift pervades the writing, drives it to madness. Here we may detect a singular element, already present in Genet: how literature of the marginal, instead of conforming to the stereotyped flatness that some social realists would attribute to it, takes a baroque turn, it becomes entangled in lustful language, while still representing all forms of speech. Something analogous could be said of Osvaldo Lamborghini: always aiming for the ‘highest’ to describe the ‘lowest’.



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Climax More than a systematic analysis, these scant notes aim to serve as a diving board, inviting the reader to plunge into the carnal phosphorescence of the undulations of El Fiord. If the critical text, in its ‘loyalty’ to what it is built upon, doesn’t let itself be pulled along (like a riptide) by writing as disturbing and powerful as Osvaldo Lamborghini’s, if it instead tries to carry out an aseptic codification, it will run the risk of draining the force from the operation of ‘translation’, which reveals itself in this way as a ‘confiscation’. To put it in Deleuzian terms, criticism, in its rigidity, in its glacial temptation, functions as an ‘abstract machine of over-coding’, when what it’s about is the intense molecularity of desire that puts the churning cogs of El Fiord in motion, plugging it into a machine of mutation which, upon overturning the order of writing, reverts the suffocating authoritarianism of life. Many expeditions may set out across these fraught waters, attempting, for example, to transmit the beautiful sordidness which may feed and nourish a text. It is far from encompassing all the disparate effects of this poeticization of politics (not in the soft, sissy, naive sense of the patriotic period, but in the sense of an intensification of micropolitics) and still fearful, to a certain extent, of getting lost in the maze of possible escape routes, where, even after the fall of the artificial despot, a microfascist stench still lingers in the decadent violence.

On Alambres

If there’s not one self, reads the rhizome of A Thousand Plateaus, if we’re all multiplicities, entire populations, drifting masses – nutria, bears, prostitutes in São Paulo with bra straps and cleavage showing, Delias with smudged mascara, Ethels, Rosas on the hunt for Grossmans lost in Luxembourg – then the first question is: who is it that writes? Who is it that speaks? Or: on whose behalf? If we are each made up of so many voices, the simple becomes complicated. To speak of the self is to babble about an irreducible multiplicity. If I’m asked to speak – with a courtesy that ‘Me, the worst of them all’ (as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz signed her work) does not deserve – should I slick my hair back or spike it up? Should I put it in a bun or a braid? Should I split, ponytail between my legs? An irresistible temptation to lose myself in the micro-sea of syllables. We are now speaking – closer, closer to the words, in the disgusting rococo of syllables. It’s not what I want to say, but I obfuscate, or masturbate. Let’s be clear: ‘I tried with Alambres …’ – the first lie: I can’t try anything. If there is no yo [self] then the poet is a yo-yo. It takes considerable effort to create a more or less coherent idea: happily, poetry doesn’t bother with such trivialities. It’s about letting yourself get swept away. The tips of the fingers tied This is probably the only text in which Perlongher reflects on his work, except for in interviews. It was published in El Porteño no. 74, February 1988.

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to the tyrannical typewriter. But I’m getting away from the topic. They asked me to talk about Alambres: to write about what has already been written? To laugh at what has already been laughed at? To criticize (in purgative self-criticism)? Saying I tried anything is a lie: it’s what came out of me, the Xs of the excrements. I recognize, fully, a host of problems: one of the issues that most worried me when writing Alambres was, precisely, the inexistence of a unity of style, accustomed as I was to books like wombs that give birth to identical twins. This was something that didn’t come naturally to me. I would start to write a series, a mambo, of poems – many were abandoned, some, if I was lucky, survived. But I admit: very few. Meagre achievement: an accumulation of tacky little adornments which, every once in a while, gave off some slightly more enduring iridescence. When the shine persisted or resisted successive shifts in perspective, there was no solution but to leave them: they were on their way out. Poetry – I think now – is a branch of ecstasy. It should be acknowledged that producing it or inducing it requires diverse tactics: wiping down the dusty historical view of texts – for the epic poems in Alambres: especially ‘Salidas’ – or immersing myself in the feeling of becoming-woman (Daisy, Ethel, Mme S.) or simply reinventing scenes in an attempt to capture what was underneath or inside them, that is to say, not limiting myself to describing what was ‘happening’, but excavating the intensity, the magma within the words, always distorted, mangled, twisted, undermining the tyranny of meaning; the mandates of discourse, instinctively understanding that the crushing iceberg that is each day is nothing more than a sequence of syllables. It is, in the end, a struggle, solitary and atrocious: a constant disfiguring and distrust of established meaning, and, simultaneously, letting go, letting yourself be swept away by any passing current, by whatever makes us quiver and flutter. It’s true that there’s the risk of falling into an irresistible and ridiculous trap: of scansion, rhyme, the aftertaste of giving in to the allusion. There are two planes or two parts to Alambres: one, the ‘historic’ poems, which cover approximately half of the book and culminate in the final catastrophe, ‘Cadáveres’ [Corpses]. The other part, which could be called ‘desirous’, spans the second half of the book, escalating to an explosion of associations in ‘Frenesí’ [Frenzy]. The borders between the two parts are blurry: both fields of force affect, to different degrees and magnitudes, the entirety of the verses, but a unified tension is built. If with Austria-Hungría a kind of sensual

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epic was already established, I think that Alambres proceeds in the direction of a baroque epic, where history is dazed by desire. What happens is that desire tends to establish a field of immanence, of pure intensity, a maximum degree of deterritorialization, where meaning is created by shattering the unconscious, and the person typing has no task other than to channel the flow of a tenacious stream, liquid ecstasy. If this stream staunches its flow with the foulards of history – to keep from seeping into its pores – it’s the delirium that surges from the gorge at Tarija, saturating the soil to unleash a landslide of allusions – picaresque, mordant, corporal. In the end it is the body (Nietzsche and Artaud) that we are referring to. We’re referring to writing, of creating a body of work – a body that squeals, pants, moans with pleasure, that waddles, rustling rouge petticoats, pulling taut tulle over intimate nooks and crannies, rubbing polished nails over brass buttons. Intermittent mechanical sparks suture the loose wires, spilling buckets of shadow across the succession and alteration of words.

Anthropology of Ecstasy

Urban Poetics

‘Getting lost in the city.’ Let’s talk about the vicissitudes of this getting lost which implies displacement and deviancy. The city as a tangled mass of flows: ‘a knot of flows’ (Guattari), ‘a network of nets’ (Maffesoli). Instead of following a predetermined path, the deviant, the displaced person, switches between them, jumps over them, mixes them up, bisects them. In the wandering drift ‘with no rhyme or reason’ – in reality a whole desirous journey – what matters is not the destination, but going with the flow of the path itself. In fact, it matters little that these paths by turns reinforce and undo circuits of urban drifting, creating moveable micro-territorialities, itinerant territorialities. The drifting motion has something of a nomad movement. The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths […] he is not ignorant of points […] But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse of what happens to the sedentary. […] A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on This essay was read at the International Seminar ‘Creatividad, Arquitectura, Interdisciplina’, held in Buenos Aires in 1989. It was published in La Letra A no. 2 in 1991. Perlongher published other essays in this journal, which existed from 1990 to 1994.

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all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380)

In this sense nomadic deviance is intensive, while sedentary displacement is extensive, it is limited to movement from one point to another, it is strictly determined by the path between these points. ‘From home to work and from work to home’, says a Peronist motto. This getting lost in the city, necessary for exploration and ‘knowledge’, is therefore intensive. What kind of knowledge is gained? The classic distance/opposition between the subject and the object is missing. The person who gets lost loses the self. I lose myself … to wander is a submergence in the smells and tastes, in the sensations of the city. The body that roams ‘learns’ in/with their displacement. It learns with the body, as Castañeda would say. This ‘knowledge’ – though the word is manifestly inadequate – is acquired through the senses. A ‘sentimental cartography’ (Suely Rolnik) involves the ‘invisible’ ‘vibrational’ body, connecting in an almost trancelike state with the vibrations of the city, a kind of ‘urban voodoo’ (Edgardo Cozarinsky). Serious (or maybe delirious) thinking about the city cannot be limited to the physical constructions that occupy its space, nor to a conventional sociology of its populations; what must be plotted are the sensorial points, the ‘instantaneous condensations’ that wind through the emotional (short) circuit. Climates, atmospheres, affections, feelings. Launching us on this voyage of intensities – intense vibes – of the urban, its spaces, its climate, its affective and sensorial/sensual flows, like an eroticism of the urbe (the Dionysian force explained by Maffesoli in The Shadow of Dionysus), is the notion of the urban sensibility, or, more precisely, an ‘ethnology of the urban sensibility’, developed by Pierre Sansot. Both authors work on the plane of the imaginary. For Sansot, one of the arguments that proves the presence of this sensorial imaginary – sensation that affects the plane of the imaginary – is established by the practice of ‘imagining the city’ as an intuitive totality. ‘Une ville, dont on ne saisit à chaque instant, dans la perception, que des fragments, ne devient totalité, une totalité belle, immense, donate que dans et par notre imagination’ (‘Pour une ethnologie (sociologie) du sensible urbain’). The city is at the same time imagined and imagining, capable of producing images. ‘Il existerait un imaginaire non point accidentel,



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non point subjectif, non point seulement reproducteur mais producteur et inventif.’ To experience the city is to feel it, and to feel it is to invent it. It’s not an individual subjective invention, but a collective, ‘impersonal’ invention that is transmitted, between quavering, contorted bodies, through a plane of perception that is the plane of the sensorial intuition. The poetic nature of intuition is the mode of perceiving the sensorial. Without minimizing the imaginary or the pertinence of problematizing it, another way of approaching the urban sensibility, inspired by Dionysian principles, would be to approach the sensorial from the dynamic dyad force/form (intensive forces/expressive forms). Intensive sensations (sensation belonging to the sensorial) experienced in the vibration of desirous bodies and intuitive perceptions that are whispered (muttered, moaned) in a mysterious language that conceals iridescence in its depths. The poetic, in its Dionysian, aesthetic form, put to the service of the Dionysian element. Roberto Machado writes: Dionysian art transforms poison – a magic potion, filtered by the witch doctor – into a cure, taking from Dionysus his ‘destructive weapons’ […] Pure Dionysianism, freed from itself, is poison, since it implies destruction of life. […] If art is capable of letting us participate in the Dionysian experience without implying being destroyed by it, it’s because it enables an experience of inebriation without the loss of lucidity. (Nietzsche e a verdade)

Remaining lucid while being thrown into the whirlwind, gliding smoothly over troubled waters. If the aim is to access this plane (maze-like, molecular) of the body, could there be a more regal route than through poetic ‘draping’, the folding of expressive materials into a mercurial cloak? Superficial operation. For Foucault, depth is no more than a fold, a wrinkle (a draping) of the surface that is flattened: ‘… if the interpreter must go to the bottom himself, like an excavator, the movement of interpretation is, on the contrary, that of a projection [surplomb], of a more elevated projection, which always leaves depth above it to be displayed in a more visible fashion.’ The entire depths of the Nietzschean excavation ‘is in the strict sense the reversal of depth, the discovery that depth was only a game and a surface fold’.1 Like a swath of tulle, the veiled

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surface is unfolded, exposed, extracting a material force from its depths. Fold/unfold the superficial depth: basically, a baroque operation – taking baroque to mean a ‘state of sensibility’ (or ‘spirit’) of a time, while simultaneously transhistoric, which is to say, not restricted to a determined historic moment, but a collective spirit that marks the ‘climate’. Deleuze sees, quite rightly, traces of the baroque in Mallarmé: ‘The fold is without doubt Mallarmé’s most important concept, more like an operation, the operative act that makes him a great baroque poet.’ A sense of sensitivity, a sense of collective spirit that sets the tone, ‘characterizes’ a period or a perspective, the baroque essentially consists of a certain folding of content and form. Forceful gales, fluttering folds – chiaroscuro splendour – the baroque form. Sensual potlatch of excess, but constructed of ‘material textures’, a ‘theatre of matter’ (Deleuze): taut with tension or hysteresis (the rigour of hysteria), matter, elliptical in form, ‘can express the folds of another matter’. Pulsational, corporal matter (sensitive) to what the baroque evokes in its full-bodied corporality, bent and saturated with heterogeneous inscriptions. Poetry seems to be the most efficient method of capturing this sensorial ambiance. The baroque – or more precisely, the neo-baroque – ‘expresses’ the (sensitive) state of a given period. Going back to where we started: the nomad drift. The ramblings of the flâneur. A certain expectation of erotic adventure motivates the march – indifferent and automatized – of the multitude in the modern megalopolis. Benjamin, in his commentary on Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘To a Passer-by’, points out how the gaze of the flâneur ‘captures’ (singularizes) the furtive object of his desire. A lightning flash … then night! Fleeting beauty by whose glance I was suddenly reborn, will I see you no more before eternity?2

Benjamin comments: ‘The delight of the city-dweller is love – not at first sight but at last sight.’ In the instantaneousness of that rushed passion, sex is separated from Eros: ‘What makes his body contract in a tremor – crispé comme un extravagant, Baudelaire says – is not the rapture of a man whose every fibre is suffused with eros; it is, rather, like the kind of sexual shock that can beset a lonely man.’



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In much the same way that Benjamin fixes his gaze on Baudelaire’s poetry to explain the micro mobilizations that pulse through – desirous quivering – the anodyne march of the facsimiled crowd, so the urban poetics of the Brazilian Roberto Piva transmute the paranoid contortions that vulcanize the ‘climate’ of São Paulo into a surreal linguistic unconscious. Vision of São Paulo at Night Cannibalistic Poem under the Effect of Narcotics by Roberto Piva On the corner of San Luis a procession of [a thousand persons light candles in my head there are mystics spouting nonsense into the hearts of [widows and a silence of stars departs in a luxurious carriage a blue fire of gin and carpet colours the night, [the lovers suck each other like roots Maldoror in cups of high tide on San Luis my heart gnaws a stretch of [my life the city of growing chimneys, bootblack angels [with their slang [ferocious in the full joy of the plazas, girls [ragged [definitively fantastical there is a glade of green serpents in the eyes of my [friend the moon rests on nothing I rest on nothing I am granite bridge on the wheels of subaltern [garages simple theories boil my insane mind there are green benches affixed to the bodies of the plazas there’s a bell no one sounds Rilke’s angels fucking in the latrines glorified vertigo-kingdom spectres vibrating spasms kisses echoing in a cavern of reflections coughing faucets, howling trains [hoarse adolescents gone wild

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[in their youth the juvenile delinquents yo-yo at the gates of the Abyss I see Brahma sitting on the lotus flower Christ stealing the miracles box Chet Baker moaning over the Victrola I feel the crash of all the cables leaving the [destroyed doors of the brain I see whores gigolos pimps towers crazies dafts drafts [window displays men women paedophiles and [children pass by and open inside me like moon gas street trees moon [frightening suppliers collision on the bridge blind man sleeping in the window display of horror I spin like a top my head sinks down into my throat an entire life rains upon me, arduous suffocating fluctuation in my guts, my love, I carry your scream like a treasure [buried I’d like to pour over you my epicycle of centipedes [freed furious yearning of windows eyes open mouths, [whirlwinds of shame [currents of marihuana from floating picnics wasps buzzing around my yearning children abandoned naked on the corners vagabond angels shrieking amid the shops and the [temples, amid loneliness and blood, amid [collisions, birth And the Clamour

One of the questions posed by anthropology is: how do we capture the climates (sexual climate, sordid climate) of a time? We see that poetry often lends itself admirably to such a task. A kind of atmosphere, which, beyond impressionism, could be thought of as ‘a field of force’, a tenuous yet persistent passionate stratum where Maffesoli sees the insistence of the Dionysian element, secretly upholding society.

Poetry and Ecstasy

‘Mi éxtasi … estálaue! … inste ostento no instó en este instante! … tú consistas En mí. O sea dios que se me añade! …’

Martín Adán

Oracular, the poetic word exudes a hermetic fragrance from its doublets of mystery. It is common knowledge that poetry is not communication: it moves by leaps of alliteration or metaphors or intensive reverberations of sounds and colours, whispers and ideas. The flights of ideas like freshwater seahorses skittling across the skin. Then, something like a heave or moan – cora said Kristeva talking about Artaud – in the musical insistence of the phrase, the arching of courtly contortion. The vague limits of the idea sink into the colourful marshes with a whisper, a murmur, a muttering. Zither of (interior) rhyme, the similarity, the relation of poetry to music is heard in galloping glimmers of language. We hear it in Rubén Darío’s ‘Canto Triunfal’: Comes the parade now with one accord Marching comes the army and the clear, bright bugling begins Fearsome is the glittering of each sword With gold and steel amassing the moving paladins.1 Published in La Letra A no. 3, 1991.

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Without completely ignoring the poet’s role as inspired bard, the spectacle of the contemporary scene reserves for the few surviving poets an oral destiny. The poet writes verses that are not understood. This is because the magical resonance of the words is sourced through a different state of consciousness, a trancelike state that the poet enters into and hopes to bring the reader into, or that the reader enters into on his own. The fact that the poetic project is built on a sensorial foundation should make us question the chatty aunt stereotype attributed to poets today. The poet is not understood (as a poet), so he’s invited to talk about poetry. The result is that the discourse on poetry, saturated with academic criticism, has no resemblance whatsoever to the flow of the poetic word with its displays of playful grace. The discourse on poetry addresses something else entirely. The act of poetic creation taps an aesthetic quality, the gleaming beauty that emanates from the word. The sweet affectation of the entranced throat. How should we view this academic interference in the discourse on poetry, diluting radical linguistic experimentation with a reverence for rational interpretation? The legitimacy of this interpretation is yet to be seen. The apparatus of academic criticism decodes the oracular mystery of poetry, to arrive at an interpretable meaning that is above all translatable to the vernacular slang of the trade. It’s worth asking to what point the discourse on poetry, a requisite at cultural events, is not in fact a way of domesticating (dominating, as Osvaldo Lamborghini would say) the rough refulgence of the electrified word. I would like to file a complaint against the Department’s domineering distortion of inspiration. This would imply a battle over style. Hubert Fichte, author of Etnopoesía, questions this essential betrayal of academic discourse with relation to anthropology. Why not extend this critique, more logically still, to the criticism of poetry? The decisive rift between poetic expression and the discourse on poetry occurs, perhaps, in the genesis of its creation. When we understand poetry as ecstasy, we see the clear discordancy of ordinary critical terminology. Or, to put it in Hubert Fichte’s terms, ‘the bland rococo of our university departments and academic journals’. Where does it go when it’s not here? Where is it when it goes out?



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Ecstasy means: leaving the self. Michel Leiris sees in ecstasy and trancelike states the desire to stop being what one is, a break from the identity. For this reason, the crafty flattery about the identity of the poet only makes us smile blushingly. Leiris recognizes three variations of this break with identity: projection to another world (as in the voyage of the shaman); being outside one’s self (as in a mystic trance); becoming someone else, through possession and worship. How do the workings of the poetic word fit into all this? The ancient Greeks, as Dodds shows us, distinguished four types of trance, daughters of the gods: the mantic, or prophetic trance, attributed to the intervention of Apollo; the poetic trance, ushered along by the muses; the erotic trance, related to Eros and Aphrodite; and the ecstatic trance, ritually associated with Dionysus and his Corybants. Let us now enter the poetic trance, consulting the oracle through the essence of the inspired word. One of the routes to access the poetic trance is through glossolalia, the gift of language: hermetic language, difficult to interpret or even understand, transmitted by a superior, celestial or awesome power, which expresses itself through a different or altered state of consciousness, to which the reception of the oracular flow refers. It does not pass through the plane of communication, but, firstly, through this kind of interior connection of entranced souls. Recognized by Georges Lapassade as ‘one of the rare forms of relatively ritualized trance that still exists in the West’, poetic creation reveals its relation to other forms of trance: from heteroclite spiritual exercises that aim for ecstasy and fusion with celestial deliquescence, to all variations of leaving the self through ingestion of psychoactive drugs accompanied by an understanding of the experience, including the entrancement of actors, present in experiences such as Living Theatre. The circle of ecstasy reverberates outwards: once again, the rituals of the theatre of cruelty connect to other ways of reaching this ‘second state’ (altered state or state of superior consciousness) through the beating of a drum with vertiginous velocity, which disconnects the codified cables of the brain and makes them dance at the light speed of saints and souls. The beating of fingertips on snake or sheep skin, and the contortion of the body to the rhythm of membranous sensuality that heralds the gods and excites and dissolves individual senses as the divine power carries us along.

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In a way similar to privileged possession by the spirits of the forest or the water, the person touched by the poetic word passes, like the saint on his horse or mule, through the self, exiting through the tongue or fingertips; the poet goes over to the other side. Lapassade defines this second state in the arid idiolect of the man of science (an ugly man, without aesthetics) as: ‘The modified consciousness characterized by a qualitative change of ordinary consciousness, of the perception of time and space, of the image of the body and the personal identity. This modification supposes a rupture produced by the induction, through which the subject enters into a second state.’ The poet? He’s not here. He’s somewhere else. Turned over. He is others. This brings to mind Pessoa’s heteronyms, dissolution of the poor self in a kind of proliferating schizophrenia whose ‘style’ – as Leo Navratil and Evelyne Sznycer show us in Schizophrénie et art – borders on mannerism. We see a similar effect produced by Abisinia Exibar, Lezama Lima’s asthma medication, which left him constantly enshrouded in a voluptuous blue mist. And Borges’s Aleph, the iridescent vortex of the universe hidden in a basement in the Constitution neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, and the marvellous parody – ‘Help a él’ – Rodolfo Fogwill’s inversion of the story, which explodes the Aleph through the shifting gleam of mescaline. And while we’re at it, what’s more fitting, while we’re listing the uses of the oft-maligned narcotics, than to recall the writing, witty and riddled with visions, of L’Infini turbulent: … thousands and thousands of blazing microscopic points, dazzling diamonds gleaming microbes […] Inside the whirlwind of dust of a closed room, apparently immobile, until a ray of sunlight, passing through a hole in a worn curtain, reveals its insane, incessant agitation, going nowhere yet never resting, with no order at all.

Meaningless motion. This agitated confusion reminds us of Artaud’s peyote-induced delirium, so well described by Lezama Lima: Inspired by peyote, man creates purely imagined cultures, without basis in reality, mysterious fortresses, prodigious temples where faith becomes substance, substance becomes reality, musical gorgons,



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which do not acquire their reality from the exterior world. Man, nourished by the satanic peyote, does not return to nature, does not weave from land and air his arrogant resistance, his diamond sovereignty, his docile anemones on the whims of the wind, but he enters the nonexistent current of increasing speed, where the exterior that is reality, metamorphosed in the unreal interior, which influences his movements, his gestures and his images, erases nature and replaces it with its intermediate derivations. In this world produced by peyote, to act is to disappear; holding out a hand throws the other person into the silent abyss; the foreign word leads to insanity, like a crystal, penetrating him first and pulverizing him into the dust of a slow ember.

Satanic, since it lacks an invocation of the divine, peyote constructs in the pompous void of the head floating castles where, in the infinite corridors adorned with dazzling gemstones, the logical person becomes lost, the ego dissolves in the hollows made by the perfect production of light and colours, the violet and yellow rays of prophetic illumination drowned in the lagoon of meaning. Minutia that dissolves at the very edge of reality! Lezama said: Peyote created a civilization, constructed it, without existing, built it up, without confirming. The moats of its castles flowed to the forehead. Its vegetation took vengeance on the man. It built inside him a tree that grew its leaves from the cerebral evaporations. He hung from this unreal tree, singing, and in the void his feet kicked up sand which his fingers could not feel but that fell like dew onto his forehead.

Satanic, this enchantment that is nothing more than the velvety fall into fabulous voids. Lapassade recognized that great poetry is always a liturgy. But this liturgy, since it is not consecrated by the celebration of divinities, celebrates nothing. The entirety or at least a large part of hermetic modern poetry could be compared to Lezama Lima’s view of the fantastic figurations of peyote: elaborate constructions of a ferocious and irreducible aestheticism floating in the orotund vacuity of the void. But, before venturing into the nihilism at the heart of poetic transubstantiation, we must first agree on poetry as a form. I daresay: as a form of ecstasy. To consider poetic expression as a form of ecstasy supposes understanding entrancement as an ecstatic force. A Dionysian

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force, in the Nietzschean sense. The Dionysian experience – writes R. Machado inspired by Nietzsche: ensures, in place of individualization, a rupture from the principium individustonis and a total harmony between man and nature and other men, a universal harmony and a mystic feeling of unity; in place of self-awareness, a disintegration of the ego, which is superficial, and an emotion that supresses subjectivity to obtain the total oblivion of the self.

Twisted by the emanations of the hallucinatory concoction, the Dionysian dancer, absorbed in the musical exaltation of the chanting, in the rhythmic pulse of the forest, leaves himself, ‘feels God’ (Nietzsche). More precisely, Machado wisely warns, the purely Dionysian is a poison, impossible to experience, since it implies the destruction of life. Some form is needed to maintain lucidity amidst the chaos. We know that this form is poetry. We infer that it might be divine. Different from the demonic iridescences seen by the atheist Artaud under the influence of peyote or the embroidered ethereality of poetic trinkets dissolving into the trivial void, there are religious forms of trance that do not merely shine phantasmagorical lights into the mysterious abyss, but use the agencement of the glimmers as a stairway to the blue of the astral plane. I’m referring, due to my singular proximity, to the cult of Santo Daime, centred around the ingestion of the sacred drink, ayahuasca, or yagé, in which visionary expeditions and trans­ personal meanderings through the paradises of the beyond are punctuated and guided by chanted hymns, channelled by believers through divine inspiration, who serve as guiding lights through the astonishing force of the rapture, transforming the divine into a form of ecstasy which is poetic.

The Religion of Ayahuasca

‘Nao creias nos mestres que te aparecen E nem con eles o caminho queira andar Creia somente en teu Jesús Que ele é que tem para te dar Meu mestre a Vós aquí eu peço Para vos me guiar Me guie no caminho da Santa Luz Nao deixa ninguém me derribar Segué sempre leu caminho Deixa quem quiser fular Recebe a lúa Luz de Cristal Te firma e le compõe em teu lugar Recebe todos que chcgar Faz o que eu te mandar Because of his personal interest in the Brazilian religion Santo Daime, Perlongher wrote several texts on the ritual experience associated with it. This essay – previously unpublished – is the most extensive. Shorter versions and other similar texts were published, such as ‘La force de la forme. Notes sur la religión du Santo Daime’, in Societes no. 29, Paris, September 1990; ‘Santo Daime. O discreto charme do sagrado’, in Nicolau no. 40, Curitiba, 1991; and ‘Éxtasis sin silicio’, in El Porteño no. 116, Buenos Aires, August 1991.

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Não deixa fazer o que eles quercm Espera até o dia que eu chegar’1

Vibration of light (it sometimes seems like the lightbulbs in the temple are about to burst), multiform explosion of colours, cenesthesia through music which impregnates everything with flows of iridescent particles, which wriggle tracing arcs of steely shimmers in the vaporous volume of the air, a thick air, like liquefied crystal. The acrid regurgitation of the sacred liquid in the guts – heavy, deep, almost gravid – converts for a second the pain into pleasure, into an ecstasy of delight that is felt like a film of incandescent shimmer emanating from the organs or from the aura of the soul, twinkling glitter, like an oily cellophane, adhering to the body fevered with emotion. We are in the ayahuasca ingestion ceremony, held in the ‘church’ of Santo Daime. The participants in the ceremony – men on one side, women on the other, the former dressed austerely: white shirt, blue trousers; blouse and skirt of the same colours for the latter. For holiday ceremonies, which coincide with religious or saint day ceremonies, the uniform is white with green ribbons and the women wear crowns. A six-pointed star engraved with an eagle and a moon is worn on the chests of the fardados (the ‘uniformed ones’, meaning the initiates). The observers form a double L around a table laid with winking candles and transparent stones on a white embroidered tablecloth: in the centre, the Cross of Caravaca rises up imposingly (with two horizontal lines indicating the second coming of Christ on Earth). After the prayers, of Christian origin with spiritualist and esoteric influences, comes the distribution of ayahuasca, sacred drink prepared through a complicated maceration of an Amazonian vine, the yagube (Banisteriopsis caapi) combined with chacrona o rainba (Psychotria viridis), a tropical bush, brewed in a high climate of ritual. Mixed two times with other vegetable elements – such as the powerful toe, the formidable datura, or devil’s weed2 – it is called by many different names (in the Santo Daime religion it is called simply Daime) and subject to a variety of ritual uses depending on the group ingesting the elixir. It was adored by the Incas who gave it the name ayahuasca (literally: ‘wine of the souls’ or ‘wine of the dead’, since under its influence the departed are invoked). Schultes and Hoffman, important scholars of the subject, highlight the magical character of yagé:



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There is a magical intoxicant in northwesternmost South America that the Indians believe can free the soul from corporeal confinement, allowing it to wander free and return to the body at will. The soul, thus untrammelled, liberates its owner from the realities of everyday life and introduces him to wondrous realms of what he considers reality …3

Considered sacred and venerated as such, the potent concoction, capable of producing celestial visions and cosmic journeys, has been used since time immemorial among the people of the Western Amazon, in territories today belonging to Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia. Of note is the expansion of ritual consumption of ayahuasca first to rural and suburban areas among the mestizo populations (process occurring especially in Peru4) and currently into the hearts of major Brazilian cities. This shift from tribal use to urban use occurs, in Brazil, through two new (although not incipient) religious formations: Unión do Vegetal and Santo Daime. We use the term ‘new’ as defined by Marión Aubrée: ‘autochthonous production of innovative mixtures’.5 Both religions conserve the essential elements of the indigenous practice: the preparation and ingestion of the sacred drink, accompanied, in the case of Santo Daime, by a rhythmic musical ritual. Chanting, among traditional consumers, is of utmost importance: among the Mai-Huna of the Peruvian Amazon, for example, it would be inconceivable to ingest yagé and remain silent.6 Anthropologist Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, who studied the Yagua people of northeast Peru, attributes the extension of shamanistic uses of ayahuasca among mestizo populations to the fact that the ‘non-dogmatic and integrative character of shamanism facilitates the progressive incorporation of new models […] into the traditional conceptual framework’. Far from hostile towards change, ‘shamanism appears as a system in constant adaptation to experienced reality’.7 This explains the combination of shamanistic practices, generally with the objective of healing, and a religious corpus strongly impregnated with Catholicism, product of several centuries of missionary work. In traditional ceremonies, the healer drinks along with the patient and sees the sickness affecting them to determine its magical or spiritual causes.8 Marlene Dobkin observed in Iquitos similar rites during which ayahuasca was taken as a ‘filter of love’ to protect the person from abandonment and betrayal.9 The indigenous peoples of the Sibundoy Valley travel to urban centres in

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Colombia, Venezuela and Panama, carrying out ritual healings and divinations centred around yagé, sometimes mixed with Datura;10 they thus carry, as Taussig says, magical power from one part of the country to another.11 Normally the collective use of ‘hallucinogens’ (the accuracy of the term will be discussed later) is considered characteristic of so-called primitive societies and has been relegated to them. Guattari, recognizing that ‘drugs have played a fundamental role in all societies, in all cultural and religious areas’, distinguishes between ‘the solitary drug of capitalism’ and ‘the collective mode, which was, for example, the mode of shamanism’.12 The interesting thing about Santo Daime is that it is a modern religious ritualization of the use of plants of power taken as primitive and traditional. Upon introduction into modern urban societies, Santo Daime, with all its divine faith, is exiled to the sordid circuit of drugs. At the same time, this contemporary classification seems to highlight a transcendental element present, although vaguely, in modern drug culture. Although for William Burroughs – whose experience with yagé wasn’t precisely pleasant – no religion could be built around opiates,13 all the so-called hallucinogens seem to predispose the user to a state of supernatural trance. ‘The hallucinogenic experience’ – states Martine Xiberras14 – ‘is in effect very close to a mystic experience of the world.’ The psychedelic experience may be in reality ‘pre-religious’: hallucinogenic substances, according to Furst,15 are the foundation of all revelation and, in consequence, of all religions, located ‘at the source of mystic life, the root of religious practice and the origin of art’. Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, recognizes and tries to explore this religious facet. But how can a religion be built on individualistic hedonism? How do we classify Lisa Lieberman, ‘chief boo-hoo of the Neo-Marxian Church’ and self-proclaimed goddess of obscene transgression, emerging naked on a motorcycle from the depths of the pseudo-occult?16 Leary mentions the Native American religion of peyote, also imbued with strong Christian components, but he doesn’t seem to understand it. There are noteworthy parallels to Santo Daime (especially with respect to the combination of indigenous rituals and fragments of Christian doctrines, as well as the relative youth of both religions. The Native American Church, according to Lanternari,17 was basically built as a defence mechanism – to defend Native American culture – whereas Santo Daime is not ‘defensive’



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but ‘offensive’, given that it is not merely a revindication of traditional culture, but the creation of a new culture. There is a messianic tone present in the discourse (sometimes vaguely military18) of expansion and extension (although preaching to the public is not practised) as well as the establishment of villages that aim for an earthly incarnation of paradise with mystic and utopian connotations. We may mention here the religion’s Empire (the Juramidam Empire).19 The religion of Santo Daime (literally: Saint Give Me, the name originating from the invocations – constructed with the Portuguese verb dai-me (give me) – give me peace, give me love …) first appears in the 1930s in the strategic Brazilian state of Acre – near Brazil’s borders with Bolivia and Peru – which in the early twentieth century broke away from the authorities in La Paz to join those in Rio de Janeiro. This new religion, which today sees a minoritary but bustling expansion among the middle classes of major Brazilian cities, emerges from the massive displacements of migrants20 from Brazil’s northeast region, during the rubber boom. Their eclectic popular Catholicism (in reality saint worship21) encountered indigenous shamans (witchdoctors) who used ayahuasca for healing or celebration. According to the religion’s origin story, founder Raimundo Irineu Serra, a man of African descent from Maranhão – a region marked by strong Afro-Brazilian spiritualist influences – imbibed the drink with the Peruvian shaman Crescencio Pizango, who upheld the tradition from his Incan heritage. He was visited by Our Lady of Conception, Queen of the Forest – also known as Iemanjá and Oxum, African aquatic deities, all forms of the Divine Mother – who revealed to him the doctrine22 and ordered him to spread the word as a soldier of God.23 At the summit of a complex, multifaceted and proliferate native Olympus – alongside the Virgin Mary, Buddha, Krishna, and even Mohammed – sits Master Juramidam, supreme divinity of the forest;24 the syncretism being more of a simultaneity than a rigid hierarchy. The ritual takes the form of a collective festival, with nuances of Dionysian communion, but maintaining a rigorous and aesthetic formalism. The ceremony usually lasts an entire night, till the first light of dawn or into the early hours of the morning. During this time the devotees sing, accompanied by guitars, energetic maracas, and sporadically by accordions, flutes and violins, something like a celestial choir singing hymns, that is, rhyming poems with mystic

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content ‘received’ through divine inspiration by the protagonists of this unique ritual, who move in a synchronized ‘dance’: a monotonous swaying, rocked by hypnotic chants, with a vague indigenous resonance, believed to contribute to better absorption of the liquid in the body, the emetic and purifying power of which manifests itself, not infrequently, in a violent manner. The chant, and the rhythmic breathing that this implies, is common among all the tribes that consume ayahuasca. ‘Through this rhythmic movement’, writes Vera Froes25 in one of the few books on the subject, ‘a strong spiritual current rises up among the participants.’ The miraciones – celestial visions, intense vibrations, a kind of guided ‘hallucination’ (mainly merging constellations of phosphenes), which is not uncommon or undesired – produced by the effect of ayahuasca in the body, combine with the music and dance to configure a singular experience of ecstasy. It is a true musical doctrine, composed of ‘numinous hymns’26 which are received (the poetic drift of a glossolalic, oracular, mantic trance) by the devotees through divine inspiration, which functions as explication and guide for the experience induced by the bitter elixir: nontransferable, ineffable voyages of the soul. Alex Pollari, ex-guerrillero and one of the current godfathers of the church (led by Visconde de Mauá in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro), sees a Lake of Energy: At times the surface of the lake was a calm translucence. An iridescent light filtered down and out of it slid other forms and comprehensions of what was happening there, in that moment. Later, energy was thrown onto the surface of the lake and the concentric circles began again. In that movement of lines and circles, which traced arabesques before my eyes, I thought I saw all the secrets of the uninterrupted cycle of creation and destruction of all the Universes that ever existed. In this moment, I felt the Force. My body pulsed with it, now chaotic, now calm, keeping time with the pulse of the energy.27

The flow of young nomads, sons and daughters of the 1960s hippie generation, introduced oriental and esoteric elements into this mystic pahtheon,28 already populated by indigenous, African and Christian entities. The happy encounter between the rural ayahuasca worshippers and pilgrims from the ‘hippie circus’ ready to ‘return to nature’ occurs in the Colonia Cinco Mil (a village so called because it’s made up of plots of land worth five thousand



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cruzeiros each), founded by the church’s newest commander, Godfather Sebastián Mota y Meló, who, because of disputes over succession after the death in 1970 of the initial founder Irineu, had to move with his people to a nearby colony in Alto Santo, outside Rio Branco, the capital of Acre. A certain nomadic messianic impulse would urge the followers of Godfather Sebastián to later move deeper into the jungle, founding the village of Céu de Mapiá, a two-day trip by canoe from Boca do Acre, in the state of Amazonas – without abandoning Colonia Cinco Mil, which, however, became less important. Now led by Godfather Sebastián’s son, Godfather Alfredo Mota, the group is currently dedicated to the colonization of a vast area near the Purus river, ceded to them by the Brazilian government.29 This specific sector of Santo Daime (there are various subgroups: original followers of master Irineu who continue to gather at the colony of Alto Santo, as well as other branches influenced to varying degrees by Umbanda practices) is the one that instigated, starting in the 1980s, the urban growth of the religion, by founding churches in urban and rural areas of Rio de Janeiro and now extending out to São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Florianopolis, Brasília, Porto Velho and other minor centres, with communities in Nova Friburgo and Airiouca, among others. This limited expansion (which, presumably, will never cease to be minoritary, since Santo Daime is too radical for most people) was, more unobtrusively, preceded by the expansion of another important ayahuasca religion in Brazil: the Unión do Vegetal, also originating from the encounter between rural people and natives of the region of Rondonia. This religion, a good deal more insular and exclusive, practises a different ritual – more esoteric and less dancecentred – of ingestion of the sacred drink, here called Vegetal. The church of Santo Daime – officially called the Eclectic Centre of Flowing Universal Light – shows further fusion, eclecticism as a religion. The doctrine is defined as Evolutionary Eclecticism: ‘various interpenetrating religious currents based in Christianity’.30 There is a fairly significant proximity to Umbanda, a mix of African and Catholic elements,31 which do not necessarily imply a substitution, but instead a total simultaneity: a Catholic saint could be at the same time an African deity, configuring a kind of negation of the principle of identity. Alex Pollari talks of three principal sources, in addition to the Afro-Brazilian influences: the East, with its meditation methods

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capable of dissolving the ego; the Christian doctrine, especially its most esoteric tradition; and the worship of sacred plants, specific to the New World. Before joining Santo Daime, many devotees had spiritual, esoteric or Buddhist experiences. This multiplicity is wholly accepted: We don’t care if someone believes in karma, resurrection or reincarnation, if they come from Spiritism, from Umbanda, or Buddhism. All that matters is doing our work, chanting our hymns in praise of God and Nature, knowing how to live together and share our bread with authentic Christian values integrated into our daily practice.32

An astonishing plasticity characterizes this religion in motion, comparable to the sect of María Lionza in Venezuela, which also mixes elements of the most varied origin, even including the worship of President Kennedy: the high priestess says she doesn’t even know where the religion is going.33 This process is in every way analogous to the workings of Umbanda, now growing at a surprising rate in Buenos Aires.34 A kind of spiritual cannibalism also appears in other recent cults, such as Tía Neiva, decidedly baroque, and the Yokaanan (Eclectic Universal Spiritual Brotherhood), a ‘mix of Catholicism, Spiritism, and Umbanda on 1540 Khz’,35 both based in Brasília. The fact that there is no written doctrine, only one derived from the hymns received by the acolytes, favours the aforementioned proliferating plasticity – which seems to have no limits: the church in São Paulo is attended by devotees of Gnosis – a certain esoteric school – as well as followers of candomblé, practitioners of shamanism, worshipers of Saint Germain, and even disciples of Wilhelm Reich (!), to form an indiscernible spiritual patois (or paté), sometimes as banal as a holy man on a beach of Rio. There are even books, such as the previously cited work by Gregorim, centred entirely around this spiritual mix of diffuse limits and forms. This abundance and experimentation (almost gymnastic) of diverse superimposed religious codes is not necessarily a defect and could even be considered a virtue, as it forms an indefinable juxtaposition like the store stocked with Afro-Cuban religious items that Fichte discovers (and admires for the richness of its assortment) in Miami.36 There is, in addition, a strong pantheistic base, of nature worship, present in hymns that exalt, among other elements, the sun, the moon and the stars, what Maffesoli calls ‘reinvestment of



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magnetism’,37 which additionally fosters social links. This shows the traces of the extinct pantheistic religion of northeast Brazil, which was persecuted by authorities in the 1930s and which had notable iconic and imagistic similarities to Santo Daime.38 It is, in truth, a liquefaction of religious codes, transmitting them, no longer through water, but through ayahuasca. This liquid quality, in all senses, of Daime, is manifest in the name adopted by the church in São Paulo: Flower of the Waters. In addition to the dances, there are special works of healing, where participants chant, seated, without dancing, certain selected hymns, in the presence of the sick person and with a select group of fardados (initiates who have received their uniform and star, who have been indoctrinated). The Daime practitioner Chico Corriente, from the Colonia Cinco Mil colony, talks about the works of healing: There are nine people who do the healings. The sick person is given Daime, nine prayers are said, concentrating, each person seeking the good that they need for themselves, asking the healing spirits to make the work flow, to take actions, give advice … the seers witness the arrival of the spirits. Through the drink that the group drinks, they gradually arrive at a point in which a spiritual force brings in positive energies and takes out the bad. The more they concentrate on God, the more strength in the heart of the patient.39

In these works of healing – which tend to be shorter – the godfather, who directs the healing work, can be clearly seen to take on dual roles as priest and shaman – the first assimilated to the society of the state, the second to tribal society.40 Discussing this issue, Clodomir Monteiro associates the ‘ecstatic shamanistic flight’ present in Santo Daime and similar faiths (which he calls the Juramidam System, from Jura, meaning God, and Midam, meaning son), to the ‘manifestations of typically Afro-Brazilian mediumship’, constituting a convergence between indigenous peoples, and people of European and African descent in a ‘new type of shamanism’.41 Fernando de la Roque Couto, on the other hand, prefers the notion of a ‘collective shamanism’.42 Something of the Andean heritage can be noted, additionally, in the desire for facial impassivity during ceremonies, even when channelling entities, very different to the exasperated contortion specific to the Afro-Brazilian trance. It could be posed, as a

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hypothesis, that Santo Daime represents a shamanistic ‘foundation’ upon which a religious form has been ‘constructed’.

Force and form A whole poetic and baroque atmosphere is created to ritualize the collective imbibing of the sacred drink. This gives form (Dionysian, aesthetic and perhaps baroque) to the ecstatic force that is called forth and awakened, keeping it from dissipating into vain phantasmagoria, or, worse yet – as in the de-ritualized western use of hard drugs – from turning on itself, pulling the user into a vortex of destruction and self-destruction. We take from the great Christian mystics the distinction between experience and doctrine. For San Juan de la Cruz – as recorded by Baruzi43 – experience describes ‘the fact of having experienced certain states’ comparable to the ‘states of modified consciousness’ mentioned by Lapassade.44 However, Baruzi continues, ‘the experience, indispensable for the person who wants to feel mystic life, is not sufficient to describe it’. Experience, in itself, allows one to feel, but not understand; in order to understand, a doctrine is necessary. To the extent that the experience remits to a cosmic contemplation, it seems to be beyond the doctrine; at the same time, the doctrine acquires a new tenor in light of the experience it is based upon. ‘Beyond the construction of a doctrine is the rhythm of the experience itself.’ Therefore, among the mystics of poetic ecstasy, Baruzi summarizes, ‘the experience is translated directly into a chant’.45 In the case of Santo Daime, the belief is not merely ideological a priori, but is based in a divine experience, witnessed through the visions offered by ayahuasca. On the other hand, the doctrine expressed in the hymns – which basically exalt Christian values such as discipline, humiliation, forgiveness, faith and divine power, etc. – gives form to the experience and ensures that it does not degenerate into the terrifying triviality of the purely personal. Useful for thinking about Santo Daime, the dyad of experience/ doctrine can be compared, functionally, to the distinction between the plane of the body and the plane of expression46 as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari47 through Hjelmslev. On the one hand, the plane of the body includes everything that has to do with the purely ‘physical’, corporal and even visual effects of the drink; on the other



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hand are the hymns, the rituals, everything that has to do with the plane of expression. In short, the religion of Santo Daime includes a plane that has to do with the experience of the body, in the body, with the body,48 in this sense Dionysian. At the same time, Santo Daime makes use of its own autonomous plane of expression, the Juramidam Doctrine.49 While this ability to produce an effective autonomous discourse may be common to other religious formations, in the case of Santo Daime there’s a less common singularity, which is the fact that the religion revolves around the ingestion of a psychoactive liquid. This allows us to make a comparison, in this case not with other religions, but with other unregulated uses of substances commonly referred to as drugs (the accuracy of said denomination being debatable). The ‘savage’ experience is devoid of any ritual, much less a sacred one, that could in some way ‘contain’ the subject who undertakes this journey. It therefore runs the risk of throwing the user into a whirlwind of destruction and self-destruction. Unable to construct a plane of expression, the drug user may fall into tragic chaos. Descendant trances, which are ‘destructive’ to the physical body (damaging to the organs, specifically, or an indication of the creation of a body without organs focused on the destruction of the organs50), are like a kind of satori that destroys the body, but yet constitutes a deranged exaltation of the personal body, the body as the self.51 It’s not that drug users lose their collective agencement – as depicted in films such as Sid & Nancy and Drugstore Cowboy – a mechanical flow that unites and links bodies through shared sensation; an essentially corporal experience, of a collectivized body, but that paradoxically encloses each individual inside the hell of their own solitary dependence. At the far edges of nihilism, they fly the tattered flag of an ego in ruins, resisting (or incapable of seeing) the collectivization of the sacred. To the extent that drug users cannot efficiently articulate the blubbering of their marginalities, their experience is distorted, their souls become hard and cold and they are rehabilitated, shut away, institutionalized, by the apparatus of police control and medicine. In short, they are easy victims of the social machines of discipline, through mechanisms that seem to take the form of a device analogous to the device of sexuality spoken of by Foucault, which proliferates as a loquacious interdiction. There is no purely clinical effect of a substance itself, but an effect that is inseparable from a certain plane of expression, which – according to Deleuze and Guattari – neither represents nor reflects (nor does

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it signify) the plane of bodies, but instead intervenes on the body by giving it orders (a relationship of reciprocal presupposition existing between the two planes: one does not determine the other, but rather both function presupposing the other, while maintaining relative autonomy). Using a form/force structure, we may postulate a theoretical approach to understanding Santo Daime. This takes a different notion of control (ritual control of the use of psychoactive substances52), which seems too ‘exterior’ and a different hypothesis of the imaginary, which runs the risk of creating a kind of bubble where, it could be postulated, everything is real (or even surreal): nothing is more real than ecstasy. How would this force/form structure function? Let’s recall the tension between the plane of the body and the plane of expression which served as an introduction to the problem. It is difficult, if not gratuitous, to try to explain what this force is. We may instead try to capture the emotional experience, falling somewhere between Nietzsche’s forces and the candomblé notion of axé, closer to the second in the case of Santo Daime.53 This brings us to the field of anthropology and Lévi-Strauss’s well-known criticism of Mauss,54 approaching the notion of hau (vital force) taken from the Polynesian people by Mauss, whom Lévi-Strauss accuses of having a nativist perspective, and he therefore substitutes the previously mentioned hau for a linguistic equation. Here we once again encounter the Dionysian/Apollonian dyad explored by Nietzsche. However, we must not apply this notion in a literal sense, but in a broad sense – in the way proposed by Maffesoli in The Shadow of Dionysus.55 We speak of the Dionysian in the sense that it is an experience that directly affects the body, passes through the body, touching, to use the words of Mircea Eliade, the plane of sensory experience, imbuing the sensorial activity with religious signification.56 A concrete fusion takes place in the plane of the body, of sensorial vibrations, casting aside the supposedly foundational intervention of the egocentric consciousness. It seems, more precisely, that consciousness, more than determining a priori the sense and direction of ecstatic forces, imposes form a posteriori. It is not Dionysian in the sense of a pagan carnival, nor a sensual free-for-all. If there is any analogy between the experience of Santo Daime and what Nietzsche calls ‘Dionysian’ it can be seen, in addition to the shared agrestic character (Santo Daime worships Our Lady of Conception, Queen of the Forest), in the breakdown of



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individual self-consciousness in the mystic feeling of unity with the cosmos, with nature, and with other humans, which characterizes collective ecstasy. This limited Dionysian character appears, then, in the dissolution of individuality. Let us recall Bataille’s theories.57 For him, there is an essential continuity between men that is severed by human civilization, establishing a discontinuity – each person closed in on themselves in their egotistical monad – which does not abolish, however, their impulse towards that original continuity. There are three essential forms of ‘restoring’ said continuity: eroticism (the dilution of individuality in the fusion of orgy or passion, the latter being what Bataille called ‘eroticism of the hearts’, more sentimental and stable than ‘eroticism of the bodies’ which is fleeting and allows the ego to return unfazed); death (the end of individuation through physical extinction); and the sacred (implying a mystic fusion that dissolves the individual subject in the divine body or in the pantheon of deities). This destructuring of Dionysian frenzy pulls the individual identity into the ‘affectual nebulous’58 of bodies (and – why not? – souls) in amalgam. However, this Dionysian fervour, to the extent that the person liberated from themselves is – says Machado59 – a ‘poison’ that leads to pure destruction, requires the harmony of the Dionysian element to give it form, to grant them lucidity in the midst of the chaos. This form runs the risk, however, of overcoming and repressing the force aroused through ecstasy (as happens in rational western culture, intent on expelling and suffocating the Dionysian). But that’s a different debate which could lead us to consider the extent to which Santo Daime and other religious sects (such as the neighbouring Unión do Vegetal, analysed by the anthropologist Anthony Henman60) constitute an authoritarian formation, capable of transforming, at least in certain situations, form into dogma. On the other hand, it could also be argued that faithful observation of religion could permit a higher and more perfect flight through the paradises of vision and revelation. The ritual would then serve, in the words of Walter Dias Junior, as a ‘potentiation of ecstasy’.61 Far from simplifying these complex matters, we see how the religions of ayahuasca – completely legal in Brazil, even if this legality isn’t and hasn’t been exempt from threats of prohibition – show the possibility of a ritually organized use of psychoactive substances vulgarly called drugs. More accurate would be the term ‘entheogen’

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(literally, God inside us), proposed by the investigator Gordon Watson, who discovered hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico and took them with the shaman María Sabina, over the term hallucinogen, which has negative associations – since we are not referring to a hallucination in the conceptual sense, even if, physically, visions similar to constellations of phosphenes are produced – it is more pertinent to highlight the ability of these substances to produce ecstasy. Ecstasy – the word means, literally, ‘leaving the self’ – is not a trivial experience, but something that takes the subject into the most hidden recondite of the being and makes them feel they are in the presence of a superior and cosmic force, something felt corporally and mentally, in a state of trance that implies the passage to another level of superior or altered consciousness. In opposition to descendant ecstasy, what we call a ‘satori pit’, which users of hard drugs tend to fall into, experiences such as Santo Daime and the Unión do Vegetal in Brazil, the worship of the San Pedro cactus in Peru, and the church of peyote among Native American all offer an ascendant ecstasy, using the energy of the psychoactive substance as a cosmic trampoline, ritualized in order to guide and ‘control’ (as Edward MacRae puts it) the trip. Contemporary modern uses of ayahuasca reveal a search for ecstasy that parallels the mass experimentation with drugs, despite the fact that drug use is widely associated with misery. In short, religions such as Santo Daime offer another perspective on the ridiculous war on drugs that currently envelops us, keeping in mind as well that ayahuasca has therapeutic uses; it is particularly efficient in cases of addictions, alcoholism and psychosomatic illnesses in general, having even been proven to cure more serious afflictions. But Santo Daime doesn’t merely show the power of ecstasy: it also configures a true poetics. Self-defined as a ‘spiritual-musical association’, the devotees of Daime give great importance to the aesthetics of sociality. This poetics is in the end baroque: elements of a popular baroquism are abundant in the lyrics of the hymns, always imbued with the delicious ambiguity common to poetic expression; the hymns aspire, in their incessant proliferation, to ‘sing the world’ – or to invade the world with their song. It should be noted that this link between the use of entheogens and production of an oracular and hermetic poetics is common, not only to other uses of ayahuasca,62 but to rituals based around other substances, such as the case of Mexican mushrooms studied poetically by Munn.63



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In another manifestation of the baroque, symbolic elements are abundant, especially in the more prosperous churches of southern Brazil, for example the wide array of prayer amulets on the tables of a church of the San Pedro religion,64 where more than ninety objects, each one granted a ritual meaning, were piled up. In this abundance we could interpret a symbolic excess. A certain baroque tendency is manifested as well in the syncretic avidness (it may be more pertinent to call it, as the devotees themselves do, eclectic65) with which Santo Daime fuses and allies itself with similar religions, guided by the conviction that any divinities may be seen in the ritual visions. It might be interesting to create, as an experimental hypothesis, a certain sequence of visionary experiences, observed also in studies of LSD usage.66 These phases are not necessarily verified and much less in this order, but could be summarized as: first, a phase called psychoanalytical, with the emergence of memories or ‘movies’ from one’s life, where scenes parade by at a dizzying speed; then, a phase of abstract visions: lines and dots, curves, fields of flowers, strange geometrics that show the tendency of the phosphene to morph into iridescent points of light, brilliant lines of energy. Sometimes, between one stage and another, a certain physical discomfort is felt, a pain that is transformed, if one is able to overcome it, into ecstasy. Ecstasy, in this third phase, can manifest itself as a vision of the aura of other people, an extreme intensity of light, telepathic phenomena, sensations of astral travel and out-of-body experiences, as varied as they are ineffable. Another phase, considered superior, would include visions of saints, gods and the diverse supreme divinities that make up the pantheon of Santo Daime. This is why it is referred to as experiencing the sacred. It should be noted, however, that these sacred figures appear to be made up of points and lines of light, resulting in a luminosity, as shown in the visionary paintings of the ayahuasca worshiper Pablo Amaringo, from Iquitos, where the rituals of ayahuasca or yagé – another name for this viscous potion – are led by local healers. Returning to the sacred visons, they would be considered more an end destination than a starting point. In short, the experience of Santo Daime condenses and unites all manner of transcendental states; even the classic differentiation between religions of possession and shamanic journeys are questioned or diluted in the richness and variety of experimentation. Daime is ascetic. Sexuality is seen as an impediment to ascension to the astral plane,67 chastity – as Mircea Eliade observed68 – conceived

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of as an ‘economy of spiritual forces’ aimed at ‘conserving sacred energy’. This does not however impede some polyamorous agreements from taking place. A certain tension between religious asceticism and the Dionysian ecstatic experience with ayahuasca is resolved in a kind of ‘conflictual harmony’, as Maffesoli would put it. It is basically a communitarian religion, where the collective nature of the ingestion of ayahuasca is of the highest importance. It nourishes the underlying sociality. This concrete form of communism is perhaps less apparent in the urban centres; however, Daime calls for the renewal of an underground utopia, like the return to nature popular in the 1960s and ’70s. Additionally, the expansion of the worship of ayahuasca to certain sectors of the former political, artistic and cultural ‘vanguards’ could be an indication of a broader process of transformation of the classic search for ecstasy through sex and de-ritualized drug use, direct access to the experience of the sacred through corporal trance, echoing certain psychedelic slogans. There is also a sociopolitical dimension, since the religion advocates a communitarian model of daily life, overcoming private property; in this way, the ‘liberating’ nature is not restricted to the mystical level, but aims to penetrate the material plane as well. The communitarian aspect can be seen at its best in the community of Céu (Sky) de Mapiá, hidden in the jungle, beside a tributary of the Purus River, accessible only by a two-day boat trip, in a veritable wilderness ascesis. It is interesting to see how people of diverse backgrounds and social class live together, working hard, in a climate of permanent assembly that recalls the tentative communes of the 1970s, with frequent ayahuasca ceremonies dissolving tensions and carrying them to other planes through chanting, dancing and collectively experiencing visionary and sensorial alteration that strengthens the ‘fusional order’ (Maffesoli). It would seem that these Amazonian farmers – subverting the habitual relation of domination as they guide and convert their brothers and sisters from the city – are trying to invent another meaning of life.

The Argentine Falklands

All Power to Lady Di

It is at least ironic to witness how the military occupation of the Falkland Islands – martial law imposed on the unlucky Kelpers – has permitted a fascist and bloody dictatorship like Argentina’s to become decorated with the threadbare braids of anti-imperialism. But this irony becomes cruel when we see how, in the name of an abstract territoriality, which could in no way benefit the punished masses of Argentina (or at least the majority of them), the nationalist orgy clamours for death. It’s almost logical that a state as paranoid as Argentina would invent a war: the perfect excuse for the xenophobic delirium that is considered a step forward, in the terminology of the far right coined by the magazine Cabildo, which has been warning of war for a long time now. It’s a step forward that ignores the government’s massacres and raids, and, through a sacrificial ritual, further strengthens the power of the state. This is nothing new. But the general populace’s lust for war – supreme sport of masculine societies – is not as easy to understand; it seems to This is the first of the essays in which Perlongher writes sarcastically about the Falklands War. It was published as ‘Todo el poder a Lady Di. Miltarismo y anticolonialismo en la cuestión de las Malvinas’, in the feminist journal Persona no. 12, 1982. Perlongher wrote other texts for this small journal, which was published sporadically in the early 1970s and 1980s, sometimes under the pseudonym ‘Víctor Bosch’, as he first signed this essay.

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prove the hypothesis of a desire for repression. ‘The masses wanted fascism’, said Reich, whose libidinous enclaves, swept along by military fervour, were propelled by the force that drives any group of young men to form an angry mob. In the plane of political rhetoric it is quite revealing that the multiparty opposition – which includes communists, montoneros and Trotskyites (in particular the PST – Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores [Socialist Workers Party]) – have set the scene for this fatal pantomime, calling not for desertion, but to further this war, lauded as anti-imperialist but which doesn’t consider the interests of the affected populations, only the expansionist zeal of the states involved. The left’s claudication in the face of the dictatorship’s patriotic delirium is a constant: they let themselves get caught up – like the characters of Alejo Carpentier in El siglo de las luces – by the enthusiasm of the masses, without caring that this results in a legitimization of the regime – like the World Cup of 1978. They allow themselves to be pulled into internal governmental battles on orders from the all-powerful Catholic Church: at a demonstration in November of last year, staunch Marxists were seen climbing the steps of the shrine to San Cayetano, patron saint of the unemployed, on their knees beside a military minister. In the case of the false Falklands conflict, the excuse brandished to justify the claudication before the fascist patriotism of the Military Junta is inspired, vaguely, in Lenin’s concept of imperialism, according to which, in any conflict between one backward country and one advanced country, the former should be defended – as if a poor master were less despotic than a rich one. Among the Marxists, Rosa Luxemburg took a different stance – refusing to support the independence of Poland if it meant allying with the nationalist Polish bourgeoisie, against which, in 1920, Trotsky would launch the Red Army (Russian), this time in the name of socialism. Marx himself – with a no less statist view – would defend the US occupation of Mexico, believing they would impose a more modern version of capitalism. With these references – aimed at the historicity of the concept of imperialism – only a regime like that of Argentina, which is more a state dictatorship than a class dictatorship, with the military apparatus above all classes, could change alliances so abruptly: to switch from the American side to the Russian. Faced with immanent collapse, the dictatorship saw no other alternative besides war – and



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it only refrained from attacking Chile out of fear of the equally paranoid nature of this neighbouring dictatorship. The change in alliance could in theory lead to changes in the powers that uphold the state – but, unless we see another of the uprisings that periodically shake the ungovernable Argentina, it will almost surely strengthen it. Underlying this, we may discern a gradual process: the USSR, which currently possesses 40 per cent of Argentina’s exterior commerce and builds ports and dams (like an Aswan of Latin America) is slowly replacing Britain as the dominant economic power – our active dependence on Europe later replaced by indifference to Yankee looting. This might explain the elation felt by the left, especially the Communist Party, which for years has been clamouring for a civil–military coalition government – which they see as a step towards converting Argentina into the Ukraine of the Atlantic. To say that the mobilization in favour of war serves to promote an anti-dictatorship message – inconceivable, given the ruin of the country – is at the very least hypocritical: since these messages, despite such inconstant spokespersons, were heard much more clearly before the war. The government, unanimously applauded as anti-colonialist, has just banned all films with a pacifist message and all antiwar criticism, claiming it could demoralize the soldiers. The ultra-bureaucratic and semi-clandestine CGT [General Confederation of Labour] has donated one day of salary, already meagre, to the troops. And even the massacred left, delirious with patriotic euphoria, has to support these measures as well as other more radical ones. The supposed popular vanguards reveal their true crimes as servants of the state. Faced with so much absurdity, the most elegant exit is through humour: if Borges recommended giving the islands to Bolivia to restore the nation’s stolen sea access, we might as well proclaim All power to Lady Di or The Vatican to the Falklands in order to expose the ridiculousness of power legitimized by a chorus of suicides. As some sane person proposed, before fighting the British occupation of the Falklands, we should first conceive of the de-occupation of Argentina by the self-named Argentine Army. The mere fact that handsome men, in the flower of youth, should be sacrificed (or even submitted to the torture of military discipline) in the name of some sickly little islands, is reason enough to denounce this sad farce, played out through the marriage of young men and death.

Island Illusions

We were far from land. And in a jam. The penitence of this distance (perhaps, impenitent) deafening us to the glacial howls, we are melted by its warmth, reduced to the (sub)literary. The clarity of the deepest folds, the edges of the fjords (and here Lamborghini’s hand is evident: ‘The drawing was better’) infiltrated the imagination of the recruits. Loathsome ides. The school superintendent, wrapped in her nutria or seal skin coats, getting out of the car, to scrutinize the gleam (echoes of the hymn to Sarmiento: ‘Childhood your illusion and your contentment …’) of a pimply, juvenile patriotism (‘And in your heart, the youth of love a temple …’). The school superintendent’s fur coat would’ve come in handy to the recruits (sedentary in a desert they could not desert). Instead, they were cloaked only in dirges – copied down in perfect handwriting (some half-written, others finished). We argue, we come to blows, over the possession of some desert islands (which it appears cannot be deserted). The seer awakes in the desert: sleepy-eyed, delirious: ‘The war – we imagine – will push Published in the journal Sitio no. 3, December 1983. The text is a kind of letter, dated in January, sent to the editorial group of the journal regarding the previously published number of the journal. In the same number as this essay, both editors of the journal responded; Jorge Jinkis responded with ‘A tibia musa, de un vate desencantado’ and Ramón Alcalde with ‘Illusiones de isleño’. Sitio was published from 1982 to 1984.



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us towards new social relationships (at times, we imagine them triumphant and inaugural).’ The identity of this ‘we’ – since it is not the Borgean ‘we’ – is clear: it is the men who signed the Call to Question: Alcalde, Grisafi, Grüner, Gusmán, Jinkis, Savino. The Call to Question rises, fleetingly, to the didactic level, as it declares that the Argentine state – ‘a neutral spectator’ – has not known, in this century, any wars. They must be referring, we assume, to ‘clean’ wars (waged, according to the laws of martial arts, between sovereign states). Sovereign, we laugh. But there’s no reason to suppose that the mud of the Ganso Verde [Goose Green] trenches should stain more than the muddy delta of Victoria, or Tigre. Only in the former, the panther of war roars more stridently, without any apparent clandestineness. However, what this rhetoric hides is – and worse still, already was – evident. The illusion (‘the illusion it offers us’) becomes deception – and ‘objective’. We’ve Been Deceived! The Prophets – wondering what role (…) ‘we might play’ in these ‘new relationships’ – were confronted by the ‘cold north wind’ of defeat – the ‘essential loneliness’ of the cliffs. That has perhaps saved them from the dubious task, dressed as braided geishas, of performing at the encampments – ‘Now, at war, we’re faced with a question that literature will have to mull over.’ Mulling (or turning) over, however, will not save anyone. But – we should recognize – our war didn’t take long to become Our – capitalizing the irony – destiny. Never as transparent as when it alludes to ‘modern democracy, strong, efficient, and organized in the short term’ which ‘we all (!) proposed in 1976’. Look how well that turned out. So the prophets take off, in a small boat, set adrift (‘effeminate gentlemen’, Quiroga would say). It doesn’t really matter that Rossler may try to cause a commotion (protesting, in passing, our Brazilian passion for musk), nor that Professor Viamonte won’t clarify in which funeral homes, or even in which coffins, lie the victims of the delicious conjugation – the terrifying nerve of those who set the scene, refereeing the unfair battle between the wrong David and Goliath, a petty compromise. Halfway between Florida and Boedo, we find ourselves, not in Libertad, but in Cochabamba. It’s all too familiar, too close. And since we mentioned conjugation, let’s focus, just for fun, on the idea of the libidinousness of military relationships (should they be separated?) and on delicious titbits from Crowd Psychology. We waver on this point: since our distance

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has impeded us from reading, more than at a glance, ‘Juan López y John Ward’. Our criticism will not be, therefore, literary. But we may sum up the message thus: OK, gee whiz, there have always been wars, but not always in (my) country. Since resorting to war (the war machine?) doesn’t hide the clumsiness of the territorialities invoked to untie them (war of machines?). Sovereign, (again) the state carves the line of some phantasmal fjords. Are we being too repetitive? So much repetition is what it’s all about: repetitive clattering. The urgent summons moves us from reclusion to recruitment, requires the syllogism of a tortuous declaration. ‘The blame falls not on the Commander, but on the Queen of England’, says the learned bard of the elevated gaucho – tied to the stake. (With the same fragility, Puerto Rivero could come to be called Puerto Argentino, in honour of silver, in homage to the escaped slave, very symbolic and very imaginary.) ‘Bitter the mate that was washed in the vate.’ An allusion to yerba mate, the flavour of which – we mustn’t forget – fades. They see the metaphor to the end – accidental – of the land: ‘Prior to commencing friendly relations (López & Ward), they’d first had to agree on the possession of this geographical accident’ (a cape, a strait, a peninsula …). Is this a problem for the judges, the poets, the soldiers, the lovers, the injured parties? ‘Hand that writes traces a line’, said the aquatic Alfonsina Storni (the gilded vowels!). Writing, to safeguard History, must submerse itself in a blinding Geography. (‘No checker rag could replace it’) of a learned Geopolitics. Designed around a sedentary desert, which cannot be deserted. Can it be done? Apparently, it’s not a problem for the signers of this collective ‘Call to Question’. A ‘Call to Question’, wrote Jinkis (Sitio no. 1): ‘The intellectual who has been ripped from his origin, who has “betrayed” it, still belongs nowhere else.’ And then he warns: ‘This uprooting will find some solace in recognition’ … Maybe a lighthouse? Has the desolate war changed our location? Has it brought us closer to some islands? Anchored in ‘territorial waters’? Our exalted springtime Muse – ‘South Americanist, anti-colonialist, nationalist’ – is now left limping over the glaciers. There’s no need to beat ourselves up over it: to right ourselves, we still conserve some ‘rights’. To conclude, let us remember the innocent verse of Alfonsina:



Island Illusions At the bottom of the sea is a house made of glass, at the edge of a coral-lined street.1

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A notice from the defunct Gay Liberation Army of the Falklands (in exile), carefully censured by the press, said textually: ‘We recommended the eight (see Kinsey report) Falkland fags turn themselves over to any soldier.’ If we believe Kinsey’s statistics and estimate that the approximately 15,000 soldiers stationed on those cold desolate islands required coitus at least once weekly, the unfortunate Kelper women would’ve been dealing with an average of 250 soldiers per day, supposing that the military machismo would’ve kept the boys from satisfying their needs amongst themselves and discarding the possibility of sheep, since such perversions fall outside the topic of this debate. From there, any self-respecting gay movement would have declared immediate solidarity with the Falkland fags – still better than the left’s alignment with the Argentine dictatorship – not so much because they wouldn’t have been able to bear it on their own – since the shipments of Russian Vaseline unctuously distributed amongst the soldiers would make any dilation a pleasant one – but Published in the anarchist magazine Utopía no. 3, 1985. The text was read on 25 June 1982 before the Journalists Union of São Paulo, in a conference on ‘Politics and Desire’ organized by São Paulo gay rights groups. Despite the fact that the issue of identity is repeated throughout the essay, the allusions and analogies to the Falklands War – in addition to the date it was written – led us to include it in this section.



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because the war had to end one day, and then no one would be able to save them from that vice of the masses. But the young men launched across the ocean (the English expedition was a true voyage, a ‘cruise’ as one commander bragged) to lie down in the bloody mud of the trenches, surely aren’t so naive when it comes to their desires. Freud himself pointed out the homosexual nature of the libido (of love) common within all-male institutions such as the Military and the Church (we’ll talk more about the papists later), where perverse passions bloom (for example among the Nazi SA Stormtroopers). We have to wonder what drives them to seek the shelter of masculine comradery in dressing rooms and on football pitches, always devolving into violence (football or war) – on these cold little islands. A desire for death could be posed as a hypothesis – coincidentally, the same thing is said of fags who cruise the periphery – although the differences are clear: one will die for his country, the other for his arse. While we’re on the subject, the recent murders of prostitutes in Brazil show us how differently society perceives the murder of a prostitute and the death of a warrior – a hero. A certain ritual specific to the ‘politicized’ petite bourgeoisie distinguishes ostensibly between the heroism of a person who is arrested for ‘political reasons’ and the shameful reprobation of the person detained because of drugs or vice. Perhaps the state represses these ‘alternative groups’ not because of their discourse, but because of their practice. Now the Pope enters the scene, her starched skirts sullied with blood and mud as she bends down to kiss the boots of the soldiers, her petticoats brushing the dust. If one asks: for what reason was her Ineffable Holiness sent from Krakow? – a kind of sacred Barbarella, a professional pilgrim, extreme sports version of the papist who breaks the porcelain doll image of his predecessors (up to a hundred years ago Vatican prisoners, freed by Mussolini (!) in 1929). The answer: she was sent to restore some order. A broken ring? The curious image of the dictator of the day kissing the ring of the goddess – is that not suggestive enough? Whatever the case, she still handed out gold rings in the slums, taking them off in an elegant motion, and burying, with her silence, the disappeared. But maybe even worse than the macabre images of war – teenage boys returning home with their feet between their teeth, in a Lamborghinian manner – is that humongous complicity between the population – of the ‘nation’ – and the gangsters who would

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send them to their death. Even Argentine exiles in São Paulo rushed to sign up as volunteers: one came to tell me that, even though the war was insane, he supported it as a matter of preserving national identity. And here we come, all of a sudden, to the issue of identity. The now-extinct Argentine FLH1 published, in the second to last issue of its journal Somos (before the final police raid), an editorial entitled ‘Gays Have No Homeland’. It centred around the notion that the discourses of those in power were directed, at their most inclusive, to the ‘men and women of the nation’, but never to the ‘gays of the nation’. But we have to ask to what extent this appeal would even be desirable – or what that desire signifies. Since if what is desired is some acknowledgement from this power, perhaps what must be formed is a homogeneous block, recognizable as such with clearly defined borders. From there the anger of a certain gay activist when I confused – unconsciously? – the slogan No PT os gays tem vez2 (chanted at a public demonstration) with another: No PT 3 as bichas tem vez.4 We’d have to see how these semantic slips – homosexual, gay, fag, queer, macho, taxi-boy, trannie … – are organized in a discourse that aspires to affirm its affirmation, or, put another way, to affirm that affirmation. I once attended a meeting of this group, and everyone was speaking ill of the michés, and when I asked, innocently, if gigolos weren’t gay too, a firestorm of accusations was unleashed: because if the dyad miché/marica is taken as an imitation of the model male/female, it forms an intermediate space (neither miché nor marica: just gay) that is equidistant from each extreme and is consummated through the relationship of equals, gay–gay. This is something that’s happening now (the gay– gay couple) and I think it’s wonderful: but if this amorous accident is to be elevated to the plane of the ideal, as a model to be followed, wouldn’t we be configuring a kind of reincarnation of the Third Sex theory that caused so much commotion in pre-Nazi Germany? With one difference: Hirschfeld and his accomplices thought that the gay man was a woman in a man’s body, and they photographed them alternately dressed in men’s and women’s clothes. In this same city where I was treated as pro-fag and pro-macho, I one day created a small scandal when I rushed across a crowded street; it must have been very funny, because some women started to shout: ‘nãi é homem nem mulher’. This ambiguity of being ‘neither woman nor man’, or being both ‘man and woman’ is what is at risk of being stamped out in the construction of the gay identity. That Argentine exile who spoke of national identity, proclaiming



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Viva la Patria, is perhaps not so far off, in terms of attitude, from the person vindicating gay identity by proclaiming Viva la homosexualidad. But this ignores the nomadism inherent to homosexual desire – which can appear anywhere – and cedes its monopoly to a new character: the gay man. (In a recent leaflet published by Ruth Escobar5 – through a lapse in judgement – she says: ‘blacks should live their blackness, women their femininity, gays their desire’ – reserving for this last group a monopoly on desire). I don’t really know what this question of identity identifies. When I think of identification, what comes to mind is fingerprinting at the police station, national ID cards, paranoid things. Each one of us has our little identities, which permit us to interact with other identities, but gay identity still isn’t common currency – although it’s on track to becoming so. It could be said that gay identity is a repressed identity, but perhaps the inherent falsehoods of the marica/woman, macho/man variety actually conceal a kind of refusal, since anyone knows (even she herself) that the marica is not a woman, and many maricas know just how womanly the most macho of men can be. And acknowledging that the process of ‘identification’ files down the contours of the most aggressively feminist ‘scandalous maricas’, it’s worth asking to what extent the assumption of identity doesn’t sometimes imply the domestication – through normalization, adaptation to a model of a certain transgressive banality. But I prefer to leave the issue as a problem, as a question. Things get serious with the pretension that same-sex love is revolutionary with respect to heterosexual love. And here we may circle back to the issue of war we’ve already forgotten about. Military discourse and activist discourse tend to share the exaltation of the heroic figure. ‘The martyrology of the marica is still unwritten’, Mario Mieli said ironically. Saint and marica, marica and martyr: discourses in which we always tend to appear as victims, hiding, for the sake of the image we want to project, our desire for transgression, escapism, marginalization. This is not to downplay gay persecution: just the opposite, the state’s moralizing politics – the campaigns for morality, sponsored sometimes jointly by the left and right, with the papal blessing – are our main source of ‘concrete’ concern (when the judicial apparatus enters the scene), more pressing than any illusory preoccupation over identity. On the cellular level they are all grouped together: maricas, michés, gays, queers, taxi-boys, potheads, junkies, drunks, blacks, fags,

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trannies, prostitutes and pedestrians in general; sometimes I wonder why so much effort is given to differentiating separate identities when the junkie sleeps with the drunk, the fag smokes with the pothead, and the prostitute propositions the pedestrian, et cetera. A way for maricas to entertain themselves, you could say. Maybe. We could also wonder about the solemn tone of some liberationist discourses, vestiges of the leftist discourse, so different from our everyday baroque affectedness. Maybe this logic leads to the island desires alluded to in the title: if the soldier sacrifices himself in the name of national identity, in the name of state territoriality, stranded on some ghastly islands, could ‘gay identity’ imagine other islands, other similar territories, shouting its battle cry, ‘viva la homosexualidad’, followed by a rousing speech?

Eva Perón

Evita Lives

1 I met Evita in a cheap motel so many years ago now! I was living with – well not living with – but I was staying with a black sailor who picked me up cruising the port. That night, I remember, it was summer, maybe February, it was very hot. I’d been at the club, working the register till three in the morning. But that night I’d had a fight with Lelé, ay Lelé, that jealous little fag who always tried to take my men. We were pulling at each other’s hair extensions behind the bar and just then the owner shows up: ‘Three days’ suspension, for rowdiness.’ What do I care, I rushed back to my room, opened ‘Evita Lives’ is probably considered the most evil story in the history of Argentine literature. Blasphemy, audacity and an acute understanding of the theme converge in this text, which the author dated 1975. It was first published in English, translated by E. A. Lacey and included in My Deep Dark Pain Is Love, edited by Winston Leyland, Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, 1983). It was then published in Sweden as ‘Evita vive’, in Salta mortal nos. 8–9, Jarfalla, May 1985; and finally in Cerdos y Peces no. 11, April 1987, and then in El Porteño no. 88, April 1989. The publication of this story in Buenos Aires caused public outrage, which the journal addressed in an editorial signed by the Editorial Committee of the journal El Porteño (‘Un mes movido’ [A busy month]) in its May issue, along with a response (‘Evita botarate los dislates’) by Raúl Barreiros, Director of the Buenos Aires Public Radio.

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the door … and there she was, with the black guy. Obviously, I was pissed at first, I was still geared up from the fight and I almost threw myself at her without even looking, but the black guy – such a sweetheart – gave me a sensual stare and said something like: ‘Come on over, there’s enough of me to go around.’ And he wasn’t lying; with him, I was the one who always gave up, but at first, I don’t know, out of jealousy, being home, I said to him: ‘Okay, fine, but who is that?’ The black guy bit his lip because he could tell I was pissed, and back then, when I got pissed it was terrible – not so much any more, I’m, I don’t know, more harmonious. But back then I was what you’d call a bad fag, someone to be scared of. She was the one who answered, looking me in the eyes (until that moment she’d had her head between my sailor’s legs, and of course, as she was in the shadow, I hadn’t seen her very well): ‘What? You don’t recognize me? It’s me, Evita.’ ‘Evita?’ I said, I couldn’t believe it. ‘Evita, is that you?’ And I turned on the light to see her face. It was her all right, unmistakable with that bright, bright skin, and the cancer stains underneath – which really didn’t look that bad. I was speechless, but of course, I didn’t want to seem rude, getting angry over an unexpected guest. ‘Evita, darling, would you like a tipple of Cointreau?’ (because I knew that she loved classy drinks). ‘Don’t trouble yourself, dear, we have other business to attend to at the moment, don’t you think?’ ‘Ay, no, wait’, I told her; ‘tell me how you two met, at least.’ ‘We go way back, sweetie, way back, almost since Africa’ (later Jimmy told me that they’d met an hour before, but those details don’t matter here. She was so beautiful!) ‘Want me to tell you about it?’ I was eager to hear, the bed could wait: ‘Oh, yes, please Evita, would you like a cigarette?’ but I never got to hear the rest of the lie (or maybe Jimmy was the one who lied, I’ll never know) because then Jimmy got fed up with all the chit chat and said: ‘All right, enough’, he took her head – her bun all tousled – and he put it between his legs. I honestly don’t know if I paid more attention to her or to him, I’m such a whore, but I’m not going to talk about him now, but that night Jimmy was so horny he made me squeal like a piggy, sucking me off. Then the next day she stayed for breakfast and when Jimmy went out to get pastries, she told me that she was very happy, and asked if I didn’t want to go with her up to heaven, which was full of black guys and blond guys and all kinds of guys. I didn’t really believe her, because if that were true why would she be here looking for guys on Reconquista Street, sounds fishy … but I didn’t say anything, what



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for; I said no, that I was fine for now with Jimmy (today I’d say ‘riding it out’ but back then we didn’t use that expression), but that she should call and check back later because you never know with sailors. With generals either, I remember her saying, kind of sad. Then we ate and she left. As a souvenir she left me a handkerchief, which I kept for years: it was embroidered with golden thread, but eventually someone, I never knew who, took it (so, so many have come though my room). The little handkerchief said Evita and it had a picture of a ship. The most vivid memory? Well, her, she had long nails painted bright green – which at that time was a very strange colour for nails – and she cut them, she cut them so that the sailor’s gigantic piece of meat could go in deeper and deeper, and from time to time she’d bite his nipples and she liked it, that’s what she liked the most.

2 We were in the room at the pension and the bloke who was bringing the gear that day showed up with a woman around thirty-eight years old, blonde, who looked like she’d been around the block, caked in makeup, hair in a bun … Her face was familiar and I guess the others thought so too, but I was pretty high, I was with Jaime who was shooting up and I was holding the rubber, I asked him quietly if he knew who it was and he said something like: ‘Shut up, idiot, of course I do.’ His eyes rolled back, he seemed indifferent as he said it. We all sat on the floor and the lady started passing around joints and more joints, the bloke with the gear groped at her tits and she pulled back like a viper. Then she wanted to shoot up in her neck, the two of them wriggling around on the floor and the rest of us watching. Jaime gave me a long kiss, very sweet, that was one thing he was good for, and the two kids went pale seeing us fags and that old lady and they took off out of there. But the blues were at the door and within five minutes the whole station was there, chau, we surrender, luckily there were no minors around, Jaime had turned eighteen the week before, but still, we’d passed around Evita’s lipstick and we were all painted up like Alice Cooper. The blues stormed in, the sergeant first with the officers behind him, the bloke who had the bag full of pot said, ‘Just a moment, Serge’, but the cop pushed him hard, then she, the only woman, straightened the straps of her dress and stood up:

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‘What an animal, how could you think of arresting Evita?’ The cop went pale, the two officers behind him pulled out their guns, but the sergeant gave them the signal to go back to the door and they followed orders. ‘No, I want everyone to hear – the bitch said – now you want to lock me up, but twenty-two years ago, no, twenty-three years ago, I brought a bike to your house for your son, and you were just a poor idiot rookie cop, and if you don’t want to believe me, if you want to pretend you don’t remember, I have proof.’ (Chau, what a trip, she ripped his shirt at the shoulder and uncovered a red wart, fat as a strawberry and she started sucking on it, the serge started wiggling around like a whore, and the other two were at the door looking back and laughing at first but then they started to get scared because they realized it was true, that the chick was Evita.) I took the opportunity to suck Jaime off in front of the two cops who didn’t know what to do, where to go: finally, the guys with the van joined the circus and started shouting down the hall: ‘Hey, mates, they’re trying to arrest Evita.’ The people from the other rooms crowded around the door peering in to get a look at her and an old lady started screeching: ‘It’s Evita, Evita come down from heaven.’ In the end the cops just took off, they let the two kids go, acting all posh, and she strolled out very calmly, talking to everyone who’d been in the hall and were now in the doorway. ‘My greasy ones, my little greasy ones, Evita watches over everything, Evita will come back for this neighbourhood and for all neighbourhoods so that they won’t do anything to her dear shirtless ones.’ Chau, even the old dudes were blubbering, some wanted to hug her, but she said: ‘I have to go now, I have to return to heaven.’ We sat there burning a little while longer and then we were about to go, when some of the girls told us to come into their room to tell them about her – the same chicks who an hour before had started a war with us you wouldn’t believe. Jaime and I made up a whole story: she said she wanted to get high because she was very unhappy, and chau, the comedown, it’s unbearable. Of course, no one understood what we were saying, but since we weren’t campaigning, just trying to secure a peaceful place to trip, we didn’t care. We were out of our heads and the old ladies were all sobbing, we asked them to cut it out, they were killing our buzz, and anyway, Evita was going to come back: she’d gone to make a pickup and she’d be right back, she wanted to pass out a bag of marihuana to each poor person so that they’d all be super high and no one would ever come down, man, not for a second.



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3 If I told you where I first saw her I’d be lying. She must not have made much of an impression at first, just another chick among so many other chicks that passed through the apartment on Viamonte, friends of the little fag who kept a bunch of girls there, half naked, so the blokes would get hard quick. The thing is that all of them knew where they could find us, in the bar at Independencia and Entre Ríos. The little fag Alex sent old men and women over to us every chance he got and we’d make a few bucks, and then we did him for free and we didn’t steal his radio or his clothes. I remember her because of how she rode up, in a black Carabela driven by a little blond fag, whom I’d fucked once in the Rosemarie. We were standing with some of the girls looking pretty next to the flower stall, when he pulled me aside and told me: ‘I have a chick for you, she’s in the car.’ It was going to be just me. I got in. ‘My name’s Evita, what’s yours?’ ‘Chiche’, I answered. ‘Are you sure you’re a trannie, gorgeous. Evita what?’ ‘Eva Duarte’, she answered, ‘and please don’t be insolent or I’ll have to ask you to get down.’ ‘Get down? Why don’t you get down on me?’ I whispered in her ear as she rubbed my bulge. ‘Let me touch your pussy, to see if it’s real.’ You should’ve seen how excited she got when I put my fingers in her panties! So we went back to her hotel; the little fag driver wanted to watch while I showered and she lay down on the bed. Also, with the piece of meat I have, they line up just to get a look. She was a nasty whore, she sucked me off like a goddess. I gave her three good rounds, leaving her spent, and saved the fourth for the fag, who’d earned it. The chick was all woman. Her voice was gravelly, sensual, like a radio announcer. She asked me to come back anytime, if I needed anything. I told her no, thank you. The room smelled of death and I didn’t it like at all. When she wasn’t looking I opened one of her cases and stole a necklace. I think that fag driver Francis noticed but he didn’t say anything. When I’d finished fucking him he said to me, his mouth dripping with come: ‘All the men in the country would envy you, baby; you just fucked Eva.’ Not two days had gone by when I got home to find the lady crying in the kitchen, surrounded by two police officers. ‘Shameless’, she shouted at me. ‘How could you steal from Evita?’

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Her jewels were still on the table. I hadn’t been able to pawn them, because, according to Sosa, they were too valuable for him to buy and he didn’t want to rip me off. The cops didn’t ask a single question: they gave me a brutal beating and warned that if I said anything about the necklace they’d really give it to me. I never went back to that corner or that pimp’s apartment. That’s why all the names I’ve given here are false.

The Corpse

Why didn’t I go down the hall? What did I have to do that night at 20:25, the time she was brought in, by Casanova which way does the bun twist Why him? inside sockets of viscous eyes thin skin and those spots on her face which appeared when she, oh because of a pin left by her hairdresser began to rot, oh thanks to a hairpin in the memory of her people            And if she begins to fade, let’s say to come undone what shall I say about the hallway? Why didn’t I wander? among little fawns with eyes sticky and longing huddled beneath metal, grim sickly-sweet with Peronism This poem was published in Austria-Hungría (Buenos Aires, Editorial Tierra Baldía, 1980), Perlongher’s first book.

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that tunnel? And what of her cannon and the two million people behind her with slow steps when at 20:25 the radios stop me refusing to go down the hall reticent perhaps? as was warranted? For him, for his agitated gestures of misery between his body and the reclining body of Eva, later stolen deposited in Punta del Este or Italy or in the heart of the river And the story of the twenty-five coffins Come on, don’t joke about her, about her death let me by, move, don’t you see she’s already dead! And what was at the end of that hall if not her smell of decomposing orchids of shrouds the scratches on the ambassador’s skin And if we don’t take her death so hard, I wonder? if we don’t giggle in the lines down the hall and at the balls the waves where we ladies didn’t want to venture on that twenty-hour night of immortality where she entered down that hall that smelled of old flowers and shrieking perfumes of that desired sordidness we ladies following behind the cannon? among the crowd that surged from the mouths of the hallways with panicked voices And I asked if this was a protest or a funeral



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A funeral, they told me then I’ll go alone since I didn’t want to go down the hall to see her feet on the lit-up table, snuffed out Did I perhaps think of the manicure nails painted with Revlon? Or the eyes of the communist girls wet yes, but now tired of so much wasted time: they would’ve gone down the hall immediately and wouldn’t have loitered nearby fearing the gaze of a blind god An actress – they say – who left Los Toldos with a tango singer meets the general in an earthquake, and seduces him with her air of princess of the people down a long hallway already dead         And I out of fear of forgetting petty, a theft should I refuse to let myself follow her cannon through the plazas? to contaminate myself with the transparency of her body? to go down, let’s go, that hallway where she dies in her coffin? If he hadn’t told me that he was alone that an old friend irons his shirts and that he might need, now, some help out there, in Isidro where the lots are cheaper than life precarious lots, though, prone to flooding Near San Vicente (she couldn’t stand the journey to San Vicente she tried to escape the procession more than once and Pocho took her by the arm to stop her) That desire not to die is it true? instead of staying there in that hallway under its yellowish and foul-smelling lights in her waking pain

200

Eva Perón

there, where she lay, later stolen, stowed away in a sailor’s chest in the galleons of Turtle Bay (sunken) like in a game I don’t want to enter that shadowy convalescence, gloomy in the blackened ankles that her sister keeps in a glass jar – so as not to lose honour, there in that hallway the dubious kindness of that funeral

Macabre Gems

As phantasmagorical as the writing that documents her, the jewelladen figure of Eva Perón parades through the glittering pages of Evita, A militante no camarim. The camarim is the dressing room, the un-dressing room. To set the scene, Horacio cross-dresses as a ghost writer who actually existed: the Spanish journalist Penella da Silva, secret author of La razón de mi vida, official bestseller signed by ‘the Spiritual Chief of the Nation and Defender of the Poor’, required reading in the schools of the New Argentina (1946–55). Each of the book’s supposed preparatory interviews are mirrors in which the mythic lady is reflected. The designer Paco Jamandreu, affectionately referred to as ‘the fag’ by the deceased, introduces her with glimmers of ‘woman/fag’: ‘She and I have been marginal, and in our own way, we continue to be.’ This notion of marginality refers to the provincial Evita’s troubled acting career, until she meets the ascending Coronel Perón, in a still confusing incident – probably made up. Later, the interpretative and rhetorical effects of the Peronist spectacle create a melodrama worthy of a radio soap opera – ‘on-air theatre’ designed to ravage the weak hearts of the masses. When the activist epic of the old anarchist variety is added, this sentimental discourse becomes irresistible. But A commentary on the book by Horacio González, Evita, A militante no camarim, São Paulo, Brasiliense, Encanto Radical collection, 1983. It was published in Leia Livros no. 55, April 1983.

202

Eva Perón

it is not a pale pink sentimentalism: it is as stridently anti-oligarchic (high-sounding but hollow) as it was amoral, evidenced in the romance between the military man (accused of raping a high school student) and the actress (called ‘easy’). They challenged the gazes of the prudish local aristocracy, exuding the hedonistic aroma of the redistributive Peronist orgy. The gestures were exaggerated: ‘I’m fanatical, she proclaimed, as she handed out blankets.’ While probably false, Horacio’s text has the merit of projecting, on the ‘phantasmagorical’ plane, a variety of visions, without economizing forays into literature (and sub-literature), something usually absent from the sociological focus. An observation attributed to the Polish writer Gombrowicz is especially keen: ‘Both (Perón and Evita) enjoy violating officialism, that is, they act within the official establishment but they aim to embody a principle of anti-establishment.’ This tension, which creates the Leader’s dichotomy – order/disorder (revolutionary fervour, ‘semantic revolution’/political vocation) – traverses the history of Peronism. In this puzzle, Evita fits into the ‘left’ wing, buying weapons from the Prince of Holland to arm the proletariat militia. Meanwhile, to what point does the ‘phantasmagoria’ of the writing in reference, by its very volatility, exaggerate the illusive myth of the corpse-like rigidity upon which it rests? To put it another way: Peronism knew how to combine the festive exaltation of the masses with an unabashedly paternalistic authoritarianism; it effectively ‘organized’ the working class, but it did so by confining them to the cells of a state syndicalism. This double tension incessantly reinforced the political-military state apparatus, establishing mechanisms that posterior dictatorships were able to use to their advantage. The myth of Evita falls into this trap as it was brandished by ‘revolutionary’ sectors that hoped to take over the ominous Peronist bureaucratic apparatus. The charms of these tactics are as seductive as its results are macabre: at the end of this corridor lies a body (that is made up?). When, after a disappearance of almost two decades, Eva Perón was found in a cemetery in Milan, her embalmed body was intact: she was missing only her fingernail polish, even though the manicurist had carefully painted them with the best Revlon.

The Corpse of the Nation

1 Zombie Power, its buttons of harmaline, don’t make it easy to climb (ripping at) the folds or skirts of the saint, plastered, mummified or marred, eyes ripped out two at a time brows stitched, the tired myth, frustrated ritual because she doesn’t budge, from her spot on high her nose broken when she rises (is taken) from her coffin, scarlet zombie, Revlon stockings, kanekalon fringe, nails that the manicurist, with a film-like care, files, scratching at a corridor of barbed wire. Since they capture anyone who nears or glances in a mucus-like web all the power of the gaze or eye of god isn’t enough to cut, staunch the flow of the fetid potency, guts of bicycle handlebars, sackcloth cylinder, to the ‘interior of the country’ Adjacent to her soirée, convulsing, if afternoons The last poem in which Perlongher returned to the theme of Evita. It was published in Hule, Editorial Ultimo Reino, 1989, and is dated May of that year.

204

Eva Perón

on the rocks bathed or tinged (twanged) by the curls of foam, drowning disappear, unpresentable, made crooked by the nails or pegs of the coffin, which as they puncture her thigh lift her up limping reporting to the chief her scant cleavage of ontic apple or pear, in grainy Belgrade pitted grape whose hands (already dead) held the body as it transmigrated from Bajo to the sidewalk, from the pit to Bajo, from the transcendental Combat, a coup poudre, lunacy/lust dizzying, vertical line of incense and touches of grim sympathy, burned herbs in a crematorium, the ovens, shaking tremblings and castlings, not enough to sustain in the air the shadow of that woman without unlocking the gilding and plaster that were built up by their peronios, their subjects browned in La Perla (Ensenada) Punta Lara or Baldía, the ones who pulled at her eyes until the edges of her lids were slanted in grotesque commiseration or reverence, altars erected in clumsy ramshackle houses, with eyes squinting through clouds of dust (a coup l’air) cucumber of a crude zombie Thrashing at her lace of suburban bride Balmaceda Archie Moore fearful mule appeared armed with a rind for all that proletariat exasperation in lands of salami splendour Nostalgia for the First Foundation and generous servings of quince and cherry jam and silvery cellophane, the Goddess shall never die. Though we may scale Monte Athos with cough syrup though we may catch in the stands of fallen leaves a whiff of jewels though with acid we depilate her peach fuzz, in the disaster



The Corpse of the Nation

205

of her cancer or her scabbed calf in bowls of gilded nickel, with the blood of trolley conductors who don’t transport the centipede of her guts under a Rosarian flag in monsoon whirls, Intentionally ugly? Pomp and ceremony breathes life into the hollows of vanity like a bra strap turned to dust: coup n’ame1

2 Three days later the glass is broken accidentally by the crowd who form knots in the corridor, eroding the naturally polished mother of pearl, as it shuffles past the glass until it finally faints obeying the orders of the ALN janitors who thought it was fogging up and who opened the window to wipe it with a rag drunk with alcohol or olive vinegar. She sees us from where she hangs on high shouting the betrayal should not be minimized by those who grope her taking advantage of her deadness and a slight curl to her hair consequence of the air in the closed and almost cold atmosphere of the artificial boudoir since Ara had carefully sprayed with the gas of immobility her reclining body in that twenty-something blue eternity looking down from heaven imposingly snubbing the henchmen (later in the maggiano becoming-departure) vinegary Banlon on a letterhead from the Foundation and bokor2 black garbs shrieking like helixes of arms waving in the night of the hallways of the lines of balls of the women who cry in the night for the devious departure of her imperial death trying to impede them from airing out her pores but all their magic does not keep Evita from floating over the crowns of callas the heads of the workers leaned over the mirror cleaned by the criminal so as not to let the coughs of the poor into the artificial stagnation but I want them to leave me alone with her death and in the laboratory substitute her cancerous blood for a horchata of Amazonian orchids and sorcery added to the bewitchingness of her cheekbones although she may want to smile from on high where she can be seen lying in her case like a jewel of jade she can no longer do so due to the sulphides thanks to a noble European in free hours we will embroider and brocade a shroud to replace the one she

206

Eva Perón

has that leaves exposed – not free – her calves showing for further contortion of her subjects the trace or bite of the lack of tulle of dead tissue that the sister has kept out of macabre vice collecting flowerpots in the window of the glass case creating a mountain pass to Chile or perhaps to hide them under the peplums of newspaper on the shelf in the same way as the corpse now that it has become dangerous because she from on high pulls the strings of the puppet or the rubber that ties her to the false hysteria betrayed by her rictus in the impotence of her involuntary absence.

3 Aranda give me curls as delicate as a wave of pale snow the blushing curler wrapped up with a slip of paper the lining hidden with dye to erect the tome of the bun to a height tall enough to shoo the arrogant from my bed that they won’t say I lowered my quiff even in death make it worthy Aranda give me curls don’t let the fag touch me or let my head drag the floor like a saurian temple leaning (golden highlights) over the first guard protect and keep me from him because my boys and girls are sensitive that they should never know he has touched my almost rotten flesh with those fingers which have rummaged in panties at the Rosemarie or in the shadows of the Eclaire that they don’t launch his ring spinning down the popular passageways and above all that the net around my bun does not smell of the semen of the poor, that the tepid tulle be donned as a veil, pulled taut, these pupils that have seen parades of hearses and will see them now from the highest to the lowest where I play the zither of the masses Aranda give me curls and hide my hairpins beneath my locks of hair so that whomever finds them will see them dissolve in their fingers.

4 ‘a priceless gem from the Peronist shield of precious stones’ Pedro Ara No one but me did her hair. ‘When I die, take the red off my nails and leave them nude with clear polish.’



The Corpse of the Nation Armed with a manicure kit lady of the estate, sliver and mother of pearl wrap a rosary around her hands? ‘I’m not the one – I answered – to decide those details.’ Tie the wig to the braids substitute the shoulder fringe for hairs of mucus her lichen-like fuzz, her mucilaginous shimmer I was with her day and night to keep them from giving her lumpy curls that would be difficult to embalm or wrinkles on the pillow like tigers on the prowl I cut for her mother a long lock of Eva’s silky hair And that’s the way a hairdresser says goodbye.

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Miscellaneous

Acronyms

You trusted the FRP, along with the holdovers from the ARP, nostalgic for the PVP, the FPL, and, for good measure, the UP But you couldn’t forget the delicious meetings of MALENA – around that time the FRIP joined with Workers’ Word to form the PRT – Zionist secessionists later founded the PO A stopover at LIM – TAU led you to FA – and that Night of the Long Batons you chose EA – which later became EA(A) Indoctrinated by the agrarian guerrillas you took off to Formosa and on the way a young student contact from LVR got you enthusiastic about the PCCNRR (those were times in which a group’s revolucionariness was measured by the number of consonants in its acronym) so you joined the ARFYL; when it came time to vote, at the church, you turned to TERS, because its criticisms of the UAP programme were perfect! but after the breakup of the UPE – because of the OLAS scandal – you became part of EC – followed by Filo TAR – Which almost got you kicked out of MAVIET – you barely maintained a friendship with MAR – which, in a way, reminded you of the PSAV, before LDA, when you couldn’t have imagined that the already weakened PSA would eventually become PSP, PST, CSA Mock-poem on the history of the left wing in Argentina in the 1960s. It was written in 1978 and published in Utopía no. 4, 1985.

212 Miscellaneous

It was perhaps after reading material from the CyR – written by the ex-EGP – that you began to reevaluate the role of the MNRT, when even being associated with PEN meant you were suspected of sympathy for the SUD, and CGU No one could understand your defence of the MLLFL – a group as ridiculous as the UJ or the UPI (Only a few die-hard activists of the PO(T), who’d stolen, years prior, the slogans of the POBS) Which caused a rift with the CGTA You were so fanatical about the 62 – anticipating, in a way, your adhesion to the JAEN – that more than one person thought you were touched in the head the networks of the RF (in the context of something so sinister as joining the MID amidst the breakup of the UCRI) You made such fast friends with the youths at UES, and, at the same time, were so addicted to the FOEP that it wouldn’t have been surprising if you brought PSIN flyers to the LT meeting It was there, when because of a personal dispute with a sector of the MAP you had those unfortunate encounters with VC which made you many enemies among the labourers of the PT – whose support would’ve served you well when you confronted MARA – but they preferred JSA’s position on the issue of CAR over LIR’s, which was allied with LUCHE, ousting TUPAC (when the CEP and the CA were at their height) But with the fall of SITRAC, you turned to CENAP, openly hostile towards the PCR and the PRC – but this didn’t stop you from keeping an eye on the intrigues of the FRA nor from attacking, secretly, through an action of the CF, the extremist demands of the TC with respect to the FAL – and so loyal to the PB that instead of climbing happily onto the bandwagon of the FREJULI – along with the MNY and the PPC – you wanted to push the old crook out of the PCP of the UB of the FAR! – thus breaking your last ties to the MOR And, after the dissolution of the CPL, it became so difficult to maintain your intimate sympathy for the GOR, and more still, for the FR with the insane adventure of the PA allied with the 22

Acronyms

213

that you accepted those ominous talks with the bases of the EO in the same bar where your comrade from the PCML – who was making an incursion into the LC – broke up with you, in the middle of the FAS crisis. The author would like to thank the following organizations for their collaboration: Frente Revolucionario Peronista, Peronista [Peronist Revolutionary Front], Acción Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Action], Partido Vanguardia Popular [Popular Vanguard Party], Fuerzas Populares de Liberación [Popular Forces for Liberation], Unión Popular [Popular Union], Movimiento de Liberación Nacional [National Liberation Movement], Frente Revolucionario Indoamericano Popular [Popular Indo-American Revolutionary Front], Palabra Obrera [Workers Word], Política Obrera [Workers Politics], Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores [Revolutionary Labourers Party], Línea Independiente Mayoritaria [Majority Independence Line], Tendencia Antiimperialista Universitaria [University Anti-imperialist Trend], Estudiantes Antiimperialistas [Anti-imperialst Students], Estudiantes Antiimperialistas (Auténticos) [(Authentic) Anti-imperialist Students], Lista Violeta Reformista [Purple List Reformists], Partido Comunista Comité Nacional de Recuperación Revolucionaria [Communist Party National Committee for Revolutionary Recovery], Acción Reformista de Filosofía y Letras [College of Philosophy and Letters Reformist Action], Tendencia Estudiantil Revolucionaria Socialista [Students Revolutionary Socialist Movement], Unidad Antiimperialista Programática [Anti-imperialist Unity Programme], Unidad Programática Estudiantil [Students Unity Programme], Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad [Latin American Solidarity Organization], El Combatiente [The Combatant], Tendencia Antiimperialista Revolucionaria [Revolutioanry Anti-imperialist Movement], Movimiento Argentino de Solidaridad con Vietnam [Argentine Movement for Solidarity with Vietnam], Movimiento de Acción Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Action Movement], Partido Socialista Argentino de Vanguardia [Argentine Vanguard Socialist Party], Los de Abajo [The Ones from Below], Partido Socialista Argentino [Argentine Socialist Party], Partido Socialista Popular [Popular Socialist Party], Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores [Socialist Workers Party], Confederación Socialista Argentina [Argentine Socialist Confederation], Cristianismo y Revolución [Christianity and Revolution], Ejército Guerrillero del

214 Miscellaneous

Pueblo [The People’s Guerrilla Army], Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario Tacuara [Tacuara Revolutionary Nationalist Movement], Frente Estudiantil Nacional [National Students Front], Sindicato Universitario de Derecho [University Law Syndicate], Confederación General Universitaria [General University Confederation], Movimiento Línea Las Flores Luján [The Lujan Flowers Line Movement], Unión de Jubilados [Retirees Union], Unión de Propietarios de Inmuebles [Homeowners Union], Partido Obrero (Trotskista) [(Trotskyist) Labourers Party], Partido Obrero Basado en los Sindicatos [Union-Based Labourers Party], Confederación General del Trabajo de los Argentinos [General Confederation of Argentine Labour], 62 Organizaciones [62 Organizations], Juventudes Argentinas de Emancipación Nacional [Argentine Youth for National Emancipation], Rama Femenina del Partido Justicialista [Peronist Party Women’s Branch], Movimiento de Integración y Desarrollo [Movement for Integration and Development], Unión Cívica Radical Intransigente [Radical Intransigent Civic Union], Unión de Estudiantes Secundarios [High School Students Union], Frente Obrero Estudiantil Popular [Popular Student Workers Front], Partido Socialista de Izquierda Nacional [National Leftist Socialist Party], Liga Trotskista [The Trotsky League], Movimiento de Acción Programática [Programmed Action Movement], Vanguardia Comunista [Communist Vanguard], Partido del Trabajo [Labour Party], Movimiento Autónomo Radical de Avellaneda [Autonomous Radical Movement of Avellaneda], Juventud Socialista de Avanzada [Advanced Socialist Youth], Comandos de Acción Revolucionaria [Revolutionary Action Commandos], Línea Izquierdista Revolucionaria [Leftist Revolutionary Movement], Línea Universitaria Che Guevara [University Che Guevara Movement], Tendencia Universitaria Popular Antiimperialista Combatiente [University Popular Militant Anti-imperialist Trend], Comandos Estudiantiles Peronistas [Peronist Student Commandos], Carta Abierta [Open Letter], Sindicato de Trabajadores de Fiat Concord [Fiat Concord Workers Union], Partido Comunista Revolucionario [Revolutionary Communist Party], Partido Revolucionario Cristiano [Revolutionary Christian Party], Frente Revolucionario Antiacuerdista [Anit-peace Revolutionary Front], Cuerpo de Delegados de Filosofía y Letras [Philosophy and Letters Body of Delegates], Tendencia Comunista [Communist Movement], Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación [Armed Liberation Forces], Peronismo de Base [Peronist Base], Frente Justicialista de Liberación [Peronist

Acronyms

215

Liberation Front], Movimiento Nacional Yrigoyenista [National Yrigoyen Movement], Partido Popular Cristiano [Popular Christian Party], Comandos Populares de Liberación [Popular Commandos for Liberation], Grupo Obrero Revolucionario [Revolutionary Labourers Group], Fracción Roja [Red Division], Partido Auténtico [Authentic Party], Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo 22 de Agosto [August 22 People’s Revolutionary Army], El Obrero [The Labourer], Partido Comunista Marxista Leninista [Marxist Leninist Communist Party], Liga Comunista [Communist League], Frente Antiimperialista por el Socialismo [Anti-imperialist Front for Socialism], Partido Conservador Popular [Popular Conservative Party], Unidades Básicas [Basic Units], Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias [Revolutionary Armed Forces], Movimiento de Orientación Reformista [Reformist Orientation Movement].

Credit for Tancredo

He who makes a deposit into the account of the friendly candidate discovers, when it’s already too late, that the cash has flown and what is owed cannot be returned or such an extreme abuse even contested, they may only suck their thumb because it’s all said and done credit for Tancredo has been won. War is no more: all is peaceful. The cunning and deceitful gather with the loafer to pull the athlete from the reclining nation from the sacrifice from the teat – later the spectacle

One of Perlongher’s mock-poems written in a language that combines ‘portuñol’ with the gauchesca and baroque traditions, parodying the political situation in Brazil. It was published in Novo Leia year 7, no. 75, San Pablo, January 1985.



Credit for Tancredo he was injured not in vain because it’s all said and done Credit for Tancredo has been won. To the great conciliation they call the twisted armies; not all in life is earnings the master smiles with relish as he assumes the prestigious office cutting off an ear of the worker who agrees to get fucked, with satisfaction without a word of complaint they can fuck him without fear since he was asking for it Giving credit for Tancredo You must be very respectful if they kick you on the street, it’s better to turn the other cheek and not enter the battle, because the one who attacks you may be fulfilling their desire and it’s not to pull your leg or break your face, but the one who beats you is building an alliance that will fill his belly and fitting perfectly on his finger is the diamond ring you pawned Giving credit to Tancredo You asked for it! I told you so. They shook their cruel red tassels and since the gem was cracked the best thing to do was quickly give consent The workers of the mill milled round the wheel of the grinder that ruffles their chaste canine fur. Although the crimes are unpardonably old

217

218 Miscellaneous and they slip down the slides to which their descent condemns them: they have chosen to stop thinking and give it all to anyone who appears full lipped, lopsided head although exceptionally grinding the dressing room props luxurious slander, robbery, theft suspicious misplacement, gleeful thorn dripping or sterile, that pokes you in the centre of the eye where who saw the bills yoked to the pistols and the jewels. You said it yourself, it was destined that he’d breach our fences with the flutter of a Portuguese fan, wafting the air from the Escorial of Madrid. Vote the dead and no one on their hems will tread because they’ve been resurrected Giving credit for Tancredo. Ghosts, academic paradises, dull straw chairs: the batrachian of an idea, extreme hypocrisy, rows of slabs, gripping the worn alabaster of an indecisive sceptre, you sway as if you had it between your legs but it’s in your head, fixed, like the carousel at ‘The Union’ Union Bar, between brown tangoes of sour caramel like the sperm of a warrior, remote and untrue, of carrion of boats where the captain is lost and never again emerges pierced by his rusted fishhooks of gravestone. May it weigh heavy on the head of the conciliator, the quiver of his infantile little hands, crossed eyes the cuckoo invokes the bogeyman, the general in the skeleton made of baton. The error, while silvery, is attributed to the sickly-sweet evening, to the crystalline woman passed around in bowls, pools of inexperience where all force is lost and it appeared faintly at the edge of the mangrove, since the face flashing with crystals hid the wounds pearly, in the glimmer of suffering, fictitious, and we haven’t lost ourselves in the tangle



Credit for Tancredo because we started out with a disadvantage Giving credit to Tancredo. Like a carousel, like a slip of the tongue that reflects the winking nits on his delicate dick that becomes thin as a thread that drapes us in cobwebs of payments: The Debt Is Infinite! And the sin corrodes us with the devotion of a tangled mass and although we may apply mascara to the eyelashes we can’t keep the eye from seeing what it saw, what was promised but violated fleeting flight the pearly vault and that truth could not be omitted: the flight on a carousel of hypocrites, meows that discarded the howl, discerning the preparation of an armadillo that pulls up the pavement and turns it to vine, lily, shroud of lilies in the yellowing autumn. but you couldn’t care less because the remainder of the debt has been invested Giving credit to Tancredo. Lower your eyes jealous woman, let the kind gentleman kill you with the rosette on his breast after beating you senseless so that you may prepare for what is to come, and you may not sever his penis because he himself has sold it to a soldier for a few coins, a castrated, chaste executioner, successful, with his silver tip erected but it was the stench of feet that let him know he was stewed: because if they’d amputated it he couldn’t wear it like now like a sash, more than a doll, a mere box

219

220 Miscellaneous of illegal beatings, that ended up Pleasing us. And if to the ranks of the fervour I do not cede It’s to sit and count what we have earned Giving credit to Tancredo.

Lake Nahuel

For Nahuel Moreno Call to order! List of speakers! he put an end to the pirouettes, the chicanery doled out slogans and expulsions, rained down gilded pills the shore of an illusion a shout: Ipiranga! Alcorta! Pondering in one-eyed minutes the minutes of the resolution, in the revolt, rising up (Delacroix effect) in the shadows cushiony, or rustic, horse of battle cries, echoes packaged in red: exhausted rouges in thin noodles, whose fabrication or centenary quarrels, which gnawed in sickly strikes thick traces, lustrous, the approach of a girl, acned, grainy, assaulted by conflicts, by protests: organized the rain on the iceberg During his time as a Trotskyist activist, Perlongher dealt personally with Nahuel Moreno, historical leader of this political movement in Argentina. On his death, Perlongher wrote this poem on 2 January 1987; it was later published in Hule.

222 Miscellaneous the slippery apron wailing plates of Styrofoam or martingales of a bluish brine, of citrus blossom, firestorm of data, laid upon the table the red report: shocking October estuaries, embryos of caviar in the flabby hake, bonnets on the sparrows, palazzos in the twisted metal, warm tundra, thrashed scattering the bourgeois, the power daring hallucinated estuary on the Isle of Nevsky? the bridge, the seat, glossy, the wheel of the bus driver, worker from the bureau inverting the routing and the bones, lethargy, country bonhomie blemish of white hair brillantine already coarse, run aground on the glacier: illusionist’s bazaar, congestions of masses in the fork, barbed-wire sounds by poor farmers, grief-stricken women and more women: Chinese pastries and Asian, tournaments of Galicia and Roman Bessarabia, insipid loaf who sedates the manscupia overlapping straps in the burst of laughter, over a book of accounts, whose entry was it confiscation? Blatant deception? or pageantry of viscous gestures, opened to the fags their headquarters, rustic silk, dust-covered boxes containing acronyms, more acronyms: FRIP, Workers Word, The Truth, PRT: dogs of Troy watch the waste, to one side of the coffin – which I imagine covered in magnolias dyed yellow – the separatists march, the debtors: he knew to go back, reconcile reconditely with the traitors of pain, while Sedova combs scalps with a cattle prod of ice, of cellophane of the last slogan about dissidence in Tanganyika?



Lake Nahuel Abisinia Exibar? He wore out labels and emptied foaming bottles onto tablecloths of clouds: he delighted wrapped in reports, circumscription, flowerpots in the committee hall? was the cheap talk filled with worms? he entered River, surrounded by a committee of disappeared Uruguayans, to ask the hour or the moment, of the uprising, the masterful stretch: he visited the lady, he wore a suit of fire to the olive trees, snatching the bridles of hysteria in this colloquial story, a puff of smoke.

223

Blue

‘… overcome now with serene commiseration’ Juan José Hernández … with serene commiseration. Overcome. He walked the halls – wearing out the soles of his shoes – and in the bathroom doorway he found plastic envelopes with a white powder inside and nylon underwear scattered on the carpet – some, stained with ashes or mud. It was the police! They’d put them there! During their investigation! / Golden fell the snows of karma, severe, with serene commiseration / all around, he looked: and saw the little blazing eyes of the pursuers like blackberries, hidden among the opal glimmers and that faint smoke from the streets, where the chariots of angels, with their restless headlights, neon and sequin, booing glassy gazes: from their chariots, see: firefly voyeurs, revolting / They’re a bunch of Sons of Bitches / like they have a stick up their arses, because of that aluminium hardness – and the dream of the bullet tearing them down – scaly like the membranes of silvery fish, elongated, it’s the colour of the cops. How sour: that taste in the mouth of the chief that smells like old tobacco and cells, little blue cells where she hangs her coat of furtive rabbit hides and prays, like someone pissing; and yoked weasel: plague of rats, of rats eating the prisoners’ bread as they play in the field, and the smell of packaged This story was published in the journal Pie de página no. 3, summer 1985.

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underwear. And the wives of the prisoners – prison mother – bring them tomatoes and drumsticks on Sundays; and they smoke in the stairwells, with only one hand. They strip the visitors, they stretch them on the rack and submit them to the anus test: which is sliding a baton into the anus – without Vaseline – ‘to show the strictness’ / ‘of the police’ – an anus reeks; the bannistered uniforms and those brass buttons, against which the bullets – brass – ricochet. But they are not immune to fire: the fire of the anuses, diarrhoea of the mind, napalm of the balls. There Is No Other Way to Finish Them Off. It’s a question of methodology. He climbed – on one foot – the bleachers of institution no. 15, running at full speed, and dripping a thin thread from one eye, spying – and being spied: if they’d only seen: he’d looked at a skinny boy, and seen a cobra of smoked glass entwined around his thighs; or imagining the anus of that boy, in a friendly gathering, springy, up against a railing. And that was seen through a lace curtain. Through fogged-up windows, Toxi’s skilled jockeys fly, making way through the juices with bells: with a moving desire: … to catch you when you do it. Admit it, yes, you do it, and not so secretly: did they hear the imaginary scratching of the living-room rug? And your mother? What does she think when she remembers? You danced a Spanish dance, in a fringed tulle dress and heels; and you received a smack to the head, foolish, always a faggot since girlhood. Since you were young they’ve been after you, girl, and you go uncovered, no sweater draped sweetly over your shoulders, to be careful, you see. You’re doing it again. They told you not to do it any more. You always do it. You spend your time doing it as fast as you can, until the wolf appears and says: you do it, let’s see, do it again, show me how you do it. I don’t do it any way, no, I’ve never done it. It’s a problem of methodology: – the long method, called ‘fluting’, involves lying like a lizard and licking the paws of a dog, the mouth of a cavern the stiff glaciality of the gate, bell, bell; – the short method, called ‘lilying’, consists of crowning like a flower waiting to be pruned – knowing all the while it’s going to happen, which adds a melancholic fury, a certain old woman’s rage. They know: they must scurry away, be more and more like a fly, a spider; curl up in the closet, like a damp boa constrictor, hung up to lie in wait, draped, and mildewed: of that foulard. (And if they see the rancid gauze? And weakened in paradings – ‘Oh, of course, you were alone’ – as the mate turns to liquid, blue.

226 Miscellaneous

Therefore: if each one throws their grenade, a tiny grenade like a bauble – and you said it, you should’ve stayed quiet, should you have lied? – and they’ll blast you to bits like Ben Wa balls. I can’t stand the sight of blood. There are loose ends to tie up, handsome drovers. Which is leftover! The charming embroidery, their badges? Who has never fantasized about those vests, blackened and brined. They’re two fantasies, divided into two big dreams, like spilled shoe polish, they are: – the prison fantasy: the cell block chooses one, and the volunteer, the dandy companion, a trampling love, the stench of that muscular crush that piles on you: the pile-driving mambo of being pillaged – and sometimes depilated with barbed wire, quartering you into pieces, nubile – and the black men enter full on: ploughing and penetrating. – the brothel fantasy: which is like a prison yard fantasy where they serve Bacardi to hooded sailors and one of them raises anchor, with a gloved handful of meat: rough caress of pillage against the bathroom plumbing, drain pipes block the swiftness of rigid deepness which attacks: the blockage … which buttons up. I would stroll – soft and commiserating – the estate, passing the Ming vase among pitchers from other dynasties which had the virtue of being defeated without putting up a fight: the nymphs dispersed before the army of lechers, sombre pimps with a shot in the crotch, and the madams unbraided their headdresses of limestone and rose, and stained their perms! In those iridescent ringlets, the blue fashion. You do it. It is truth that you cling to. You do it now, you’ve done it before, for how long. Tell them that in those chalets the headbands are tied in back and leave enshrouded bosoms to float in a daze, and end in a wide ring of daisies. You would walk thusly, hemmed in by the vegetation, the hallways of the police station.

Corpses

To Flores Beneath the shrubs In the scrubland On the bridges In the ditches There are Corpses In the thresh of an unstoppable train In the wake of a shipwreck In the ebbing wave On the docks the mounting blocks, the launching pads, the jetties There are Corpses In the fishermen’s nets In the scurrying crabs In her lock of hair ripped loose Barrette hanging limply There are Corpses As Perlongher told it, this poem was written on a long bus trip from Buenos Aires to São Paulo in 1981. It’s an attempt to disrupt Argentine social poetry and at the same time a notable attempt to make sense of the Argentine military dictatorship. It was published in Revista de (poesía) no. 1, April 1984. Perlongher himself recites it on a cassette published by Ultimo Reino in 1991.

228 Miscellaneous In the conspicuous absence In the censure of the word In your divine presence Commander, in the part of your hair There are Corpses In the hot sleeves of the woman with the passport who throws herself out the window of a little boat with a baby in her arms In the man obliged to make candy-coated peanuts In a frying pan lined with crumbs In the velvet, in the straw, There are Corpses Right there, in that current Coming undone, and In the sidestepping of the one it’s best not to mention, and In the disdain of the one who doesn’t say what she’s thinking, perhaps In the one that doesn’t say what she knows … There are Corpses However, in the tongue of that shoe tied discreetly, to a hand mirror, in the buckle of a belt that slides, unwittingly, across the ceiling, feet in the air of that coin purse that deflates, like a huge owl, and, nevertheless, In that c… how do you spell it? C… what? but, All In all Above all There are Corpses In the overcoat in which she faints, feverishly, in the swaying of she who slithers through the ivy, defenceless in the gutting of the one who is wrapped, barely, by a light cover, and a heap of discarded covers, and outmoded trends forgotten like dead rubbish of which There are Corpses They can be seen, gutted quartered floating in the swamp: in the seat of the muddied pants, likewise; in the silk-trimmed train of the bride who never married because her groom has ....................!

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There are Corpses In that low blow, in the hollow of that cheek, in the camouflaged vulture, the zed of the azaleas, blazing, in that dark haze There are Corpses They are everywhere: in the jars of pig milk which the farm girls pour over their pimps, in the fjords of the ports and docks where they dawn, hidden, with waterlogged panties; in the damp pockets, bags, that are flattened with the movement of those from There are Corpses It seems trite: in the hobbling of those gauchos, in the hides of that exalted troop, in the reed bed (sea grass), in the spoils of the wily ones, the smell of the judge’s shrubs There are Corpses Oh, in the whimper of the singer who sold ‘federal stars’ Uh, in the stomping of that harpist who fucked little queer dogs, Wow, in the fart of that race to the waterfall, with a bottle of ‘Russian’ whiskey full of broken glass in the bra straps, So thin, There are Corpses In the elegance of the seamstress who uses ribbons to cover a hole In the delicate hands with which the manicurist electrifies the bright red nails, in the cuticles that she scrapes, in her bathroom, in her dressing room, so … indecisive … that carefully placing the bishops, on the hips of the Queen and in the little princess’s notebooks who, with the sound of royalty collapsing, oui There are Corpses Yes, in the case filled with camphor on the breast of that pretty teacher! Ecco, in the charcoal with which that pretty teacher! traces the embers of that incense;

230 Miscellaneous There, in the throat of that necklace, or in the flab of that bruise pierced by a ring, petticoat, in Already There are Corpses In the pushing in the choking In the swallowing in the fucking In the amputating in the impaling in the whore! There are Corpses It can no longer be held: the handle of the shovel that stabs in the dirt its rosary of moss, the rosary of the cross that encrusts in the wall of dirt a nail the tide that traps the fish in the reeds the – tin, tin … – of the rattling spittle that is sputtered … There are Corpses In the sliminess that is sucked, also, in the gargle; in the glacial amygdala; in the failure of what is not sucked to fruition because it is decorated with shit; in the spit stamped on a cock, in the salivation of an elephant penetration, in those jokes about the ant, There are Corpses In the little cunts of the young girls In the tiny prick of the southern gladiator, dreamy In the gilding of oblivion that winds, through the rifts, in the shroud of the client who pays an exorbitant price for a fuck, In the dust There are Corpses In the desert-like doctor’s offices In the dusty ‘unconscious’ divans In the incessant bureaucracy, in the hospital ‘process’ where the dead flow, through the corridors where the nurses say SHHH! with a needle to the ovaries,

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in the gaps of the glass orchestra showcases where surgeons cross-dress as ‘draped men’, opossum of rubbish, where you tattoo, or carve, (or taste) a palate, in turns There are Corpses In the mama’s baskets alternately filled with or emptied of emeralds, sweets, in the pleats of that bias cut that clings – a bit too much – to the bras, in the blue hair, glorysea, in the suckling of the teat that is wrung out, on the prayer stool, against a mandolin, salami, tub of polished pipes … There are Corpses In these circumstances, as mother washes the dishes, the son his feet, the father his belt, the little sister the pus stain, which, under her armpit is ‘growing’ or There are Corpses They can no longer be counted: in the little ‘trace’ of ash that my horse leaves as he smokes across the fields (fields, hmm …) or through the stud farm, as if it weren’t true that There are Corpses When the horse jumps The filthy polders, feathered he sinks into the grass; when the swallow, tera tera flies in circles, like a rooster, or when the swine like a serpent’s ‘cobra milk’ dissolves, the onlookers all reach the following Conclusion: There are Corpses When the foreigners, hedonists (‘the priestess has died and they’re groping her two at a time’), accomplices, kneeling under(neath) the statue of death, and she is devalued! There are Corpses When the exhausted pistol, the flaccid anus,

232 Miscellaneous can no longer bear, the weight of a cock, the piss of a ‘drunk stick’ the royal lineage of an azalea in bloom red, like a ceiba tree, or a Serb, when a pageboy prunes it, calmly, gnawing away, as he shoves it into the wall, and sitting astride it, drips and There are Corpses As he buries it lightly, thrilled with the pro -gression of his pike, but screwing in his nail, cramming it into the pistil of that carrion the peristyle of a carriage crooked as it overturned dragging down everything … freckles, or Places There are Corpses Warts, haemorrhoids (of Teflon), ordinary omens: when without … riddled, refined, myriad angels of swordfish, marred myrtles, adolescent, toes pained by the kick in the veins, toast of udders, taut percale, snub clit … There are Corpses In the country where the miller is yoked In the state where the butcher sells his loins, in cash, And where all Occupations are named … In the regions where a hooker turns out her synthetic fur, They’ve smelled her from afar, since yesteryear There are Corpses In the province where the truth is never told In the shops where lies are never sold – This doesn’t leave here – In the loos of the drunks a red sore in the underwear of the one who urinates – this isn’t going to end here – against the Tiles, in the doorway, of number 14 or 15, Corrientes Ave and Esmeralda Street There are Corpses And she immediately becomes La Cautiva, the chiefs give her an enema they open up her c… to get the kid out, the husband stays with the little girl,

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while she grips a scapular containing a faded photo of a dressing room where … There are Corpses Where he betrayed her, where he tried to convince her that she was a truant lamb, where the bitch shat, where the swine spat short hairs from its syrupy snout musky, seductive There are Corpses. Where she ejaculated, her panties soft, like the bloomers of a doll like bubbling limestone – the remnants of shackles floated in the ‘Moisturizing Solution’ (water method) she had to tell him There are Corpses The foetus, growing in a rat-infested stream The grandmother, shaving over a bowl of bleach, The mother-in-law, snorting the seed of Sarmiento, The aunt, going insane over some curved combs There are Corpses The family, rummaging for him in the folds of the sheets Her friend, sewing nonstop the rip in her hose The idiot, sucking off the cop for a few unread slips of paper A pimp, when he tried to put it in the exhaust pipe of a VW Kombi, There are Corpses The woman with dishevelled hair, the bun frizzy from too much ‘sunlight’ too much ‘clarifying’; The woman with the martini, whose heart preferred not to know; The dispossessed woman, who caught her teeth trying to flee a taxi; The woman who wanted, beneath a greasy blanket, to remove her teeth to keep from seeing what she saw: There are Corpses The married matron, who did the boy a favour giving him    a good tip;

234 Miscellaneous the knitter who never tires, who wears herself out making stitches     so discreet they hide everything – and at the same time let everything happening be seen – ; the owner of the factory, who saw the veins of her workers    tactilely at the looms – giving it that rhythmic texture …      purple … The vine, that wraps around the wire, the barbs There are Corpses The woman who hasn’t seen a cock in years So she imagines it, velvety, in a pram (or cram) Beba, who escaped with her husband, now impotent, to a farm    where they watch them, with a nose, or with a hammer, to the knees, they took their nipples, with a pair of pliers (Beba was as pretty as a    teacher …) There are Corpses It was seeing despite all evidence It was silencing against all silence It was protesting against every protest Against every lick it was to suck There are Corpses It was: ‘Don’t tell him that you saw him with me because then they’ll    know’ Or: ‘Don’t tell him what we saw because he might take it    to heart’ Perhaps: ‘It’s best he doesn’t know or he’ll cut off your tits’ Even: ‘Today they assaulted a cow’ ‘When you see him pretend you didn’t notice anything … and that’s it’ There are Corpses Like hesitation plugged in to the neck Like a trite expression tightening the corsets, the girdles Like a forgetful twinkling, like glimmers from the guard tower Like A necktie observes, a silver clip, like that There are Corpses In the    fields In the fields In the house

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On the hunt There There are Corpses In the decline of this writing In the erasure of these inscriptions In the fading of these legends In the conversations between lesbians showing their garter belts, In that flexible fist There are Corpses Isn’t it marvellous to say ‘in’? A centric aspiration? A centring of the centric, whose forward Dies at dawn, and decomposes through The Tunnel There are Corpses The main area of burial pits? The parrot with the caged beak? The pavilion that is a rookery of tits? The seed, tied up, in cubism Of frivolous surface … ? There are Corpses I didn’t want to tell you, Fernando, but that time you sent me to the office, to file the paperwork, when I was crossing the street, an old woman fell, tripped over a rail, and the cars that passed, with those old-fashioned crepes (I need, I told you, a new pair of white trousers) and do you think they stopped, Fernando? Imagine it … There are Corpses We are tired of that reiteration and sick of that reiteration we are. The Italian damsels lose the Louis XV cap in La Boca! The ‘models’ – from the Polish party – can’t find their buttons (the neck buttoned up in the back) in La Matanza! Cheap and jealous mestizas – whose body odour can’t compete – in Quilmes!

236 Miscellaneous Very pretty young ladies in the parades of Avellaneda! Barracas! There are Corpses Oh, don’t say anything to doña Marta, she’ll tell her grandson who is    A recruit! And don’t let Misia Amalia find out, she has a boyfriend in the military! And that woman who sings, shut her up! The woman who strums the guitar, harpoon her! Not a word to the woman who minds the Victrola, she’s a rat! Not even to the shoeshine, shameless! Not even to the one who plays the lady who sews ‘ruffles’! NOT EVEN There are Corpses Allegorical coffins Metaphorical basements Metonymic mugs Ex-plicit! There are Corpses Exercises Campaigns Consortiums Condominiums Contractus There are Corpses Barren or Lengthy Pozzis or Westerleys Rouges or Shadows Boards or Folds There are Corpses – – – – – – –

All this doesn’t just happen by accident Why not? Don’t tell me you’re going to tell them You don’t think it’s a good idea? When did you graduate? Was he an activist? Are there Corpses?

You went out alone

Corpses In the Chill of the Night When you were Surprised by the Lights You were caught uncovered And There are Corpses Do you understand? Wasn’t it clear? Wasn’t it a bit too much for the time? The blue fingernails? There are Corpses I’m the one who just yesterday was … She’s the one who … Look at the harp … The living room rug … Villegas or There are Corpses .................... .................... .................... .................... There’s no one? Asks the Paraguayan woman. Answer: No there are Corpses.

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Appendix

The Gay Struggle in Argentina

ASÍ: How is the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina organized? FLHA: The organization is made up of autonomous cells each with its own coordinator. The Front doesn’t have a leader because we believe that a vertical and authoritarian structure is something imposed by the patriarchy and therefore is contradictory to our aims. Our experience over the years has shown us that excessive centralization tends to degrade into sectarianism and slogans. On the other hand, our form of organization, more spontaneous and more free, allows for a front in which each group organizes, creates and designs itself to achieve aims that are useful for the movement. But, at certain times, when actions need to be coordinated to achieve a specific objective, some kind of leader might spontaneously arise. Néstor Perlongher’s first appearance in the public eye occurred on 3 July 1973 in an interview with three members of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina (FLHA) [Gay Liberation Front of Argentina] published in the weekly Así, which was widely read at the time. The interview is transcribed here. The answers belong to Néstor (23 years old), Fuad (30), and Manuel (33); the first two were introduced as students of sociology and architecture, respectively, and the third as a professor of social sciences. In the commentary prior to the interview, the reporter asserts that there are half a million gays in Argentina and that the Gay Liberation Front had five thousand active members.

242 Appendix

ASÍ: How have you proven the efficacy of a cellular organization? FLHA: The Front’s cellular organization, during a political period in Argentina marked by widespread repression, is what has enabled us to continue functioning. But our aspiration is to act not in a clandestine manner, but freely and openly, with our doors open to the streets, where anyone who wants to meet us can come in, because we want to meet everyone. ASÍ: What is the Front’s opinion on the way modern society is organized? FLHA: Our society, basically, is not only structured around a system of established production models, but also around a moral and cultural system that we consider to be reactionary. This system reserves privileged positions to the main power holders. The system’s morals are rooted in religion, which has already achieved its objectives. Children are born subjected to the pressure of a series of moral standards that are imposed on them beforehand. And which are not accidental. They are related to the social system they belong to. So the child learns a determined model of social relationships, which are those of his family, where essentially the power is given entirely to the father. Even the father is a victim because he was taught to behave this way. So the son of a labourer is going to be taught, at home and later at school, that he should be a labourer as well, and the son of a wealthy family will be taught from the cradle and by our educational system to lead. To a society of domination like ours these roles are indispensable. That’s why homosexuality is not tolerated since it signifies a violation of those roles. Therefore the ultimate cause of gay persecution is political; it occurs because sexual freedom isn’t convenient to the ruling class or to our authoritarian society. And to do this they brandish all the traditional moral guidelines, based fundamentally in religion and upheld through repressive legislation. It’s not simply a question of morals because when the individual violates these ethical-religious norms they are harassed by the police. There’s a whole moral and judicial framework set up to defend the system. The main issue is that the entire social system is in crisis. It’s not that gays throw the system into crisis. In a different kind of society, a free society, sexual norms should also be free. This is the reason we call ourselves the Liberation Front: because we understand that we form part of this whole sector of people who are fighting to change the



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economic, social, judicial and moral norms that support the regime and that Perón called domination. Or dependence on imperialism. ASÍ: Is the repression of homosexuality something specific to this century or does it have historical precedence? FLHA: Based on the classic blueprint of history we can see that during what was called antiquity and especially up to the seventh century before Christ, the taboo of homosexuality is totally foreign to ancient societies, especially Eastern societies. If we go back to the origins of the Old Testament we see that the taboo of homosexuality occurs as a product of necessity; this necessity arose in a group of people who were considered an historically important human group. There was a need to guarantee the growth of Moses’ troops. This necessity moved homosexuality from something taboo to having laws against it, given that it was a common sexual practice among all the Semitic peoples who for the previous five millennia made up the underlying base of what was later known as the Ancient Western World. There’s an epic poem about a famous warrior king named Gilgamesh, in which the drama of man in his eternal struggle to achieve eternity isn’t taken as a consequence of the original sin, as it is in the Old Testament, but as a fatality of the historic circumstances in which those people were immersed. This Sumerian poem was passed down by the nomadic poets of the Hebraic tribes. In it, Gilgamesh’s desperation to obtain from the gods of death the conquest of eternal life for his friend and lover Esquiú is shown openly and spontaneously, free and pure, as the product of a world in which sexual freedom was a right of men and not a sin before the gods. The need of the Hebrew troops to expand their ranks as a form of facing the other Semitic tribes drove them to denounce the taboo of homosexuality, as well as the prohibition of women to mix with men of other tribes. Parallel to the emergence of the Hebraic people’s denouncement of homosexuality, we see that for the 4,000 years prior and 1,500 years after, homosexuality subsists as a sexual practice indifferent to the majority of civilizations both before and after the emergence of this taboo. Civilizations in Egypt, Greece, Rome, Crete, the nomadic people of Asia Minor – the Hyksos, Hittites, Arameos and others – practised sexuality freely as an attribute of the gods and not as coercion imposed by men or groups of men. Both feminine and masculine homosexuality was practised in Phoenician temples.

244 Appendix

With the emergence of Christianity and its institutionalization by the Roman ruling classes, the taboo of homosexuality, as well as the idea of virginity in heterosexuality, are based in modes of domination and repression as a form of assuring the transition from a slave economy to a feudal economy. The huge coercion exercised by the Church in the field of sexuality in general reached its height in the Middle Ages where chastity and sexual repression produced one of the darkest periods in human history. With the emergence of the middle class as a revolutionary class, sexual taboos begin to break down. When we reach the Renaissance, we discover a struggle between an emerging, free-thinking class, in conflict with the religious hierarchies in which economic power is sustained through moral control over the population as a whole. We mustn’t forget the terrible massacre of the Cathars, in the South of France, at the end of the Middle Ages. This religious group had an economy of shared goods and broad sexual freedoms which led them to become a pole of sociocultural development that was antagonistic to the interests of the Church at that time. When we arrive at the conquest of America, the Church’s ideology served as a justification of a process of domination and destruction of the Aztec, Mayan and Incan civilizations, as well as the peoples from the Caribbean to Tierra del Fuego who served as slave labour to guarantee the exploitation of resources needed for the capitalist expansion of modern Europe. The historian Oviedo, familiar with Greek culture, was shocked by the sight of the ‘Jewel of Santa Marta’ in which the representation of two men sexually joined is just another expression of pre-Columbian art. Neither Father Victoria’s angry demands nor Father Las Casas’s brave protests were able to halt the genocide. In the name of God and of the ‘sin against nature’, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa massacred the defenceless adolescents. Gamarra’s racist attitudes about Native Americans, whom he believed to be ‘libidinous, lazy, unpredictable, treacherous …’ plus the stigmatization of homosexuality and tobacco as vices, were three of the pillars of the religious, fanatical and intolerant morality that justified the extermination and enslavement of those cultures. From Mexico of the Aztecs to the socio-theocratic empire of the Inca, the pattern was repeated. Historians of Pizarro are horrified by and attribute to the devil’s work the sexual worship practised by the ‘chimúes’. Sappho reined in the Gulf of Guayaquil in one of the richest civilizations the planet has seen.



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The religious morals of the colonizers kept under lock and key the amorous world of our indigenous ancestors. We mustn’t forget either the Victorian censoring of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the moralizing intentions of a Nazism that carried thousands of gays to concentration camps and extermination. They were branded like cattle, with an inverted pink triangle, now used as the symbol of our organization. ASÍ: Some people see the ‘sexual revolution’ as a symptom of a crisis affecting the entire system we live in … FLHA: The world is witnessing a revolutionary process at all levels. Trying to compare the sexual revolution to symptoms of the crisis of the bourgeois system is absolutely anti-historical and reactionary, since it has been manifested in different time periods and in different social systems as another resource in man’s struggle to fulfil himself. ASÍ: In a document published by your organization, you underscored ‘the pride of being gay’. How should that be interpreted? FLHA: By using the ‘gay pride’ slogan on our protest banners, we’re trying to encourage our brothers in the struggle and destroy the shame and guilt that from childhood and our years of existence we carry around as a product of the repressive and anti-human nature of our education system. When we say gay pride, we’re not trying to create differentiations or become a sexual sect. This flag can be flown by any person who feels and believes that the fight for human liberation leads to total sexual liberation. Our ultimate objective not only aims for the reaffirmation of this pride as gays, but we hope that in the context of a better world people may also be able to externalize heterosexual possibilities repressed in the name of morality. We believe that, once authoritarian sexual morality is abolished, individuals will be able to choose and carry out their sexual impulses exactly as dictated by their desire and consciousness without having to worry about what society ‘permits’ or ‘prohibits’: the choice will be a product of their own critical analysis and not based on what others tell them. ASÍ: On 25 May and 20 June the Republic witnessed two historic mobilizations. Members of the Gay Liberation Front participated in both carrying banners that identified themselves … FLHA: Yes, we believe that the struggle for sexual liberation is not fought in isolation but within the context of the struggle

246 Appendix

for national and social freedom. Therefore, from the start we’ve identified with the demands of the popular sectors, denouncing and opposing the dictatorship and participating in the protests on 25 May and 20 June. The Front’s objective is to shatter the myth that labels homosexuality as a reactionary practice, as well as to incorporate into the broader gay community the process of public demonstration, from which we have been marginalized. The fact that we propose an integral liberation of the human being means we’re putting that struggle into practice. Only to the extent that people recognize us as another sector of the population which suffers specific marginalization and oppression is it possible for homosexuality to be accepted as another model of love. From there, the central slogan we marched under on 25 May as well as on 20 June was ‘May love and equality rein among the people’, a verse from the ‘Peronist March’, which for us is no hollow phrase. It means that despite the contradictions and the sexist prejudices that are still prevalent among the general population, the popular revolution should also question the moral norms of the ruling class. Therefore revolution is an act of love. We always remember the words of Eva Perón when she said ‘those who deny the evidence of a trial or slander what they don’t understand or prefer to silence […] are the ones who only travel well-trod roads; the inventors of the word prudence; the ones who refuse to compromise; the cowards, who never bet on a cause or on anyone; the ones who do not love because for them love is exaggerated and ridiculous …’ ASÍ: What was your experience like with the popular activist groups in the recent mobilizations? FLHA: In the Plaza de Mayo and on the Ezeiza highway, people came up to talk to us, to hear our position. ASÍ: What is the Front’s priority in this period the Republic is currently experiencing? FLHA: We believe that current legislators have an obligation to remove from current law all repressive elements that fundamentally go against our National Constitution. ASÍ: Are you aware of the anti-homosexual ‘raids’ that have taken place under the new government? FLHA: Yes, on 23 June, officers of the Federal Police Force of the



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twenty-first branch carried out a raid on a bar in the capital, with the aim of intimidating and frightening the gay community. Nine citizens were arrested, without even being allowed access to telephones. Events such as this one were common under the dictatorship. The fact that they are being repeated indicates the continuance of reactionary attitudes and elements that aim to sabotage the popular government from within. It’s no coincidence that the repression of the gay community reappears at the height of the confrontation between those working for liberation and those who would stop it. The coincidences aren’t purely theoretical. Osinde – one of the main persons responsible for the Ezeiza massacre – who before 25 May from the pages of the journal Mercado promised to ‘put an end to homosexuals, hippies, and junkies’, has made his intentions clear. The Front believes that the upholding of bourgeois moral norms and its associated repressive edicts constitutes a contradiction to the process of liberation, to the extent that existing structures can’t be changed without also altering man himself, without also freeing him from the dominant system’s oppressive internalization of taboos and prejudices. ASÍ: Do you propose a homosexual society? FLHA: We are not proposing a homosexual society. We simply want recognition of each individual’s right to make their own choices about their body and their life, as established by Article 19 of the National Constitution. It is unfair that in the midst of the process of liberation from the dictatorship people are still being incarcerated simply for being gay. The persistence of anti-homosexual police mandates constitutes blatant discrimination against an entire sector of the population, similar to racism.

Biographic Timeline

1949: Néstor Osvaldo Perlongher is born in the Avellaneda suburb of Greater Buenos Aires. His birthdate is 24 December, but his friends remember that he celebrated it on the 29th, possibly to avoid coinciding with Christmas Eve. 1956: First year of elementary school, in Avellaneda. 1963: Starts high school at the National School of Commerce No. 1 in Avellaneda. 1968: Enters the University of Buenos Aires College of Philosophy and Letters and begins a degree in Literature. He is interested in Trotskyist politics, coming into contact with activists from the Política Obrero (PO) [Workers Politics] later called the Partido Obrero [Workers Party]. 1970: Collaborates as a journalist in some publications of the press Editorial Atlántida, under various pseudonyms. He abandons his Literature studies and decides to switch to a degree in Sociology. 1971: He joins the controversial Frente de Liberación Homosexual (FLH) [Gay Liberation Front]. Soon afterwards, he breaks away from the Workers Party after failing to convince the university branch of the group to declare their support for ‘the gay cause’. 1972: He organzes the Eros Group, within the FLH, and becomes the spokesperson for a more radical, ‘ultra-leftist’ line. He also co-founds the Grupo Política Sexual [Sexual Politics Group], defined by him as a group of gays, feminists, and non-sexist hetero men. 1973: He publicly declares himself a gay activist in an interview



Biographic Timeline

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(illustrated with photographs) carried out by the weekly publication Así, widely read at the time. He supports the election of Héctor Cámpora and heads the lines of the FLH in the popular demonstrations held on 25 May in front of the Government Headquarters and on 20 June in Ezeiza. He joins the editorial team of the journal Somos, published by the FLH; here he publishes his first political texts. 1974: He is a prominent figure in the campaign against the Birth Control Law imposed by the Peronist government. He works as correspondence and writing secretary for the General Economic Confederation (CGE). 1975: He graduates from the College of Philosophy and Letters with a degree in Sociology. After a police raid of his apartment on Libertad Street, he spends three months in the Villa Devoto prison accused of possession of drugs for personal use. 1977: He gets a job as a school social worker with the Department of Psychology of the Ministry of Education in the Province of Buenos Aires, in the town of La Matanza (in a letter he joked: ‘Parti du la Massacre’) where he lives briefly. 1978: Around this time he begins writing reports on the repression of gays in each city he visits and publishes them under the pseudonyms ‘Víctor Bosch’ and ‘Rosa L. de Grossman’. 1979: He works for survey and marketing agencies. He publishes his first article in the cultural journal Periscopio. 1980: Tierra Baldía, publishing house led by Enrique Rodolfo Fogwill, publishes his first book, Austria-Hungría. 1981: He is arrested several times for failure to comply with police mandates and on one occasion (in the city of Mendoza) he is beaten. He moves to São Paulo. He publishes his first article in Portuguese, in the anarchist magazine O Inimigo do Rei. 1982: He writes the poem Cadáveres during a long bus trip from Buenos Aires to São Paulo. He begins his postgraduate degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Campinas. He publishes in the feminist magazine Persona. He opposes the Falklands War and writes a few articles on the issue, one of which (in the journal Sitio) causes a controversy. 1983: He begins to write for the journal El Porteño. 1984: He participates in the forming of the Comisión pro-Libertades Cotidianas, a union of gay groups, feminists and anarchists, which, together with the journal Cerdos & Peces, organizes a petition demanding the end to police mandates.

250 Appendix

1985: He begins contributing to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. 1986: He finishes his thesis ‘O negocio do miche. Prostitucao virile m São Paulo’, and receives his Master’s degree in Social Anthropology. He teaches a course on urban anthropology at the University of Campinas influenced mainly by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. 1987: He publishes Alambres, his second book of poetry, with the press Ultimo Reino, directed by Víctor Redondo. He receives the Boris Vian Literature Prize for this work, awarded by a panel made up of Juan Jacobo Bajarlía, Liliana Heer, Héctor Libertella, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Juan Carlos Martini Real and Nicolás Rosa. In São Paulo, his books O Negocio do Miche and O qué é AIDS are published. 1988: El Fantasma del SIDA is published by the press Editorial Puntosur. 1989: Hule is published by Ultimo Reino. In El Porteño his favourite story, ‘Evita Vive’, is published, immediately sparking a controversy among both officialist and radical members of the Concejo Deliberante. 1990: He publishes Parque Lezama, with Editorial Sudamericana. He becomes involved with the Santo Daime religion and begins to participate in their rituals. He travels to Paris to take a postgraduate course on the cult of Santo Daime under the direction of Michel Maffesoli. He publishes in the journal Chimeres, directed by Deleuze and Guattari. 1991: He returns to São Paulo, abandoning his course. He publishes Aguas Aéreas, with Ultimo Reino. He gives a course in the Argentine College of Philosophy on ‘Forms of ecstasy’. On 6 May, a symposium on his work is held at the college, with participation from Nicolás Rosa, Guillermo Saavedra, Américo Cristófalo, Reynaldo Jiménez and Arturo Carrera. 1992: He dies in São Paulo on 26 November. El Chorreo de las Iluminaciones is published in Caracas, by the press Editorial Pequeña Venecia. 1994: The University of Campinas publishes Lamé, an anthology of his poetic works prepared by Roberto Echavarren. 1996: The first book of literary criticism on Perlongher’s work, Lúmpenes peregrinaciones, is published by Beatriz Viterbo Editora press in Rosario, Argentina, edited by Adrián Cangi and Paula Siganevich, with a prologue by Horacio González.

Notes

Introduction 1 Where English translations of works cited do not exist or could not be consulted, all English titles and quotations are the translator’s.

Sixty-nine Questions for Néstor Perlongher 1 “Pardejón” Rivera was the nickname given to José Fructuoso Rivera y Toscana, Uruguayan caudillo and politician who became the first constitutional president of Uruguay and whose administration was marked by corruption.

Cover Up, Girl 1 Oliverio Girondo, ‘Devotion’, in Scarecrow, translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert. Xenos Books, 2002. 2 The girls of Flores (a working-class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires) references the Girondo poem cited in the epigraph and the repression of middle-/working-class sexuality in ‘decent society’.

252

Notes to pp. 22–50

Loca Sex 1 Marquis de Sade, The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, ed. Richard Seaver and Austryn Weinhouse. New York, Grove Press, 1966, p. 240. 2 Reference to La seducción de la hija del portero [The seduction of the doorman’s daughter], short story written by Pacho O’Donnell in 1975, deemed pornographic and banned by Argentina’s military dictatorship.

Don’t Lift the Lid, We’re on Shaky Ground 1 The Destape was the name given to the return to democracy after dictatorship. The term comes from the verb destapar, meaning to uncover, uncork, or lift the lid.

A Marica is Murdered 1 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Avatars of the Boys of the Night 1 The term miché, in Brazilian street slang, is a boy who prostitutes himself to older homosexuals without shedding his outward expression of masculinity. It is equivalent to the American hustler, the Spanish chapera and the Argentine taxi boy, among others. We chose to use the term miché. 2 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984. 3 Marica is used to denominate an effeminate homosexual. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. 5 Peter Fry, Identidade e política na cultura brasileira. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1982. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 7 G. Damata, Os solici roes. Río de Janeiro, Pallas, 1975.



Notes to pp. 50–58

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8 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. 9 Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, translated by Daniella Dangoor. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1993. 10 T. Cardia, Orgia. Río de Janeiro, José Alvaro, 1968. 11 Robert E. Park, ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment’. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 20, no. 5 (March 1915), pp. 577–612. 12 See CERFI, ‘Generalogie du Capital 1; Les équipements du pouvoir’. Recherches, no. 13, Fontenaysous-Bois, 1973. 13 Georges Bataille, Eroticism and Death, translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986. 14 K. Stebler and P. Waiter, ‘De l’errance spatiale a l’errance sociale’. Espaces et Sociétés, no. 24/27, Paris, 1978. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 16 Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, translated by Rosemary Sheed. London, Penguin, 1984. 17 João Antônio, Malhaçao do Judas Carioca. Rio de Janeiro, Civilizaçao Brasileira, 1975. 18 Jaques Meunier, Os moleques de Bogotá. Rio de Janeiro, Difel, 1975. 19 Pierre Clastres, A sociedade contra o Estado. Porto Alegre, Afrontamentos, 1979. 20 Jean Duvignaud, ‘Esquisse sur le nomade’. 10/18, Paris, 1975. 21 Paul Veyne, ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History’, in Arnold I. Davidson, Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 146–82. 22 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, translated by Bernard Frechtman. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012. 23 Osvaldo Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos. Madrid, Ed. del Serbal, 1955. 24 Janice Caiafà, Movimiento Punk nas cidades. Rio de Janeiro, Graal, 1985. 25 Félix Guattari, ‘Espaço e Poder: a criaçao de territorios na cidades’. Espaço e Debates, no. 16, São Paulo, 1981. 26 Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, translated by Charles Levin. Candor, NY, Telos Press, 1981. 27 Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy, translated by Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist. Albany, SUNY Press, 1993.

254

Notes to pp. 63–68

Living-Room Deficiency Syndrome 1 Reference to the 1973 Brazilian film, All Nudity Shall Be Punished [Original title Toda desnudez será castigada].

Minoritary Becoming 1 Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Micropolíticas. Cartografía do desejo. Vozes, Petrópolis, 1986, text taken as the basis for this one. 2 Michel Maffesoli, A conquista do presente. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1985; see Chapter 5, ‘El espacio de la socialidad’. 3 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, translated by Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi. New York, The New York Press, 1998. 4 Janice Caiafa, Movimento punk das cidades. Rio de Janeiro, J. Zahar, 1985. 5 N. Silveira Jr., Grafite-intensidade. Research project, postgraduate in Anthropology, Universidad de Campiñas, 1989. 6 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnét, Dialogues, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London, Athlone Press, 1987. 8 From ‘Howl’, by Allen Ginsberg. 9 Deleuze and Parnét, Dialogues. 10 Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, translated by Don Smith. London, Sage Publications, 1996. 11 Lampião, Beijo Livre. 12 The importance of these experimentations isn’t limited to the personal, but would seem to act on the very plane of production of subjectivity. The subject is not a natural occurrence, but the fruit of social production, mechanical, ‘industrial’. The deterritorialization that flows from capital implies mining established territorialities, demanding the production of ever more artificial means of serial subjectivity, as well as the expansion of modelization of more ‘intimate’ areas of daily existence. Additionally, the extension of these devices ‘politicizes’ these ‘marginal’ regions of collective life, provoking ‘resistance’ that would be, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘desirous’. 13 A Thousand Plateaus, p. 272. A ‘plane of organization’ – which is of the Law and remits to the development of forms and the



Notes to pp. 69–95

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formation of ‘identitary’ subjects, structured in identities – a ‘plane of consistency’ does not cease to extract itself, to destroy forms reorganizing its particles in relations of speed and slowness, breaking functions to reestablish the flows and producing in this way blocks of becoming through agencements of desire (C. Mafra and N. Silveira Jr., ‘Sociedade araweté, Sociedade do devenir’. Boletín de antropología, no. 3, March 1989, Campiñas, p. 35). 14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Politique et psychoanalyse. Des Mots Perdus, 1977. 15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 16 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 291. 18 Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, translated by Rosemary Sheed. London, Penguin, 1984. 19 Guattari, Molecular Revolution. 20 See ‘Matan a una marica’. Fin de siglo, no. 16. Buenos Aires, November 1988. 21 S.O.S Muhler was a feminist group that helped victims of violence, active between 1981 and 1984. 22 Pierre Clastres, ‘Entre silence et dialogue’. L’Arc, 1968. 23 Deleuze and Parnét, Dialogues. 24 J. S. Trevisan, Devassos no Paraíso. São Paulo, Max Limonade, 1986. 25 Roberto Piva, Antología Poética. Porto Alegre, L & P M, 1985. 26 Néstor Perlongher, O negocio do miche. San Pablo, Brasiliense, 1987. 27 Georges Bataille, Eroticism and Death, translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986. 28 Bocas do lixo (literally ‘trash zones’) are areas of marginality and prostitution; bocas do fumo are areas for the sale of marihuana. 29 Jean F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, translated by Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. 30 Paul Veyne, ‘Foucault Revolutionizes History’, in Arnold Davidson, ed., Foucault and His Interlocutors. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 163.

Sandy Beaches to Muddy Delta 1 Gustavo R. Hocke, Manierismo, o Mundo como Laverinto. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1986. See also J. Y. Guérin, ‘Errances dans un Archipel Introuvable’, in J. M. Benoist, Figures du Baroque. Paris, PUF, 1983. 2 Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer, L’Âme atomique. Paris, Albin Michel, 1986.

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Notes to pp. 96–104

3 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, translated by Tom Conley. Minneappolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 4 Omar Calabrese, in A Idade Neobarroca (São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1987), treats the neo-baroque as a trend and lists among its characteristics: loss of integrity, universality, search for instability, polydimensionality, fluctuation, turbulence. 5 R. González Echevarría, Relecturas: Estudios de literature cubana. Caracas, Monte Avila, 1976. 6 José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana. Santiago Chile, Ed. Universitaria, 1969. 7 Luis A. Villena, ‘Lezama Lima: Fragmentos a su imán o el final del festín’. Voces no. 2, Barcelona. 8 See Leo Navratil, Schizophrénie et art. Bruselas, Complexe, 1978. 9 C. Vitier. ‘La poesía de Lezama Lima y el intento de una teleología insular’. Voces no. 2, Barcelona. 10 Interview with Lezama Lima, in R. González, Lezama Lima, el ingenuo culpable. Havana, Letras Cubanas, 1988. 11 Severo Sarduy, ‘The Baroque and the Neobaroque’, translated by Christopher Winks. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010. 12 Hocquenghem and Schérer, L’Âme atomique. 13 Saúl Yurkiévich, ‘La risueña oscuridad o los emblemas emigrantes’, from the Coloquio Internacional sobre la obra de Lezama Lima. Madrid, Poesía, Ed. Fundamentos, 1984. 14 González Echevarría, Relecturas. 15 Severo Sarduy, ‘El barroco y el neobarroco’, in Cesar Fernández Moreno, ed., América Latina en su literature. México, Siglo XXI, 1976. 16 Lezama Lima, interview with T. E. Martínez in González Echevarría, Relecturas. 17 J. Schwartz, Vanguarda e cosmopolitismo. São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1983. 18 Roberto Echavarren, interview with Arturo Carrera: ‘Todo, excepto el futuro a la vuelta de la esquina y el pasado irrealizado’. La Razón Cultural, Buenos Aires, 1985. 19 Nicolás Rosa, prologue to Si no a enhestar el oro oído, by Héctor Picoli. Rosario, La Cachimba, 1983. 20 Osvaldo Lamborghini, El Fiord. Buenos Aires, Chinatown, 1969. 21 Arturo Carrera, La partera canta. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana. 1982. 22 Héctor Libertella, Nueva Escritura en Hispanoamérica. Caracas, Monte Ávila, 1975. 23 Severo Sarduy, Cobra and Maitreya: Two Novels, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Champane, IL, Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. 24 Osvaldo Lamborghini, Sebregondi retrocede. Buenos Aires, Noé, 1973.



Notes to pp. 108–149

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Foot Fetish 1 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. 2 Michel Foucault, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’, interview by Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson. Advocate, Malibu, no. 400, 7-8-84.

Baroquification 1 José Lezama Lima, Paradiso, translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974. 2 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester. London, The Athlone Press, p. 257. ‘But resemblance should not be understood as an external relation. It goes less from one thing to another than from one thing to an Idea, since it is the Idea which comprehends the relations and proportions constitutive of the internal essence. […] Consider now the other species of images, namely the simulacra. That to which they pretend (the object, the quality, etc.), they pretend to underhandedly, under the cover of aggression, an insinuation, a subversion, “against the father”, and without passing through the Idea.’ 3 Reference to Sebregondi Retrocede, by the Argentine writer Osvaldo Lamborghini, whose work sets off within Argentine literature a certain current that we could call, more than neo-baroque, ‘neobarroso’ from the Spanish ‘barroso’, meaning muddy.

Cuba, Sex, and a Bridge to Buenos Aires 1 Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Tejada. Source: Bomb Magazine.

Urban Poetics 1 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Freud, Marx’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, translated by Jon Anderson and Gary Hentzi. New York, New York Press, 1998.

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Notes to pp.150–162

2 Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, translated by William Aggeler. Fresno, Academy Library Guild, 1954.

Poetry and Ecstasy 1 Rubén Darío, ‘Marcha Trinfal’, in Diversions, translated by Colin John Holcombe. Santiago, Ocaso Press, 2008.

The Religion of Ayahuasca 1 ‘Nao creias nos mestres que te aparecen’. Hymn 9 of the Prayer to Santo Daime. Hinário de Cura. Oracão. Cruzeirinho. São Paulo, Flower of the Waters Eclectic Centre of Flowing Universal Light. 2 See D. McKenna, L. E. Luna and G. Towers, ‘Ingredientes biodinámicos en las plantas que se mezclan al ayahuasca. Una farmacología tradicional no investigada’. América Indígena, vol. XVI, no. 1, Mexico, 1986. 3 Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofman and Christian Ratsch, Plants of the Gods, Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers. Rochester, NY, Healing Arts Press, 1992. 4 See Marlene Dobkin, ‘Curing with Ayahuasca in an Urban Slum’, in M. Harner, ed., Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973). 5 Marion Aubrée, ‘Entre tradition et modernité’. Les Temps Modernes, no. 491, pp. 142–60. 6 I. Béllier, ‘Los cantos mai-huna del yage’. América Indígena, vol. XLVI, no. 1, Mexico, 1986. 7 Jean-Pierre Chaumeil, Voir, Savoir, Pouvoir. Le Chamanisme chez les Yagua. Paris, Edition de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1983, pp. 260–1. 8 Luis Eduardo Luna, The Healing Practices of a Peruvian Shaman. Ireland, Elsevier Scientific Publishers, 1984. 9 Marlene Dobkin, ‘La cultura de la pobreza y el amor mágico: un syndrome urbano en la selva peruana’. América Indígena, vol. XXIX, no. 1, Mexico, 1969. 10 Marí Ramírez de Jara and Carlos Pinzón, ‘Los hijos del bejuco solar y la campana celeste. El yage en la cultura popular urbana’. America Indígena, vol. XLVI, no. 1, Mexico, 1986, p. 163. 11 Michael Taussig, ‘Folk Healing and the Structure of Conquest in South West Colombie’. Journal of Latin American Lore, vol. 6, no. 2, 1980. 12 Félix Guattari, ‘Les drogues signifiantes’, in A. Jaubert and



Notes to pp. 162–163

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N. Murard, ‘Drogues, Passions Muettes’. Recherches, no. 39 bis, Paris, 1979, p. 219. 13 William Burroughs, Naked Lunch. Paris, Olympia Press, 1959. For Philippe de Felice, author of Poisons sacrés, Ivresses Divinas. Paris, Albin Michel, 1936, there is a religion of opium: ‘The mania over opium is truly a religion, most of all because it offers users the feeling of an evasion, a leaving of the self’, p. 44. The author suggests that the worship of intoxicants could only be an avatar of the ‘religious instinct’, ‘deviated and reduced to seek replacement satisfactions’, p. 79. For him, religion and drugs share a common foundation in the shared dépassement de soi, p. 372. 14 Martine Xiberras, La Société Intoxiquée. Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989. 15 Peter Furst, Flesh of the Gods. New York, Praeger, 1972. 16 Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy. Berkeley, CA, Ronin Publishing Inc., 1965. 17 Vittorio Lanternari, As religioes dos oprimidos. San Pablo, Perspectiva, 1974. 18 The chief of each religious nucleus receives the title of Commander and his followers are defined as soldiers of Daime. The founder of the religion, Mestre Irineu, was himself a soldier. 19 For an interesting take on the idea of Empire, which could shed some light on the use of the figure in Santo Daime, see Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer, L’Âme atomique: pour une esthétique d’ère nucléaire. Paris, Éditions du Sandre, 2013. 20 The displacement of these rural masses led to the ‘songs of exile’ referred to by Clodoinir Monteiro, in his Master’s thesis O Palacio de Juramidam: um ritual de transconciencia e despoluicâo. Universidade Federal de Recife, 1983. 21 For more on saint worship in Northwest Brazil, see André Brun, Les Bieux Catholiques au Brésil. Paris, L’Harmattan, 1898; also, Eduardo Hoornaert, O Cristianismo moreno no Brasil. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1991. 22 Curiously, doctrines was the name given to the songs chanted in the precursor to Daime recorded in Rondonia by Nunes Pereira (A Casa das Minas. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1979), consisting of a varied mixture of rituals originating from the Casa das Minas with the ingestion of ayahuasca. The text of the doultrinas contains an amalgam of voduns from the mina-jeje pantheon, characters from folklore, Christian saints, etc. Nunes Pereira indicates ‘in reality the entire body of these doutrinas contains nothing original and especially related to ayahuasca’, p. 224. 23 For a narration of the events, see the article by Ciodomir Monteiro: ‘La cuestión de la realidad en la Amazonia: un análisis a partir del

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estudio de la Doctrina del Santo Daime’. Amazonia Peruana, vol. VI, no. 11, 1985. 24 For a careful description of the doctrine, see Alberto Groissman’s thesis: ‘Eu venho da floresta’, in Ecletismo e praxis xamánica daimista no Céu do Mapiá. Universidade de Santa Catarina, Santa Catarina, 1991. 25 Vera Froes, Santo Daime Cultura Amazónica. São Paulo, Jorués, 1987. 26 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, translated by J. W. Harvey. New York, Oxford University Press, 1923. 27 Alex Pollari de Alverga, O Livro das Miracoes. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1984, p. 65. 28 Mestre Irineu had a background in Christian esotericism, linked to the Comuniao do pensamento church of São Paulo (which still exists) and was a follower, for a period, of the Rosacruces. In 1920 the Círculo Regeneración y Fe, founded by him in Brasiléia (near the Bolivian border), was dissolved and in 1931 he founded the Comunidad de Alto Santo, which still survives, one of the actual branches of which is led by his widow, doña Peregrina. 29 A map of the region occupied by the Santo Daime community can be found in the book by Gilberto Gregorim, Santo Daime. Estados sobre simbolismo, doutrina e Povo de Juramidam. São Paulo, Ícone, 1991. 30 Froes, Santo Daime Cultura Amazónica. 31 Santo Daime could be classified as a subaltern religion, as proposed by Fernando Brumana and Elda González in Marginaba Sagrada. Campiñas, Editora da UNICAMP, 1991. 32 Alex Pollari de Alverga, Céu da Montanba, year II, no. 2. Visconde de Mauá, 1989, p. 2. 33 Jacqueline Briceño, ‘El Culto de María Lionza’. América Indígena, vol. XXX, no. 2, México, 1979. See also Dilia Flores Díaz, Trance, Posesión y Hablas Sagradas. Universidad del Zulia, Facultad Experimental de Ciencias, Maracaibo, 1988. Additionally, Angelina Pollak-Eltz, speaking of its ‘kaleidoscopic complexity’, summarizes the church of María Lionza: ‘It is a syncretic religion of recent formation, based in older indigenous forms of worship that were held in caves and in the mountains of Central Venezuela and that amalgamated gradually into a legend around one central figure – María Lionza – who for her followers is the exemplification of good. The religion, in its current form, syncretic product that has various roots, is based in a rudimentary conception of Christianity, but at the same time recalls African rituals with its deities and indigenous shamanism with notable aspects of Kardec Spiritism.’ In María Liorna. Mito y Culto Venezolano. Universidad Católica



Notes to pp. 166–169

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Andrés Bello, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Caracas, 1972, p. 59. 34 See Alejandro Frigerio, ‘Umbanda y Africanismo en Buenos Aires: duas etapa de un mesmo carainho religioso’. Comunicares do ISER, year 9, no. 35, Río de Janeiro, 1990. 35 Pierre Gaillard, ‘Brasília magnétique, Brasília magique’. Autrement, no. 44, Paris, November 1982, p. 230. 36 Hubert Fichte, Etnopoesia. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1987. 37 Michel Maffesoli, ‘Socialité et Naturalité ou l’écologisation du social’. Cahiers de l’imaginaire, no. 3, Toulouse, 1989. 38 I’d like to thank Roberto Motta for pointing me towards the possible importance of pantheism. For more about this unique religion, which, however, did not consume psychotropics, see Gonçalves Fernandes, O sincretismo religioso no Brasil. Guaira, Curitiba, 1941. 39 Interviewed in Joáo Santana’s article, ‘Povo do Daime constrói o Céu no coraçâo da Amazonia’. Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, January, 1986. 40 Gerald Weiss notes this tension among the Campa people, which the religion of Santo Daime borrows heavily from, in ‘The Campa Ayahuasca Cermony’, in M. Harner, ed., Hallucinogens and Shamanism. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973. 41 C. Monteiro, ‘Ritual do Tratamento e Cura’. Speech given at the First Symposium of Mental Health, Santarém, 1985 (handout). 42 Fernando De la Roque Couto, Sanios e Xamas. Master’s dissertation. Department of Anthropology, Universidade de Brasilia, 1989. 43 Jean Baruzi, Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique. Paris, Félix Alean, 1924, p. 235. 44 Georges Lapassade, Les Etats Modifiés de Conscience. Paris, PUF, 1987. 45 Lapassade, Les Etats Modifiés de Conscience, p. iv. 46 Lucien-Marie de Saint Joseph (‘Expérience Mystique et Expression Simbolyque chez Saint Jean de la Croix’, in Polarité du Symbole. Etudes Carmclitaines. Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, I960) sees this dyad in terms of affective experience and symbolic expression: ‘All affective experience does not automatically align to symbolic expression.’ Father Lucien-Marie proposes studying the symbol as a means of expression of the mystic experience. 47 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Ch. 4: ‘Postulates of Linguistics’. 48 Through trance, one attempts ‘to obtain the maximum intensity of the forces that circulate in the body’ (J. Gil, Métamorphoses du

262

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Corps. Paris, Editions de la Différance, 1985, p. 135). As stated by David Le Breton (Corps et Société. Paris, Librairie des Méridiens, 1985), the process of trance poses problems similar to those posed by sexuality, or, if we believe Deleuze and Guattari, to the problems of masochism and drugs, directed to the production of a body without organs, of pure intensity. 49 Clodomir Monteiro recognizes that ‘Santo Daime establishes an autonomous semiotic whole, essentially based in gestures and language’ (in ‘La cuestión de la realidad en la Amazonia’, p. 93). Martine Xiberras, analysing the failure of the psychedelic movement, laments that it wasn’t able to ‘forge a specific philosophy through an experimental knowledge of psychadelics and an attraction to other cultures’ (La Societé Intoxiquée, p. 106). 50 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Ch. 6: ‘How Do You Make Yourself A Body Without Organs?’ 51 Henri Ey, in his Traite des hallucinations (Paris, Masson et Cié, 1973), refers to the role sensation plays in the psychedelic experience (state compared to the mystic experience), expressing something similar in the following terms: ‘Even if sensation … represents the point of impact between the subject with his world, the experience is essentially corporal, it remains as if swallowed by a radical subjectivism’ (p. 679). 52 Edward MacRae, Guided by the Moon: Shamanism and the ritual use of ayahuasca in the Santo Daime religion In Brazil. NEIP, the Brazilian ‘Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactives Studies’. E-book. 53 José Gil (in Métamorphoses du corps, p. 19) distinguishes between the notions ‘energy’ and ‘force’. ‘Energy is an undetermined, uncodified force; it designates the intensive aspect of the force, its specificity in terms of motion (of a mechanism, of a process).’ Force would be a transformation of energy, under certain conditions: ‘While energy doesn’t send out more than the pure positivity of a flow, force supposes alterations produced by this flow, in particular a codification (encoding) of energy via an operator: energy becomes force within a field’, writes Gil, and he continues: ‘Since all force must act against another force, we must allow that the individualization of energy implies these tensions of forces, a battle, that is to say forces of opposing vectors.’ This idea helps us think of Santo Daime as a convergence and encounter of forces in an energetic field, to the extent that forces are differentiated from energy. 54 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, translated by Felicity Baker. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Mary Douglas, following Father Tempels, summarizes the notion of vital force, applying it – she writes (in Purity and Danger.



Notes to pp. 170–173

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London, Routledge, 1966) – ‘not merely to the Bantu, but much more widely. It probably applies to the whole range of thought which I am seeking to contrast with modern differentiated thought in European and American cultures’ (p. 83). 55 Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy, translated by Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist. Albany, SUNY Press, 1993. 56 Mircea Eliade, ‘Experiénce sensorielle et expérience mystique chez les primitives’, in Jacques Durandeaux, ed., Du corps à l’esprit. Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1989. According to him, in the mystic experience, there is a ‘willingness to change the sensory regimen’ that is equivalent to ‘a sacredness of the senses’ (p. 81). 57 Georges Bataille, Eroticism and Death, translated by Mary Dalwood. San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1986. 58 Michel Maffesoli, O tempo das tribus. São Paulo, Forense, 1987. 59 Roberto Machado, Nietzsche e a Verdade. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1984. 60 Anthony Henman, ‘Uso del ayahuasca en un contexto autoritario. El caso de la Uniao do Vegetal en Brasil’. América Indígena, vol. XLVI, no. 1, México, 1986. 61 Walter Dias Júnior, ‘Uso Ritual de Alucinógenos em Contextos Urbanos’. Field Study, Postgraduate in Social Sciences, PUC, São Paulo, 1988 (photocopy). 62 For more on the shamanic chants of the followers of Unión do Vegetal in the Peruvian Amazon, see L. E. Luna, Vegetalism. Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon. Stockholm, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 1986. 63 Henry Munn, ‘The Mushrooms of Language’, in M. Harner, ed., Hallucinogens and Shamanism. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973. 64 Douglas Sharon, Wizard of the Four Winds. New York, Free Press, 1978. 65 With respect to the religion of Maria Lionza, which has several elements in common with Santo Daime, Jacqueline Briceño (in ‘El Culto de María Lionza’) considers syncretism too narrow a characterization, since the Venezuelan faith, where Afro-Cuban, indigenous, black, Spiritism, Catholic and occult elements mix, ‘these elements of distinct origins were added to the religion over time, in a very lively way with continuous penetration, they mix, fight amongst themselves, are set aside, brought back in, feel political, economic, and religious pressure … there is a great internal mobility in these religions of María Lionza’ (p. 359–60). Additionally, Renato Ortiz (‘Du Syncrétisme a la Synthèse: Umfbanda, une religion brésilienne’. Archives de Sciences Sociales de la Religion, no. 40, Paris, 1975)

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discusses the idea of syncretism as applied to Umbanda: ‘We are no longer in the presence of syncretism, but of synthesis’ (p. 96). 66 E. Cousins, ‘Les formes couvelles du sacré aux États-Unis’, in Enrico Castelli, ed., Prospettive sul Sacro. Rome, Instituto di Studi Filosofici, 1974. Additionally, some similarities can be drawn to the visions reported during ‘transpersonal’ LSD sessions, drawings of which illustrate the book by Stanislav Grof (Beyond the Brain. Albany, SUNY Press, 1985) and those produced by ayahuasca. Something similar could be said as well about the experiences with mescaline described by Henri Michaux (L’Infini Turbulent. Paris, Gallimard Education, 1994). In all these cases, a certain manierismo is evident in the form, which could be compared to the schizoid art collected by Léo Navratil in Schizophrénie et Art. Brussels, Editions Compléxe, 1978. 67 Asceticism is – says Roger Bastide (in Les Problèmes de la Vie Mystique. Paris, Armand Colin, Paris, 1948) – a ‘mystic technique’ consisting in a ‘purification of the soul’ and is linked to the ‘perpetual movement of negation’ specific to mysticism (pp. 50, 52, 66). 68 Mircea Eliade, ‘Chasteté, sexualité et vie mystique chez les primitives’, in Mystique et Continence. Etudes Carmclitaines. Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1952, pp. 36–7.

Island Illusions 1 Alfonsina Storni, ‘Me at the Bottom of the Sea’, translated by Richard E. McDorman. 2011.

Island Desires 1 Frente de Liberación Homosexual [Gay Liberation Front], Argentine gay rights organization active between 1969 and 1976. 2 ‘In the PT gays have a voice’. 3 Partido dos Trabalhadores [Workers’ Party] (Brazil): ecclesiasticalTrotskian union alliance; a kind of tropical incarnation of the ‘Conexión Polaca’. 4 ‘In the PT the queers have a voice’. 5 Brazilian feminist, candidate for the PMDB party (Frente de Oposición ‘Centro-izquierdista’ [Central-Leftist Opposition Front] made up of liberals, populists, Stalinists, and Christian Democrats.



Notes to p. 205

265

The Corpse of the Nation 1 coup poudre, coup l’air, coup n’ame: incantations for zombification in Hatian voodoo. 2 bokor: priest who officiates the Haitian voodoo ritual.

Index

Note: ‘P’ in sub-entries denotes Perlongher abortion 26, 27, 134 feminist essay on xviii Acevedo, Zelmar 76n activism vii, xxvi, 30, 67, 78 erotic xx feminist 70 leftist xxiii lower-middle-class union 76 P’s first taste of ix political viii, xi, xii; queer politics closely linked to x sexual liberation 86 see also gay activists Adán, Martín 153 aesthetics xii, 100, 131, 138, 149, 154, 156, 163, 168 banality 130 dated 129 ferocious and irreducible 157 P’s commitment to vii profane 130 rejection of xvii sociality 172

Afro-Brazilian spiritualism 163, 165 Afro-Cuban religious items 166 ageism xii Agustini, Delmira 102 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) 71, 90 campaigns for prevention 89 death from: mass 86; scale of 59; stats on 34 epidemic/crisis vii, xiv, 43 final blow to sexual revolution xviii moral panic of 62 only weapon to combat 44 outbreak/advent of 58, 89, 115 P’s diagnosis and battle with viii, xiv panic induced by 88 propagandistic nature of campaign against 44 social apparatus built around 87 spectre of 36

Index Aira, César 3 Airiouca 165 Alcalde, Ramón 180n, 181 Aleijadinho 96 Alfonsina (journal) 15n, 26n alienation 8, 130 fundamental x Almendros, Néstor Alonso, Dámaso 102, 118 Alt-Right viii Alto Santo, Acre 165 Amazonas state 165 American Gay Power 76 amnesty persecutors and persecuted 67 political prisoners xii anal coitus 23, 112 crude descriptions of 44 importance bestowed to 55 anarchists xviii, xxiii, 26, 73, 80, 126, 140, 201 see also Black Flag; Eros group; O Inimigo do Rei; Utopía Andean heritage 167 androgyny xi, 90 aggressive advance of 31 animalism 35, 74 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari) xxiv, 24, 34, 35, 253n15 anti-westernness 96 artform 117–18 Antonio, João 52–3, 253n17 Antunes, Ricardo xxvii Arameos 243 Arce 165 Arenas, Reinaldo xix, 113, 122, 124 Argentina viii, xv, 2, 5, 104, 107 baroquization of social realism 119 dictatorship in xii, xix, 34, 67, 177

267 emotional and political membranes of mythology xxiv father of the gay movement in vii first attempt at gay organization in 76 first gay rights group xxiii founders of feminism vii gay struggle in 241–7 genocide horrors 21 history of: intellectual, fragile xxvii homosexuality in 21–2 innovating poetry xxi left-wing history (1960s) 211n military coup (1976) 83, 134 most important loca in history of xix neo-baroque poetry xvi, 95–100, 103, 105, 122 nonfiction in xxi, xxii numerous configurations of machismo xviii one of the most important poems in literature of xxii passion for polemics 3 permanent tension in 140 power of surrealism 101 real need for freedom from machismo 77 repression in 83 revolution squashed by totalizing counterrevolution x sexual persecution 127 target of moralizing campaigns xxiii timid postdictatorial underground scene xvii ultimate fear of all essayists xxvi see also Buenos Aires; Córdoba; Falkland Islands;

268 Index FLHA; Lamborghini; Mendoza; Onganía; Perón; Peronism; Rosario; Tiempo Argentino Argentine Commission 6 Argentine Gay Liberation Front see FLHA Argentine National Constitution 246, 247 Argentinean National Anthem 8 armed organizations x, xii arrests 15, 17, 38, 185, 194, 247 gay activist 80 P’s failure to comply with police mandates 249 systematic xii Artaud, Antonin 2, 72, 95, 144, 153, 156–7, 158 Asia Minor 243 Association of Psychologists 80 Aubrée, Marión 161 authoritarian democracies x ayahuasca experimentation with 10 ingestion of xiv, xxvi, 158 religion of 159–74 ritual use of viii Aztec civilization 244 Babel (journal) 1n, 129n Baigorria, Osvaldo xvii, xxi Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo 250 Bajo 204 Baldía 204 baroque mysticism xv baroquification 116–20 Barreiros, Raúl 191n Baruzi, Jean 168, 261n43 Bataille, Georges 4, 30, 35, 37, 38, 41, 52, 74, 87, 171 Baudelaire, Charles 50, 108, 150–1 Baudrillard, Jean 7, 58, 253n26 Beckett, Samuel 5

Belo Horizonte 165 Benjamin, Walter 50, 108, 150–1 Berra, Héctor 1–2 Black Community Council 71 Black Flag (anarchist group) 78 Black Power xii blasphemy xxiv, 191n open desire for xxv Boca do Acre 165 bodily fluids hygienic barrier to exchange of xv passionate exchange of 11 seminal 107, 115 sounds that produce sensation of xvi body articulating the plane of xvi artistic explorations of x carnivalizing xvi collective political xx Dionysian convulsions of 61 establishing the power of the head over 35 freedom from patriarchal ideology of x genitalization of x language and 103 science of 36 sexualized x, 70 territorialization of x territory and xix transformative impulses experienced at level of xvi-xvii see also corporal order Boedo 181 Boletim ABIA 85n Bolivia 161, 163 see also La Paz Borges, Jorge Luis 65, 100, 122, 156, 179, 181 Bosch, Hieronymus 29 Bosch, Víctor (pseud.) 177n

Index bourgeoisie 40, 47, 56, 95, 222, 245 moral norms 247 nationalist 178 tidy men, bearing traces of conjugal normality 31 see also petite bourgeoisie Bracho, Coral 104 Brasilia 165 Brazil viii, xv, xxii, 161, 163 desbunde xiii dictatorship 67 end of long military dictatorship xii first gay and lesbian group founded xiii Grupo Gay de Bahía 23 hub for the sex trade xxiii imagined racial democracy xvii locas characterized in xi Marquis de Itú xxiii most popular president in history of xiv multiracial society 126 obsession with spotlessness that commands living-rooms 63 ritual experiences of an emerging religion xxiii transition to democracy xii, xiii transvestite invasion 29–32 see also Rio; São Paulo Buenos Aires xv, 2, 3, 105, 108, 119, 120, 227n, 249 Avellaneda 1, 236, 248 circuslike hippie culture xxvi constant allusions to homosexuality 19 Constitution neighbourhood 156 cruising Lavalle in xxiii first attempt at gay organization in Argentina 76 Flores (working-class

269

neighbourhood) 16, 129, 251n2 gay community in 81; see also Gay Liberation Front intellectual circles xxvi International Seminar (1989) 147n Lavalle Street xxii, xxiii, 20 movie house section of city centre xxii P born (1949) vii, ix, 248 prostitution 17 Saint Mary Jane of xxv Umbanda growing at surprising rate in 166 wave of crimes 34 see also El Porteño; University of Buenos Aires Buenos Aires Public Radio 191n bureaucracy viii, 230 Burroughs, William 162, 259n13 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 123 Caiafà, Janice 65–6, 253n24, 254n4 camp 120 baroquizing xvi Cámpora, Héctor 249 Campos, Haroldo de xix, 101, 105 candomblé 6, 10, 166, 170 Cangi, Adrián xxvii, 250 Caparrós, Martín xxvii capitalism vii, xxiv, 70, 123, 124 construction that led to ix destroyed x end/fall of ix expansion of 244 heteronormative family should be destroyed along with x more modern version of 178 patriarchy decried as a construction that led to ix pillars upholding xiv

270 Index sexual oppression considered a product of 78 solitary drug of 162 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 7 Caribbean 244 Caribbean nuances 103, 137 carnivalism 60–2 Carpentier, Alejo 178 Carrera, Arturo xix, 3, 103, 250, 256nn18/21 Carriego, Evaristo 102 carving 10, 35, 38, 104, 231 repeated 138 Castañeda, Carlos 148 Castro, Fidel 21, 113, 123, 124, 128 Catholic Gays of Argentina 78 Catholicism 161, 165, 166 all-powerful Church 178 censorship 22, 125, 130, 245 Central-Leftist Opposition Front 264n6 Centro de Estudios y Asistencia Sexual 19n Cerdos y Peces 191n Céu de Mapiá 165 CGT see General Confederation of Labour Chiaretti, Daniela xxvii Chicago School 72 Chile 37, 104, 179, 206 coup (1973) 80 repression 83 see also Eltit; Maquieira; Muñoz; Pinochet Chimerès 46n Christianity 126, 165, 213 emergence of 244 religion based in rudimentary conception of 260 civil rights 67, 68 Clastres, Pierre 54, 138, 253n19, 255n22

clients, of transvestites 31–2 Cochabamba 181 collective shamanism 167 College of Philosophy and Letters 79 Colombia (Sibundoy Valley) 161–2 Colonia Cinco Mil 164–5, 167 Commission Against the Prohibition of Birth Control 82 Communicações do ISER 33n Communist Party 179 concentration camps 127, 139, 245 homosexual 113 see also forced labour camps Conducta Impropia (film, 1984) 125 Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT) 179 conjugality 31, 52, 58, 85, 115 crusade aimed to penetrate borders of xxiv heterosexuality presented as synonymous with 23 conjugation delicious 181 intensity of 66 consanguinity xxiv Copi (R. D. Botana) 59, 90 Córdoba 17, 19, 24, 78 revolt (1969) 6, 76, 139 corporal order xiii, 43–5 corporality 119, 135 desirous xvi full-bodied 98, 150 Correas, Carlos 140 Corriente, Chico 167 counterculture xxv, 68 journals of xviii resistance to machismo xi youth xii counterrevolution 21, 123, 125 sexual viii

Index totalizing x coup l’air 204, 265n1 coup n’ame 205, 265n1 coup poudre 204, 265n1 coups civil xii ecclesiastic xii military xii, 80, 83, 134 Couto, Fernando de la Roque 167 Cozarinsky, Edgardo 148 Crete 243 Crowd Psychology 181–2 cruising xxii, xxiii, 24, 38, 41, 50, 52, 108, 191 casual xi eight to ten hours of 53 erotic 6 frenzied 30, 37 Cuaderno del peyote 5 Cuadernos de la Comuna 133n Cuba 138 archetypal machismo 124 exiled intellectuals 123 extinction or invisibility of classic loca 127 government treatment of cultural dissidents 123 homosexual concentration camps 113 multiracial society 126 neo-baroque poetry xvi, 95–100, 121, 122, 123 repression 89, 127 revolution (1959) ix, 21, 124, 126 ultra-machismo 126 see also Afro-Cuban; Castro; Havana; Lezama Lima; Sarduy; UNEAC cultural materials xv Dala Stella, Carlos xxvii Darío, Rubén 101, 153 Death Squadrons 34, 35 Decency League 22, 27

271

Delacroix, Eugène 7 Deleuze, Gilles ix, xi, xiii, xix, xxix, 2, 3, 46n, 66, 69, 74, 89, 96, 98, 109, 114, 135, 136, 141, 150, 168, 169, 250, 261n47, 262n48 works: Fold, The 256n3; Foucault 252n1(Marica); Logic of Sense 140, 257n2(Baroquification); see also Anti-Oedipus; Thousand Plateaus democracy 181, 252n1(Shaky Ground) new xviii repressive practices even after xviii restored 71, 72, 127 return to xix, 20 transition to vii, xii, xiii, 30 desbunde xii, xiii, xvii, 30 desire xxiii, 3, 97, 110, 113, 155, 167 actualized 111 agencements of 109 attempts to politicize x caverns of xxiv conditions for a cartography of 65–7 death 185 direct action of 107 directionality of 111 double movement of 108 drifting 58 errant 112 fulfilling 217 furtive object of 150 heterosexual xxiv history dazed by 144 homosexual xxiv, 55, 187 imperious 108 intense molecularity of 141 intersections of bodies floating on wings of 52

272 Index island 184–8 masculine homoerotic xiii, xv micro-tragedies of 4 mischievous 109 monopoly on 187 moving 225 open xxv P theorizes on viii plane of ix, 135, 136 politics and 13–91 privatizing the urban circuits of politics and xv relegated 134 repression 178 same-sex 20 scales of 109 scene of 111 secret 123 sexual 45, 245 strong link between politics and xxvii through social change x unleashing of xvii desubjectification force of viii new means of xix point of 35 transvestite xviii Dias Júnior, Walter 171, 263n61 dictatorship vii, 6, 20, 34, 127, 185, 202 authoritarian 67, 76 bloody 67, 177 civil x class 178 declaration calling people to vote against 79 denouncing and opposing 246 ecclesiastic x fascist 177 genocide of 21 left’s alignment with 184 liberation from 247

maintenance of repressive practices xviii monstrous 84 most celebrated poem written during xix paranoid nature of 179 patriotic delirium 178 state 178 see also military dictatorship differences xxiii, 41, 47, 74, 185 age 54 class xii, 54 cultural xii erotic 126 exaggerated 54 explosion of 75 extensive expansion of 75 gender 54 immense 55 inherent xiii measured 69 opinion 138 radical new conception of vii subtle 77 Dionysianism 4, 6, 61, 67, 90, 130, 148, 149, 152, 155, 157–8, 163, 168–71, 174 disappeared persons x, xii, 6, 185, 202, 223 kidnappings and 21 dissidents xii, 67, 68, 126 cultural 123 lost voices of 72 violence against vii division of labour 75 sexual ix-x Donoso, José 37 drag queens xvii, 59 drug addicts 27 drug culture 162 drug use/users 44, 169, 172 deritualized 168, 174 P in prison accused of possession 249

Index drugs xxvi, 90–1, 124 divine faith exiled to sordid circuit of 162 fundamental role played in all societies 162 hard 168, 172 masochism and 262n48 mass experimentation with 172 psychedelic xiii psychoactive 155, 171 religion and 259n13 ridiculous war on 172 shameful reprobation of person detained because of 185 zone where they can be acquired 74 see also hallucinogens; sex and drugs Duarte, Evita xxv, 195 see also Perón, Eva Duvignaud, Jean 54, 253n20 Echavarren, Roberto xxvii, 3, 101, 104, 250, 256nn5/10/14/16, 260n31 Eclectic Universal Spiritual Brotherhood 166 ecstasy 3, 88, 130 absolute 87 anthropology of xix, 145–74 ascendant 90, 172 certain drugs bring us close to 91 collective 171 descendant 172 Dionysian 4 fleeting 87 hallucinogens and 91 liquid 144 mystic xv, xix ostentation of 9 P theorizes on viii poetics of 97, 168 poetry and 143, 153–8

273

potentiation of 171 power of 172 romantic 107 sexual 90, 174 shaman-induced 139 transcendent xiv Ecuador 161 effeminateness/effeminacy ix, 4, 41, 121, 127, 181 celebrated xv gay xv, 49, 81 homosexual males xi, 252n3 politics of x unnatural xvi young men 125 Egypt 243 Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo 214 El Caudillo (fascist magazine) 22, 83 El Lenguaje Libertario (Ferrer) 65n El Porteño 19–20, 29n, 85n, 142n, 159n, 191n, 249, 250 Eliade, Mircea 170, 173–4, 263n56, 264n68 Eltit, Diamela 105 Emanuel (Christian group) 78 Engels, Friedrich 124 erogenous zones xxiv, 56, 58, 98, 150 dislocation by 111 Eros 155 death throes of xxiv sex separated from 150 violent xxv Eros group (anarchist-Trotskyist collective) xi, 77, 78, 79, 248 fierce criticism of heteronormative family x founding of ix eroticism x, xx, 6, 47, 59, 74,

274 Index 87, 98, 110, 111, 113, 126, 155, 171 baroque 128 certain expectation of adventure 150 death and 41 exaggerated xvi philosophy, politics and xi scandalous adventures 134 urbe 148 see also homoeroticism Escaleras del Sagrado Corazón, Las (Copi) 59 Escobar, Ruth 24, 187 Espina, Eduardo 105 ethics xvi, 117 P’s commitment to vii Evita see Péron, Eva Evolutionary Eclecticism 165 exploitation 126, 244 role of sexual oppression in maintenance of 82 systematic and minuscule 109 women and feminized bodies x Ezeiza Massacre (1973) 80 Falangists 139 Falkland Islands xxv, 175–88 issue revisited in Argentina and UK xix Falklands War (1982) 19–20, 24, 34, 139, 177–8, 179 allusions and analogies to 184n P opposes 249 political stance on xxii popular fervour for xxv fascism 22, 34, 36, 80, 83, 177 everyday 6 machismo and xviii, 39, 79 patriotic 178 tools needed to understand viii wanted by the masses 113, 178 see also microfascism Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 9

Federation of Psychiatrists 80 Feminine Condition Council 71 femininity 187 destabilized model of xi exaggerated increase in supply of 31 extreme version of 49 supposed 32 women should own their own 24 see also microfemininity feminism xii, xiv, 24, 67, 78, 81, 248, 255n21, 264n6 aggressive 187 analysis of fascism xviii becoming-woman heralded by 90 essay on abortion xviii founders in Argentina vii fundamental ally for xvii lean-in viii revision of Marxist theory ix sexual politics and 82 silencing of activism 70 socialist 124 surging viii tide of the current revolution viii see also Persona feminization x local characters linked to xvii unnatural xvi Feo, Rodríguez 123 Fernández, Macedonio 101 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 244 Fernández Moreno, Baldomero 102 Fernández Moreno, Cesar 256n15 Ferreira da Silva, Pedro José 106–7 Ferrer, Christian xvii, xxi Fichte, Hubert 154, 166

Index Fin de Siglo 33n FLHA (Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina) ix, xi, xxii, 76, 84, 186, 241–3, 245–9, 264n2 active (1971–6) xxiii alignment with Peronism and leftist revolutionaries x born in climate of politicization 77 fight for sexual and ideological liberation x forced to suspend activities and dissolve xii history of 76–84 homage xiii ideas brought with P to Brazil xiii methodology of xiii old slogan of xviii Florianopolis 165 Florida 181 Folha de São Paulo 9, 40n, 43n, 60n, 63n, 116n, 121n, 250 foot fetish 106–15, 257nn forced labour camps 124 Foucault, Michel xxiii, 4, 35, 36, 40, 65, 86, 87, 89, 99, 114, 139, 149, 169, 254n3 France 5, 38, 126 massacre of Cathars 244 May 1968 events 6 see also Paris Franco Bahamonde, Francisco 127 Franqui, Carlos 21 Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina see FLHA Freud, Sigmund xxiv, 20, 35, 110, 149, 185 Freudian School of Mar del Plata 134–5 Froes, Vera 164

275

Fry, Peter 48–9, 252n5 Galtieri Castelli, Leopoldo xxv Gamarra, A. 244 gaminos 54 Ganso Verde (Goose Green) 181 García, Germán 102, 134, 137, 138 García, Marcelo 6 García, Marcos 20 García Lorca, Federico 100 Gaspar, María Dulce 30 gay activists 186, 248–9 arrest of 80 P’s disenchantment with xiv Gay Association in Tucumán 78 gay clubs/cabarets xv, 53, 80 gay ghettos xiv, xxv, 35, 47, 70–1 undercover journalists in 35 gay identity xxii, 188 Anglo-Saxon model of xi construction of xiii, 186 neoliberal appropriation of xiv normalizing xi, xiv P’s solemn criticism of xxiii repressed 187 vindicating 187 Gay Lib (US) 127 Gay Liberation Army of the Falklands 184 Gay Liberation Front (Buenos Aires) 39, 70, 78 old slogan of xviii see also FLHA gay men xxii, 186, 187 effeminate xv murdered 41 gay rights xxiii-xxiv, 68, 184n broader 77 first movements 124 modern-day demands for 48 see also FLHA gender 23, 69 fixed oppositions between 70

276 Index specific and hierarchical functions based on ix-x see also transgender persons gender difference 54 General Confederation of Labour (CGT, Argentina) 179 Genet, Jean 3, 38, 54, 55, 89, 107, 113, 114, 140 genocide 60 brave protests to halt 244 horrors of 21 Germany (pre-Nazi) 186 ghettoization gays 78 identity 75 ghettos xxiv, xxvi, 47–8, 75 see also gay ghettos Ginsberg, Allen 2 Giorgio, Marosa de 105 Girondo, Oliverio 15, 101, 121, 251nn1–2(Cover Up) Gismonti, Egberto 8 Gnosis 166 Gombrowicz, W. 6, 26, 140, 202 Góngora, Luis de 2, 100, 102, 118, 119, 122 González, Horacio xxvii, 201n, 250, 256n5 González Echevarría, R. 96, 100, 256n5 Greece 243 Dionysian rituals 6 Gregorim, Gilberto 166, 260n29 GRN see Guardia Restauradora Nacionalista Grossman, Rosa L. de (pseud.) 15n, 26, 249 Grupo Gay de Bahía 23, 41 Grupo Nuestro Mundo 76, 78 Grupo Parque 79–80 Grupo Políta Sexual 82 Guardia Restauradora Nacionalista (GRN, Falangist) 139

Guattari, F. ix-xi, xiii, xix, 46n, 66, 69, 89, 109, 135, 168, 169, 250, 255nn14–18, 262nn48 see also Anti-Oedipus; Thousand Plateaus guerrillas xvii, 83, 164 agrarian 211 Peronist activists 80 systematic destruction and annihilation of xii see also Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo Güiraldes, R. 2 Gulf of Guayaquil 244 Gurkhas 19, 27 Gusmán, Luis 134, 181 Haitian voodoo ritual 265nn1–2 hallucinogens xiv, 91, 139, 158, 164, 172 collective use of 162 Havana 97, 100, 120, 123, 126, 128 National Congress of Education and Culture (1971) 125 healings 167 Heer, Liliana 250 Henman, Anthony 171, 263n60 hermeticism 9, 97, 99, 153, 155, 157, 172 Hernández, Juan José 224 Herzog, Werner 9, 17, 72 heteronyms 156 heterosexuality x, 44, 55, 69, 187, 244 compulsive and exclusive 78 fortress of gayness strong enough to resist tyranny of 23 further proof of 49 male enlightened 82; sedentary figure of 39

Index normalcy marches under the banner of 23 possibilities repressed in the name of morality 245 sexual oppression of 78 hippies xii, xxvi, 164, 247 Hirschfeld, Magnus 186 Hitler, Adolf 21 Hittites 243 Hocquenghem, Guy 36, 37, 51, 55, 253n9, 255n2, 256n12, 259n19 Hoffman, Albert 160–1 homoeroticism xi masculine xiii, xv repression of encounters 127 homophobia 34, 75, 87 leftist ix violent xviii Homosexuales (journal) 81 homosexuality xvii, 22, 27, 55, 69, 70–3, 113, 124 accusations of 123 active 19 call for an end to 83 constant allusions to 19 death of 59 defined as social pathology 125 delinquency and 56 denouncement of 83, 243 disappearance of xiv, xix, 85–91 dissolution of 59 feminine 90, 243 identity of xix leadership’s apparent change of position on 127 marginalization and 48 masculine 48–9, 85, 243 normalization of 24, 89 not tolerated 242 outward denial of 38 passive 19

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persecution of 37 preoccupation with 20 public promotion of 90 reactionary 23, 246 repression of 243 revolutionary 23 stepping out of 86 stigmatization of 244 strong fear of 34 sublimated 20 surveys on 79 suspected crime of 21 taboo of 243, 244 talk about 21 understanding the experience of xi see also homosexuals; lesbians; male homosexuality homosexuals 36 concentration camps for 113 effeminate males xi, 252n3 lifestyle of x masculine males not identified as xi older 252n1(Avatars) practices in public spaces xi presence in formation of youth 125 promise to put an end to 247 proposal to come down hard on 22 revolutionary 80 traditional suffering of 21 Hule 203n, 221n human rights xxiv Hyksos 243 identification xvii, 75, 187 obsessive 40 identity 24, 126, 137, 165, 171, 181, 184n, 255 affirmation of 70 Alt-Right’s focus on viii antidote to fixation with xix

278 Index archaeology of 71 becoming and 68–71 break with 155 coherent, construction of 72 crusade against xxiii debate on xiv, 90 deconstruction of xxvi deviant 72 difference over x escape from 51 essential 140 fixed 59 genealogy of 71 ghettoizing 75 homosexual xix illusion of 48 illusory preoccupation over 187 interior 114 molar 69, 115 national xix, 8, 186, 188 paradigms of 74 personal 51, 156 perverse race to assume 110 podophile 114 rapid institutionalization and neutralization of xviii rejection of 51 repressed 187 sexual xix, 49, 85; paranoid focus on 90 social 49 totalizing 114 see also gay identity identity struggles xii idiolect 25, 156 immorality 22 imperialism 178 Incan civilization 163, 244 inequalities xiii differences and xii, xvii hierarchical, libidinization of 110 Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana 142

instrumentality xvi International Seminar (Buenos Aires 1989) 147n Isola, Mario 3 Italian FUORI group 83 Italy 117 Jamandreu, Paco 21, 201 Jarfalla 191n Jesus, Clementina de 73 Jiménez, Reynaldo 105 Jiménez Leal, Orlando 125 Jinkis, Jorge 180n, 181, 182 Journalists Union of São Paulo 184n journals xxvi anarchist xviii countercultural xviii feminist xviii see also under various titles, e.g.: Alfonsina; Babel; El Porteño; Fin de Siglo; Persona; Somos Juramidam 163, 167, 169 Kamenszain, Tamara xix, xxvii, 3, 104 Kennedy, John F. 166 Kinsey 184 kitsch 85, 97, 107, 120 baroquizing xvi tidy 131 Klossowski, Pierre 109 Kondori, José 96 Kozer, José 104 Krakow 185 Kumec, Ana 3 La Caja (journal) 95n La Letra A (journal) 147n, 153n La Paz 7, 163 La Perla 204 Lacan, J. xxiv, 102, 134 Lacey, Edward A. 191n

Index Lamarque, Libertad 22 Lamborghini, Leónidas xix, 102, 119, 121–2 Lamborghini, Osvaldo xix, 2, 3, 98, 102–4, 133–41, 154, 180, 185, 187, 253n23, 256nn20/24, 257n3 Land, Vera xxvii language 2, 10, 105 articulating the plane of the body through xvi baroque 99, 117 body and 103 communicational use of xxvii communicative 98 demented 118 discursive superficiality of media and 131 galloping glimmers of 153 gauchesca tradition 216n gestures and 262n49 guerrilla xvii hermetic 155 imperial xvii incandescent 97 inflation of 138 liquefaction of 135 loca xvii lustful 140 manipulative and objectifying xvi mysterious 149 nucleus of 140 panting contortions of 100 particular usage of 25 perversion of xvi phosphorescent 97 poetic xv, 118, 136 political ix politicizing xvi prioritized xv radical xix revolt of 132 sensualizing xvi, 119

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sonorities and distortions of xxvii subverting xvi, 137, 139 worked with the care of a goldsmith xv see also Portuguese language; Spanish language Lanusse, Alejandro Agustín 77, 79 Las Casas, Fr 244 Latin America homosexuality in: invisible, promiscuous male xi; understanding the experience of xi ideas, history and political practice vii inspiration for the wave of feminism surging within viii LGBT in ix, xvii locas, madwomen xv marica/chongo xiii posterior generations who rediscovered literature in xix queer notion: category complementary to xvii; later development of politics x-xi; origin of theory viii; subversive splendour xvi see also Argentina; Brazil; Chile; Colombia; Cuba; Ecuador; Mexico; Panama; Peru; Venezuela Lauer, Mirko 104 Lawrence, David Herbert 2 Lawyers’ Association 80 Leary, Timothy 162, 259n16 Lecturas Críticas leftist political parties 77 Leftist Revolutionary Movement 214 leftist unions 77 leftists ix, 80, 188 FLH alignment with revolutionaries x

280 Index homophobic ix intellectual xix, xxvi political activism of xxiii revolutionary xii social change and xiii see also Central-Leftist Opposition Front; National Leftist Socialist Party; ultra-leftists Leia Livros 201n Leiris, Michel 155 Lelé (P’s jealous little fag) 191n Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 178 León, Samuel xxvii lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement xiii first group/founders in Latin America ix, xvii LGBT Pride xii right-wing viii rights viii lesbians xiii, 78, 235 P allied with xvii special courses to learn how to spot 21 see also homosexuality; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement Lévi-Strauss, Claude 170, 262–3nn Leyland, Winston 191n Lezama Lima, José xix, 2, 3, 6, 22, 96–7, 100, 101, 103, 109, 117, 118, 122–4, 127, 138, 156–7, 256n6 Paradiso 95, 116, 120, 125, 128, 257n1(Baroquification) LGBT see lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement Libertella, Héctor 103, 122, 133, 137–8, 250, 256n22 libido xiii, xvi, xxv, 20, 35, 36,

38, 39, 50–2, 56, 62, 89, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113, 124, 140, 178, 181, 185, 244 Lieberman, Lisa 162 Literal magazine 134 living-rooms 225 deficiency syndrome 63–4 familiarity and subtle estrangement 129 kitsch 131 locas (madwomen)129 acting all macho 49 characterized xi classic 127 discursivity specific to language of xvii discussion over the term 81 entire rainbow of xvii fatal meeting between macho and 34 language of xvii most important in Argentine history xix political alliance between xviii tradition of xv violent death of 34 see also madwomen; maricas logo-ego-centrism 35, 72 López, Juan 182 Louis XV, king of France 6, 96, 107 LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) 162, 173, 264n66 Lugones, Leopoldo 101 Luján 20 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio xiv Lunes de Revolución (weekly publication) 123 Luxembourg 142 Luxemburg, Rosa 178 Lyotard, Jean-François 10, 48, 74, 107, 252n4, 255n29 Machado, Roberto 149, 158, 171

Index Macharowsky, Pablo 19 machismo xii, 38, 75 archetypal 124 countercultural resistance to xi fascism and xviii, 39, 79 gay effeminate nature the flip side of 81 military 184 numerous configurations of xviii rampant 127 real need for freedom from 77 ultra- 126 working-class 47 MacRae, Edward 172 Madariaga, Francisco 101 madwomen (locas) xv-xvi, xx explicit poetics and politics of xvii marica xvii most powerful xix P’s feminist friends ordered to fuck like xviii see also maricas; locas Maffesoli, Michel 58, 65, 130, 147, 148, 152, 166–7, 170, 174, 250 Maia (undercover journalist) 35 male homosexuality disappearance of 90 invisible, promiscuous xi major incarnations of 89 see also homosexuality male prostitution xxii, 41, 49, 50, 73 artificial appearance of hypermasculinity 38 field research on xiii halo of sordidness surrounds the practice of 56 investigation into xxiv isolated object in the world of 51 marginalized 58–9

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social (or microsocial) practice of 47 work in gay cabarets 53 zones of 47, 48 Mallarmé, Stéphane 96, 101, 150 Malvinas see Falkland Islands Maquieira, Diego 104 Maranhão 163 Marcuse, H. 110 Margaride, Luis 81 marginal personality 71–2 marginalization 24, 41, 67, 68, 70, 75, 79, 131, 187 crazy and primitive 72 dissimilar protagonists of 74 economic 48 gay 78, 246; and other deviants 44 ghettoization and 75 homosexuality and 48 male prostitutes 58–9 massive processes of 73 minority 54 passions of the queer and the fag 37 sexual 48, 110 socioeconomic 110 maricas xiii, 47, 48, 54, 126 aggressively feminist 187 androgynous xi defended as countercultural resistance to machismo xi dichotomy between macho and 49, 186 discussion over the term 81 flamboyant xvii, xi, 89 inherent falsehoods of 187 madwomen xvii microfemininity as disruptive aspect of xi murdered xviii, 33–9 scandalous 187 used to denominate effeminate homosexuals 252n3

282 Index wants of 57 way to entertain themselves 188 see also locas, madwomen Mariel 126 marriage 179 equality in x normal 89 same-sex xxiv semi-dissolution of 124 martial law 83, 177 Martínez, Paulo xxvii Martínez, Tomás Eloy 250, 256n16 Martínez de Perón, Isabel 27, 82 Martini Real, Juan Carlos 250 Marx, Karl 149, 178 Marxism/Marxists 77, 82 feminist revision of ix homophobic tradition of 124 staunch 178 see also Neo-Marxian Church; Partido Comunista Marxista Leninista masculinity 86, 126 conventional, valorization of 56 destabilized model of xi hyper 38 loss of 55 measured 54 normal xviii, 39 orthodox, separation from 49 outward expression of 252n1(Avatars) masochism 56 active 114 drugs and 262n48 gays always flirting with 89 passive 114 see also sadomasochism Mattoso, Glauco xix, 106–15 Mauá, Visconde de 164, 260n32 Maugham, Somerset 2

Mauss, Marcel 170 Mayan civilization 244 McCarthy era (US 1950s) 126 Mendes Catani, Afranio xxvii Mendoza 78, 249 Mercado (journal) 247 Meunier, Jaques 54 Mexico 104, 172, 178 Mexico Aztec 244 Miami 27, 126, 166–7 michés 38, 39, 41, 47–51, 53–6, 107, 186, 187, 250, 252n1(Avatars) microfascism xviii, 38–9, 111, 141 blossoming of 57 threats of 139 microfemininity xi, 69 micropolitics viii, xiii, 40, 64, 70, 113 cartography and 74 daily 67 experimentation xii Guattari’s concept of x intensification of 141 minoritary 74 Milán, Eduardo 104 militarization xii military dictatorship 227n, 252n-Loca Sex) long xii oppression by 77 political violence inflicted by x systematic persecution of gays 83 Military High School scandal (1942) 20 minoritary becomings xii, xiii, 65–75, 254–5nn misogyny xi, 71 implicit xiv Molina, Daniel 140 Molina, Enrique 2, 101 Monteiro, Clodomir 167

Index Montoneros 80 Moraes, Reginaldo xxvii morality campaigns for 81, 187 fanatical and intolerant 244 preoccupation with 20 right-wing ix sexual 245 Moreno, María xxvii Moreno, Nahuel 221 Mota, Alfredo 165 Mota y Meló, Sebastián 165 Moura, Paulo 8 muddy baroque xv, xvi, xix, 93–144 Munn, Henry 172, 263n63 Muñoz, Gonzalo 104 Mussolini, Benito 185 mute passion 72–4 Nadie Parecía 123 Narvaja, Aurelio xxvii National Leftist Socialist Party 214 nationalism 177, 178, 182 Alt-Right’s focus on viii Native Americans 162, 172, 244 Navratil, Leo 156 Nazis 113, 126, 245 SA Stormtroopers 185 Negri, Toni 73 Nélida 16 neobarroso xv, xviii, 100–3, 105 dripping with murky fluids xvi most iconic example of xix see also muddy baroque neoliberalism vii, viii, xiv Neo-Marxian Church 162 Neruda, Pablo 2 Neves, Tancredo 216–20 New York 104 Nietzsche, Friedrich xxiii, 140, 144, 149, 158, 170 nomadism xxvii, 3, 37, 38, 50,

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54, 63, 66, 73–5, 109, 115, 125, 150 ancient 52 baroque 120 coffeeshop 8 criminalized and medicalized 41 deviant 148 fixed 5 hippie generation sons and daughters 164 inherent to homosexual desire 187 lunatics and 119 makeup of 53 messianic impulse 165 poets of the Hebraic tribes 243 punishment for excesses 48 sexual practices xiv, 58 static 97 surprise is a trait of 108 territorial paths 53, 147 underworld 41 urban 46, 57 Nós por exemplo 85n Nova Friburgo 165 Novo Leia 216n Nueva Sociedad (magazine) 46n Nuñez de Balboa, Vasco 244 O Inimigo do Rei (anarchist magazine) 249 O’Gorman, Camila 6, 101 Old Testament 243 Olivos 21 Onganía, Juan Carlos 21, 76 Operation Triple P (Pimps, Prostitutes and Paedophiles) 126 opiates see hallucinogens oppression 63, 112, 113, 114, 246, 247 gaining pleasure through 110 gay minority reaction in the face of 77

284 Index sexist ix sexual 78, 81, 82 oral sex 23, 112 orgy viii, xix, 41, 118 darkness of xxvi dilution of individuality in fusion of 171 excesses of 87 homosexual 86; cadets participating in 20 imagined hell of 22 inflation of the gay liberation movement 36 nationalist 177 redistributive 202 socialness of 58 underground network 58 unions of entwined bodies 60 Orígenes group 100, 123 Our Lady of Conception, Queen of the Forest 170–1 Oviedo see Fernández de Oviedo Padilla, Heberto 125 paedophilia 53, 54, 109, 126, 131, 152 accused suspects of 20 nocturnal 42 paganism 44, 61, 116, 170 African 5 Roman Empire deities 48 syncretic 10 Palabra Obrera 213 Panama 162 Panzeri, Dante 19, 21 Paris xv, 7, 104, 250 Sorbonne xiv Paris Commune 6 Parnét, Claire 254nn7/9, 255n23 Partido Comunista Marxista Leninista 215 Partido dos Trabalhadores xiv, 67 Partido Socialista de los

Trabajadores (PST, Argentina) 178 Pascoal, Hermeto 8 patriarchy xii, xix decried ix freedom from the ideology of the body x threatened xviii vertical and authoritarian structure imposed by 241 violent vii Paulo VI, Pope 83 Pellegrini, Aldo 101 Pellegrino, Carlos 3 Perlongher, Néstor xviii activism ix AIDS diagnosis and battle with viii, xiv baroque pearl in critical theory viii born Buenos Aires (1949) vii, ix died São Paulo (1992) vii disenchantment with gay activism xiv graduated with degree in sociology ix insistence on deidentification xvii intellectual life vii minoritary becomings xii neo-baroque poetics ix political, erotic and mystical interests x, xv relationship with Brazil xii style and commitment vii theories viii; early x thinking xvii; critical xiv Perlongher’s works: books/prose xix; Aguas Aéreas xv; Austria-Hungría xv; Caribe Transplatino xv, xvi; El chorreo de las iluminaciones xv; Evita

Index Lives xvi, xix, xxiv-xxv, xxvi, 191–6, 250; Parque Lezama xv essays viii, xi, xviii, xxii, xxv, xxvii; Avatars of the Boys of the Night xiii, 46–59; Loca Sex xvii, xix, 19–25 poems/poetry xv, xvi, xviii, xix, xxi, xxiv; Alambres xv, 142–4; Corpses (Cadáveres) xvi, xix, xxii, 143, 197–200, 203–7, 227–37, 249; Credit for Tancredo 216–20; Lake Nahuel 221–3; Zombie 203–5 Perón, Eva xix, xxii, xxiv-xxvi, 21, 189–207, 246 Perón, Isabel see Martínez de Perón Perón, Juan 18, 80, 82–3, 201, 202, 243 Peronism 77, 102, 148, 197, 201, 206, 246, 249 disenchantment and 79–81 FLH alignment with x ominous bureaucratic apparatus 202 permanent tension within 140 revolutionary ix Peronist Youth Party 22, 79 Persona (feminist journal) 177n, 249 Peru 104, 105, 179 Amazonian 161 Incan 163 San Pedro cactus worship 172 see also Pizango perversion 22–3, 31, 51–2, 57, 87, 105, 109, 115, 119, 122, 184, 185 attributing a basically moral motivation to 112 criminal 140 distribution of 110

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flow that seems to reek of 120 gay 70 imaginary album of 112 imperialist capitalist ix language xvi resource used by subversive enterprise 137 sexual 90, 134 social demarcation of 110 sociological 114 perverts eccentricity of 111 gay 17 incarnations from sodomite to 88 relationship between felons and 74 sexual 17 Pessoa, Fernando 156 petite bourgeoisie politicized 185 terrified 31 Petrarch 98, 118 peyote 5, 156–7, 158, 162, 172 philosophy intersections: poetry and ix; politics, eroticism and xi P’s thinking connects to viii political xxv Phoenician temples 243 Pie de página (journal) 224n Pigüé 20 Piñera, Virgilio 6, 124, 125 Pinochet, Augusto 80 Piva, Roberto 73, 151, 255n25 Pizango, Crescencio 163 Plate, River xv, xvi, 119 pleasure 20–3, 25, 38, 51, 104, 138, 144 actualization of 112 anus does not feel 36 attempts to politicize x bodies prowling for 33 bodily 42, 44

286 Index differences in the production of 47 disdained 110 disgusting 109 dissidence often articulated on the plane of 58 gaining through oppression 110 immoral 29 ineffable 112 macabre 34 masochistic 56 maximum 109 mobilization of the principle of 110 pain converted into 160 passion and 57 penetrations of 33–4 pushing the limit between death and 30 radical potential of 58 roads travelled to reach its destination 113 secret (but vivid) 114 sensory 44 sexual 133; ascendant 88 suffering is greatest before reaching xix terror and 56 unwanted 109 wagering on death in the name of 32 podophilia 107, 109, 111, 114, 115 poetics vii, viii, xvi, 97 baroque 99 explicit xvii neo-baroque ix, xv, 104 urban 147–52 poetry baroque 150 ecstasy and 153–8 innovating xxi intersection of philosophy and ix

neo-baroque 95–100 understanding as something vital and political xvii Poland 178 Police Contravention Code 15, 16 Política Obrera (Trotskyist organization) ix political prisoners amnesty offered to xii letters to demand freedom of 79 unjustly held xiv politicization 78, 185, 254n12 FLH born in climate of 77 hyper 84 insurgent power of alternative forms of xii language xvi misogynistic violence 71 politics current limits of 7 desire and xxvii, 13–91 dissidence and difference vii identity viii language and the body viii libidinal xxv madwomen xvii moralizing 187 passion for 131 poeticization of 141 poetics without viii sexual xxii, xxiv, 82, 121n Trotskyist 248 see also micropolitics; queer politics polytheism 10 pornography 20, 26, 102, 107, 108, 134 call for stand against 22 condemnation of 27 short story deemed 252n2(Loca Sex) Porto Velho 165

Index Portuguese language vii, xii, xiii, 2, 163 P’s first published article in 249 poverty 53, 64 celebrated xv escape from 41 local characters linked to xvii underage teenage boys displaced by 47 power 80, 86, 98, 99, 130, 186 affirmative 62 awesome 155 celestial 155 Deleuze & Guattari’s notions of ix desired 108 divine 155, 168 economic: dominant 179; sustained through moral control 242 ecstasy 172 emetic and purifying 164 falsified dispositions of 110 governmental 71 insurgent xii legitimized by suicides 179 magical 162 other’s 110 passionate 88 plants of 162 privileged positions to main holders of 242 restored 77 ridiculousness of 179 stable consolidation of 54 state 177 superior 155 surrealist 101 power relationships 35, 113 Professionals (gay group) 78, 79 Prosa Plebeya (Baigorria & Ferrer) xvii prostitution 17, 21, 50

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boys of 30 fabricated record of 16 factor that initially leads down the road to 53 gay xxiii high-end 48 low-end 48 luxury 30 rough centre of 52 street 47 transgender 30 transsexual 34, 37, 48, 49 underlying 52 see also male prostitution PST see Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores Puig, Manuel xix, 129–32, 134 punks 8, 65 Punta Lara 204 Purus River 174 queer notion/queers 24, 186, 187, 229, 254n5 analysis of fascism from perspective of xviii ban from holding diplomatic or cultural offices 125 category complementary to xvii fundamental precursor to global studies of xiii Latin American incarnation of xvi marginalized passions 37 notions that today would be considered xix origin of theory in Latin America viii war against 124 queer politics closely linked to activism x international xvii later development in Latin America x-xi precursor to xvii

288 Index racism xi, xii, 9, 75, 247 attitudes about native Americans 244 radicalization xiii, 90, 101, 137 intense 76–7 Rago, Margareth xxvii realism xxiii, 101, 128 deconstruction of 119 deep 105 dismembered xvi, 102 magical 102 social 119, 140 see also surrealism Red Army 178 Redondo, Víctor xxvii, 3, 250 Reich, William 87, 88, 113, 125, 135, 166, 178 repression xxvi, 6, 15, 22, 23, 84, 89, 113, 171 approach that transforms prevention into 44 denounced xviii desire for 178 dissolution and 82–3 gay 80, 247, 249 homosexual 23, 243 identity 187 intensification of xii legal 126, 127, 246 middle-/working-class sexuality 251n2 moral xi, 245, 247 police 21, 34, 78, 80, 81 political xi, 83, 242 sexual 83, 125, 244 softening of xii state 185 systematic 126 widespread 242 wild impulse 51 resistance movements vii Revista de (poesía) 227n Ricardo, Carlos 5 rights 54, 182

indigenous xii see also civil rights; gay rights; human rights; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement; women’s rights Rio Branco 165 Rio de Janeiro 65–6, 112, 163–6 Avenida Atlántica de Copacabana 30 Cinelandia 111 Galería Alaska 52–3 ritual sacrifice 30, 177 expiratory 34 River Plate Delta 119 Rolnik, Suely 60n, 67, 68, 75, 148 Roman Empire 243 institutionalization of Christianity by the ruling classes 244 pagan deities 48 polytheism 10 Rondonia 165 Rosa, Nicolás xvi, 102, 250, 256n19 Rosario 22, 27, 250 Russian Vaseline 184 Sabina, María 172 sacrifice x, 36, 179, 188 see also ritual sacrifice sadists 114, 140 sadomasochism 70, 112, 114 safe sex 44 Safo (lesbian group) 78 Salta mortal 191n San Cayetano shrine 178 San Juan de la Cruz 168 San Pedro religion 172, 173 San Telmo 19 San Vicente 199 Sansot, Pierre 148

Index Santo Daime xix, xxvi, 5, 10, 158, 159n, 160–3, 165–74 mysticism of viii, xiv P becomes involved with 250 rituals of xiv, 161; ecstatic xxii São Paulo 2, 27, 46, 151, 165, 227n, 249 Argentine exiles in 186 city centre 29, 41, 58; miché zones of 47 Flower of the Waters church 167 gay ghetto xxv, 35, 47 gay rights groups 184n gunning down transsexuals in murky alleys 34 P dies (1992) vii, 250 prostitution 142; luxury 30; male xxii, 41, 73 quebraquebra (1983) 73 Santo Daime church 10, 167 vice districts 29 worshippers of Saint Germain 166 see also Folha de São Paulo; Journalists Union of São Paulo; UNICAMP; University of São Paulo São Paulo Secretary of Security 31 Sarduy, Severo xix, 2, 3, 38, 98, 100, 103, 104, 119, 120, 122, 128, 131, 138, 256nn11/15/23 Sarney, José 72 Sartre, Jean-Paul 38, 55, 124, 253n22 Saudelocura 85n saunas xv, 79 Savino, Hugo 3, 181 Schérer, René 255n2, 256n12, 259n19 Schultes, Richard Evans 160–1 Schwartz, Jorge xxvii, 101

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sedentariness xxiv, 48 Serra, Raimundo Irineu 163 Seurat, Georges 7 sex and drugs cruising for 41 deritualized 174 roaming searches for 52 sexism ix, 9, 246 violent xvii, xviii sexual encounter possibility of xxiii results of 31 sexual liberation xxvi, 80, 82, 87 shock of activists 86 struggle for 245–6 Sexual Politics (group) 22 sexual practices vii, xi, 43, 90 attempt at reorganization of 89 common 243 nomadic xiv, 58 nonheteronormative x sexual revolution 86, 87, 102, 245 AIDS the final blow to xviii ebb of 88 FLH view of ix sexuality xiii, 25, 43, 87 debate over 125 increasingly less interesting 90 liberation of xvii nonnormative ix, xii surreal 29 see also heterosexuality; homosexuality sexualization x, xxiii, 69, 70, 111, 113, 134 abrupt 114 Shakespeare, William 245 shamans xiv, 5–6, 97, 139, 155, 161–3, 166–8, 173 see also Pizango; Sabina shirt lifters 20 Shock magazine 23 Sibilia, Paula xxvii

290 Index Siganevich, Paula xxvii, 250 signifieds xvi, 98, 99 signifiers inflation of 48, 98 legitimate and fixed 99 primacy of xv subversion of xvi Silva, Penella da 201 Sitio (journal) 180n, 182 social change desire through x leftist xiii subjective transformation to incite xiii social control xxiv social democracy 124 social transformation xviii basis for ix quotidian and corporal dimensions of viii socialism/socialists 77, 82, 125, 178 adherence to discipline of labour 126 feminist 124 possible for economic system to move towards ix real 126 see also PST; USSR sodomy 28, 36, 58 biblical ire incited by 124 boys prepared for 107 considered the vice of clergy 44 constituted as crime 127 homosexual desire derived from 55 laws that condemned 124 passion for 140 payment for 31–2 railing against the abominable sin of 44 right to 114 SOMOS (gay and lesbian group) xiii, xiv

Somos (journal) xiii, 81–2, 186, 249 Soviet Union 124 Spain 117 see also Franco Spanish Golden Age xv, xvi, 96, 97–8, 102, 105, 118, 119, 122 Spanish Inquisition 44 Spanish language vii, viii, 2, 3 latent force in xvi movement common to 103, 137–8 Stalinization 124 stigmatization xiv, 244 Storni, Alfonsina 2, 182–3, 264n1 subjectification 37, 61, 74–5 dominant mode of 69 see also desubjectification subjectivity gay xxvii sexual experience as mutation of ix surrealism 2, 29, 47, 95, 111 power of 101 Trotskian 123 Sweden 191n syncretic religion 260n33 African 10 Amazonian viii, xiv, 10, 173 Sznycer, Evelyne 156 taboo 243, 244 Tancredo see Neves Tarahumara people 72 tattooing 38, 103–4, 107, 138, 231 Taussig, M. 162, 258n11 terror 3, 6, 9, 21, 36, 37, 43, 59, 83, 90, 135, 139 brutal x contagious 34 intimidation and 27

Index pleasure and 56 political 134 state-sponsored x Tezza, Cristóvao xxvii Third Sex theory 186 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze & Guattari) 36, 49, 53, 54, 68, 140, 142, 148 Tía Neiva cult 166 Tiempo Argentino (journal) 121n Tierra del Fuego 244 Torres, Sarita xxvii torture 10, 21, 113, 179 blood-curdling descriptions of 139 government-inflicted xii pleasure in 22 transgender persons 24 P allied with xvii prostitutes 30 see also lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement transsexuals 23, 24, 38, 41, 59 defence of xvii gunning down of 34 prostitute 34, 37, 48, 49 transvestites xviii, xxv, 23, 60, 69, 70, 90, 135 fights among 31 invasion of 29–32 Trevisan, João Silvério 72–3, 110, 255n24 tropicalism see desbunde Trotsky, Leon 178 Trotskyists ix, 178 militant xxiii old gay friend of P 6 student 7 Turtle Bay 199 ultra-leftists 248 UMAP (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción) 124

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Umbanda 165, 166 under-age boys displaced by poverty 47 fraternizing with 20 UNEAC (Unión de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos) 125 UNICAMP (University of Campinas) xiii, 9, 249, 250 Unión do Vegetal 171, 172 University of Buenos Aires ix, 248 University of São Paulo 31 urban anthropology xviii, xxii, 250 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) ix, 179 see also Soviet Union utilitarianism bourgeois 95 moral xvi, 128 Utopía (anarchist magazine) 184n, 211n Vandorism 3, 133–40 Vasconcelos, Naná 8 Vatican prisoners 185 Vegetal (sacred drink) 165 Venezuela 162, 260n33, 263n65 María Lionza sect 166 Verne, Jules 2 Victoria (Tigre) delta 181 Videla, General 83 Vinciguerra (undercover journalist) 35 violence 56, 135 antigay 33, 35 capitalist vii colonialist vii decadent 141 desired 42, 57 football 185 generalized 42 homophobic xviii internal 58

292 Index lust and 13, 40–2 misogynistic 71 patriarchal vii political x sexist xvii, xviii, 33n textual 138 urban 40 voluptuous cruelty of 39 Visconti, Luchino 9 Ward, John 182 Watson, Gordon 172 weirdos 8, 124

Women’s Commissions 71 Women’s rights 68 World Cup (1978) 178 Xiberras, Martine 162, 259n14, 262n49 Yagua people (Peru) 161 Yokaanan 166 Yurkiévich, Saul 99, 256n13 Zampi (Trotskyist friend of P) 6 zombification 265nn

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