Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s-1990s / Bettina Aptheker / 2023

As many shortcomings as this book may have, I found it an incredibly valuable window into the communist movement in the United States, especially in terms of capturing the zeitgeist of different eras and connecting the dots between major historical events and how they impacted the lives of our communist queers. It was beautiful and heartbreaking to see how the Black Freedom movement, the Red Scare, the Cultural Revolution in China, so forth and etc collided in the lives of our progressive forebears. Communists in Closets tracks the inspiring forging of solidarities and the heartbreaking exclusion of the minoritized. It made me realize you cannot understand the BIPOC history of the United States without understanding Marxism and the communist movement’s critical role, long obscured by K-12 public education in the United States. 

Bettina Aptheker is the perfect, somewhat sus narrator. A red diaper baby (that means she comes from blood-red communist parents!), Bettina had privileged access to the movement. Her first job was literally working for WEB Du Bois, for example. This privilege is not untroubled. Aptheker gained notoriety for outing her father as her sexual abuser after his death in her book Intimate Politics, first published in 2006. Her communist stripes, however, were first earned in publishing a major history of the trial of Angela Davis, which she both recorded and organized in support of Davis. She’s about 80 now and there are occasional gaffs in her writing. While her racial politics are usually solid, she refers to a particular neighborhood as historically “Negro” at one point. She also has a strange moment where she talks about how one elder communist feminist was, of course, anti-Trump and, somehow just as obviously, a Hilary Clinton supporter. The book deserves to be criticized for its writing style, as Aptheker’s portraits read a bit quaint, by which I mean to say it routinely feels like a grandmother is telling you long-winded stories. Aptheker occasionally indulges in litanies of awards her acclaimed queers earned in a way that provides a shallow, if lettered, understanding of the impact of their work. As much as these shortcomings might rub some readers wrong, the historical material was so poignant for me, that I was engrossed in the reading. 

I especially loved the portrait of Lorraine Hansberry, although I worry Aptheker may have leaned a little too heavily on Imani Perry’s work here. There was one moment in particular where Aptheker describes how Hansberry met with two other prominent Black communist women to organize resistance against the US coup of President Arbenz’s socialist government in Guatemala. This moment of international solidarity, to know that Black women in the blistering racism of the 1950s, saw my Central American kin and fought for us, stopped me in my tracks and moved me nearly to tears. Most heartbreaking of all, all of these women were lesbian yet so deeply closeted that they likely never knew about one another’s sexual orientations for the entirety of their lives. Aptheker does a profoundly good job showing how the closet psychologically tormented these prominent communists, who continued to risk their lives and well-being for the communist movement, despite its rejection of them. Such unfaltering love in the face of such cruelty is perhaps the queerest thing about this book. 

I also found the 5/5 movie Salt of the Earth through this book. The movie starred Rosaura Revueltas, a prominent Chicana lesbian! I am always happy to learn more about Paul Robeson, who was not queer, but appears throughout the book as a prominent communist. Turns out white mobs used to try to stop his performances and lynch concert goers. 

I love this book despite its blemishes. 4 out of 5.   

The State and Revolution / Vladimir Lenin / 1917

I admit I stayed away from Lenin, fearing he’d be a difficult and academic read. I was sorely mistaken. Lenin writes with a spunky lucidity, sparring with anarchists, opportunists, social democrats, and others to delineate the Marxist path to communism. The State and Revolution is a must-read for any would-be abolitionist and leftist of any persuasion. Lenin masterfully sinks his teeth into the strategic weaknesses of his peers and builds a firm argument for the need for a proletariat-led revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat. These WWE-style takedowns better makes me understand the divisions among leftists better, as the urgency of the revolution and the truly opposing perspectives inevitably create a powder keg in dangerous circumstances. While I have my own criticisms and questions about the work--how do we ensure that state power does not corrupt revolutionaries, as it has in the Soviet Union and China?, for example--this is the strongest theoretical ground I have found to stand on at the moment. Looking forward to reading more Lenin and dipping into more Marxist theory soon. 5 out of 5. 

Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia / Elizabeth Burgos / 1983

An extraordinarily compelling testimonio on the lives of Maya campesinos, Rigoberta Menchu’s story hit me en las madres. The testimonio includes interesting details about specific cultural practices, like marriage and birth rites, and beliefs, such as the syncretic Maya Christianity and relationship to naguales. Interestingly, here Rigoberta made clear that her community didn’t ostracize or stigmatize diverse sexual orientations and gender identities queered and oppressed in Western societies. These details as a whole provide outsiders with a bridge into Maya cosmovision and provide assimilated indigenous and mestizo readers an opportunity to reconnect to a bit of what was lost. The portions of the testimonios describing the poverty, organizing, resistance, repression, and torture were deeply moving and harrowing to read. Rigoberta’s testimonio is an invaluable part of the repressed indigenous marxist tradition I am currently reading my way through right now.  5/5

Telling Tales / Patience Agbabi / 2015

This is one of the best poetry collections I’ve read in a minute. The poems translate Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into a contemporary Black vernacular, riddled with rhyme and verve. This marriage plays spectacularly into hip-hop’s sensibilities and Agbabi has the rapping ability and scholarly muscles to really make these transcreations pop. Anushka and I howled with delight while reading these poems. 5 out of 5.

Tropical Town and Other Poems / Salomon de la Selva / 1918

Published in 1918, Salomon de la Selva may be the first Latino poet published in the US and is certainly one of the first Latino authors published in the US--period. Though Nicaraguan-born, he was US-trained and thus learned to navigate--and found moderate success--in both the yanqui and Latin American literary scene. Stylistically, his verse reads like his romantic contemporaries, which means he feels like a Longfellow knockoff. Topically, he occasionally bares his teeth, discussing his homeland from an overtly political perspective. Contemporary readers may find even these poems hampered by the style and inconsistent politics. He occasionally longs for white girls--whomst amongst us has not? According to this collection, his deepest darkest secret is that he once made love to a tree, surely and hopefully in the romantic sense and not the pornographic. I recommend this book to those with a historical interest in Latino authors and Central America, but few others. 2 out of 5. 

Yin Xin Tang: Journey into the Center of Yourself / Wei Fo Jung / 2024

As a practitioner of qi gong under the tutelage of master Wei Fo Jung, I found his book useful in introducing me to the range of arts important to the practice of the yin xin tang school of martial arts. Some of these elements may be surprising, like the art of eating or the art of sleeping, where traditional masters offered thorough instructions for how to intentionally do something for maximum health and benefit, which we all mostly just do mindlessly. Some elements of this book will mean more after a student has some concrete experience to connect for the texts. For example, the lineage chapter clearly states that one of the roots of yin xin tang is the practice of tantra. This meant very little to me until Master Jung introduced tantric elements into my actual practice. Many of the explorations here are introductory glances into profound arts, such as meditation or the study of the mind. In one charming journal entry, for example, Master Jung describes a conversation he had with his master as a child about the nature of the self. The journal entry doesn’t arrive at any clear answer or distinguish in much depth the journey to attempt to arrive at an answer. That’s fine for an introductory text, intended to inspire and accompany study with a master, not replace it. In that sense, readers should not expect this book to teach them yin xin tang, but rather introduce them to the core areas of practice in yin xin tang and some of their history. That’s all. 4 out 5 

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Short Stories / Jamil Jon Kochai / 2022

Goddam this is a good short story collection. Much as There, there by Tommy Orange captured the range of heat and friction in the urban Native experience, Jamil Jon Kochai’s characters wrestle with the whole of Afghanistan’s history as the cultural impact of Islam and the ever-present traumas of war, migration, and imperialism put their whole weight on their lives. Its hard to describe the magical realism of the collection, because Kochai somehow pulled off incredibly hokey and heavy-handed metaphors; in fact, these exact metaphor managed to capture sometimes horrifying, sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes gorgeous elements of the Afghani experience that beating us over the head with relentless realist trauma just wouldn’t be able to do. There’s a story, for example, where a couple keeps receiving portions of their boy child’s dismembered body. The father goes on a goose chase looking for a police officer or an official willing to do anything. The mother, on the other hand, slowly sews their son back together. Such a dark premise sounds like an awful, heavy-handed undergrad idea in summary. Kochai made this spellbinding. There’s a story where a gamer, who loves MF DOOM (apparently a favorite for men of color short story writers like Kochai and Orange), ignores his family’s worried and troubled cries as he binge plays Metal Gear Solid V, which takes place in Afgani villages, much like where his father grew up. I am especially grateful I read this pulsating collection after reading Max Blumenthal’s The Management of Savagery, which included a rather clinical history of Afghanistan. There’s a way political argument can summarize atrocity after atrocity  in a couple of bloodless paragraphs, where a fiction writer can yield a gallon of blood from a single poetic phrase. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories burns with the fires of Afghanistan’s history and glides with the slick ice of a master fiction writer’s pen.    5/5

Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What it Means for America / Paola Ramos / 2024

Defectors would have been a more useful book if it was published a couple of years ago, but better late than never I guess. For those of us who are politically conscious and aware of the news, Defectors will hardly offer anything new. Ramos does, however, synthesize research, news, and observations about the Latino right in a useful and clarifying way, if only to let us know there’s likely not a weird unexpected factor we hadn’t considered yet. 

Briefly summarized, Ramos identifies the three elements fueling the Latino far right as traditionalism, trauma, and media spheres in the global south.  

This is a surprisingly white supremacist history of Utah Latinos.

Because Ramos is a journalist, however, and not a historian, she fails to trace the historical roots of some of these traditions. For example, Ramos rightly identifies the patriarchal, family values in most contemporary, traditional Latino households, as well as the white supremacist threads in the ideology of a Latino far right leader who defended the statues of Spanish colonizers and celebrated only his Spanish heritage. She failed to identify how common national racial myths, such as mestizaje, perpetuate racism. Defectors makes it seem like these people emerged out of the mists, when I’m sure racist Latinos were apart of nearly every major Latin American populace in the United States. In Utah, this includes figures like Danny Quintana, who celebrated his Latin connection to the Roman empire, one-upping backward white people who descend from less civilized white stock. This part of the book was by far the most annoying and untenable, because what Ramos failed to articulate is that some Latinos are just white, far-right, and fascists and have represented those factions historically in their homelands. Latinos are so far from ideologically, ethnically, or racially monolithic, and Defectors behaves as if we once were. 

When it comes to the historical traumas, Ramos sometimes does not articulate some of the deeper contexts behind the masses’ reactions either. For example, her prescient discussion of Salvadoran dictator Bukele failed to adequately describe the gang crisis in El Salvador and the factors that led up to it. For those unaware of the right wing movement in Latin America, from its evangelists to the Republican funders and the fascists eager to bootlick Bukele and Pinochet, this book is critical reading.

As someone who has lost confidence in the social integrity of the Latino label for a while now, considering its net just too damn wide to meaningfully organize around, I found some of Ramos’s appeals to Latino identity to be too romantic. That said, I am inspired by the works of groups like Mijente, who organize and fund Latinos nationwide. I read this book, as a part of Mijente’s book club although I wasn’t able to attend the in-person gatherings. Learn more about mijente here: https://mijente.net/

Overall, I give this book a 4 out of 5, as its info feels spot-on. I just wish it occasionally fleshed a topic out in greater depth. 

The Black Jacobins / C. L. R. James / 1938

The Black Jacobins narrates the story of the Haitian revolution largely through its focus on one of its most critical figures Toussaint L'Ouverture. James narrates the military drama with a novelist’s eye for detail, psychological depth, and tension. His occasional asides to provide his own thoughts and connect the history to his times are revelatory and shrewd. It can be easy to be fatalistic about the rise of technofeudal fascism in our era, but during the Haitian revolution, a largely enslaved population had to shake off the chains of three imperial powers: the French, the Spanish, and the British. James spares no detail on the cruelty of the slaver’s torture tactics, from the burying of Africans to be devoured slowly by ants to the dogs to the branding. In some of its most moving passages, James narrates how in the last battles of the war, the generals told their men they did not need to fight with bravery but with an abandoned rage to survive and win; the formerly enslaved faced their deaths with an unhinged pride and resolution that stunned the colonizers. James astutely points out the catch-22: the enslaved were accused of being less than human for their “willingness” to accept slavery, but when they resisted it with all their might, sometimes petting the dogs sent to devour their limbs, other times placing the noose around their own necks at the gallows, they accused them of being incapable of feeling human pain, of being monstrous in their strength. I could say more, but you ought to just read it. 5 out of 5.

Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism / Yanis Varoufakis / 2024

Known for his charisma and charming writing, Varoufakis is one of the leading leftist figures arguing that our economic system has fundamentally transitioned so that its axis rotates not around capital, but cloud capital, thereby ushering in the age of technofeudalism. While the distinction between technofeudalism and capitalism may seem like technical minutiae to most folks--and likely is--for political strategists and organizers especially, it is critical to have clarity on who are enemies are and how to best combat them. 

The term technofeudalism does a great job at singling out our greatest enemies of the moment--the tech oligarchs--and describing their vice-like grip on the economic system. Anushka would argue that the critique of technofeudalism make the bloody-thirsty capitalists of our day almost seem like poor victims of these new gangsters, and Varoufakis himself argues in the last pages of Technofeudalism that we would in fact need to create a broad base coalition including capitalists of many stripes to defeat the challenge technofeudalists pose. The risk here is that people forget that we need to dismantle capitalism in order to escape these hellish cycles of history. In “Critique of Technofeudalism” by Evgeny Morozov in New Left Review, the author outlines technofeudalists thinkers, including Varoufakis, but also including right-wing thinkers (Thiel and Yarvin). Morozov covers impressive ground outlining the differences between feudalism and capitalism and ultimately arrives at the conclusion that as ugly as this phase of capitalism is, it doesn’t merit another term because companies like Google and Facebook earn money through much more than just “rents.” 

As a non-economist, I have few horses in this fight. Reading Varoufakis, however, did clarify for me some of the basics of global economics and the challenges tech oligarchs pose, and he did so in really captivating and easy-to-parse prose. Because of this, I highly recommend his book. Morozov may be more correct, but he was way more academic and drier. Ultimately, I think most of us just need to understand the grip these bastards have on the globe better and Varoufakis can help you get there quicker. As the US continues to undergo a technical coup and flagrant Nazism spearheaded by tech oligarchs who subscribe to right-wing technofeudal theory, Varoufakis focus seems more and more necessary, although I admit I’m unsure if he is technically correct--I simply am not an economist. 

Wednesday February 26th, Robert Evans published a summary of a warning Democratic insiders are sharing among themselves about the dangers of Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, and “Neo-Reactionaries.” The letter outlines what could be called a technofeudal plan to dismantle the United States. Technofeudalist might ultimately still be capitalists, but I think the term is worth retaining for understanding how they view themselves within the capitalist landscape. For me, the dramatic speed of technological evolution--we’re literally in a world with killer robots and AI-boyfriends--justifies a terminology that distinguishes this phase of capitalism from the last. 4 out 5.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed / Paolo Friere / 1968

Many professors and ethnic studies students are at least aware of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and many have at least read chapter 2, which distinguishes the vertical banking method of education from a horizontal dialogic one. I decided to read the whole book because Ceiba Collective wanted to begin doing study groups and the committee decided a leftist book on pedagogy felt like a good place to start. I’m grateful I read the whole book, especially because of chapters 3 and 4, which argue that dialogic problem-based education is essential for revolutionary struggle. Everywhere you see liberals and the left talking about the desperate need for better messaging, sloganeering, etc. Friere would argue they’re doomed if they simply play the same game of the right, manipulating the masses and treating them as incapable of building solutions to their own problems. Friere argued for the need for dialogic problem-based education through every level of the revolution, building a strategy for struggle alongside the working masses. This is critical, because if we only win through messaging, every victory of the left will be short-lived as the masses will not have developed the critical thinking skills to see through the lies of their enemies. For me, this is the most interesting part of his argument, and worth debate in leftist organizations.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed was specifically used to develop popular education with illiterate folks meant to organize them in defense of their community. Friere’s method was used widely throughout the world and in particular Central America during their revolutionary struggle in the last half of the twentieth century. At the same time, Friere’s advocacy for education also meant that his work was used to construct systems of mass education, which despite Freire’s advocacy for a revolutionary method, still served ultimately as a force to colonize the poor and indigenous, disrupt their ways of life in service of an education that frequently ill-prepared them for the challenges of their community. Gustavo Esteva is especially critical of Friere on this part, although his criticism is laden with the worst types of decolonial nonsense, such as arguing that illiteracy should be celebrated and cherished, as if many colonized people, including First Nations peoples throughout the Americas, didn’t have sophisticated reading systems prior to colonization.  4 out of 5. 

Love is an Ex-Country / Randa Jarrar / 2022

I read this book at the recommendation of my friend Casira, although it’s been high on my diaspora literature list for years. This memoir is bookended poorly, starting with an eat-pray-love-esque road trip across the US searching for purpose and ending with a hardly believable scene of “healing” her troubled relationship with her father. 

In a creative writing class once, a poet once told me good writing requires at least two of the following: 1) incredible personal experience 2) astute observation or 3) excellent fluency and artistry with language. Of course, a master writer would have all three. Jarrar mainly has #1 with a spark of #3 sometimes. The memoir is compelling because of the unenviable amount of abuse Jarrar suffers, which she narrates bluntly and painfully. We get glimpses of child abuse, overcontrolling parents, abusive partners, and even dystopic scenes with Israel locking her in a holding cell and preventing her from returning to Palestine. Her descriptions of kink are clumsy, however, as well as some of her expression of her own feelings around the messy bits of race, gender, and queerness. The narration of kink especially reads as the journal of someone who just experienced something, not someone who has thought about the discourse around it and is entering that discourse thoughtfully. Even so, it was a captivating read, even as it fell into so many traumatophobic tropes.  3 out of 5.

El Verbo J / Claudia Hernandez / 2018

Written in a breathless, breakneck speed, El Verbo J narrates the story of a trans woman during the wartime El Salvador. Once I realized what was happening in the book, I practically foresaw with terror and heartache the inevitable plotline: you get story of the boy bullied for his queerness, forced to hide and flee from el ejército, as well as the story of sex trafficking during migration and suffering the AIDS crisis in one body. The magnificent and shattering work of El Verbo J is to remind us that queer people existed during these times as well. While most wartime narratives are derived from the stories of masculinist guerrilleros a la Che Guevara and Roque Dalton or in self-sacrificing parents, El Verbo J zeroes in on queer stories submerged within the howls of others, whose stories dominated more historically. The story is told with a swift almost stream of thought narrative that whiplashes you, dropping you into scenarios without context only to unravel and explain later. Central American scholars talked up this book to me a lot before I got to it (via LibroFM :D) and it deserves all its praise and more. 5/5   

Todas las voces / Anarella Vélez / 2013

Vélez escribe sin ojo ni oreja, enfocándose en la angustia política y quizás en ganar lectores que simplemente sienten esa misma angustia. Solamente un poema (“Angeles”) me movio. Los demás no tienen suficientes imágenes o música para que sean memorables. Las traducciones de algún modo son peores que estos poemas. 1 out of 5.   

Shake Loose My Skin / Sonia Sanchez / 1999

In 2024, does your house have lions by Sonia Sanchez was one of my favorite reads. Shake Loose Your Skin is my first deep dive into Sanchez’s work and it provided a curious snapshot into her legend. does your house have lions? is likely the apex of her career, as she has only published one book after this new and selected, and the poems from dyhhl were by far was the best part of the new and selected. In content, many of the poems and essays in this collection grapple with gendered violence and surviving toxic masculinity in intimate relationships. Sanchez details the pain of adultery and addiction repeatedly in a confessional and heartbreaking voice with little literary stunting. Reading Shake Loose Your Skin made me feel the same way I did after catching up with a homegirl after far too long and too much has happened. I was pleasantly surprised to find a long poem dedicated to Tupac Shakur. Giovanni had a poem for Tupac too and it makes me happy knowing all the dope Black women were writing poems for him. The poems carry a natural musicality, relying on the rhythms of AAV, rather than stringent form or other phonetic flexes. While many poems are obviously meant to be sung or spoken aloud, they are still rendered on the page with a subtly that rewards close readings for deceptively smooth line breaks and evolution of arguments. 3 out of 5. 

The Management of Savagery / Max Blumenthal / 2019

I picked up this book looking to better understand the history of US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as reactionary and perhaps revolutionary violent resistance against it. In order to contextualize Afghanistan, Blumenthal begins in the Cold War, when the US began arming tribal Islamists, including Al-Qaeda, who were frequently compared to US independence heroes and Star Wars rebels by interventionists. In particular, Blumenthal does a great job disentangling the ways the military industrial complex manipulates the media to sanitize allies, demonize targets, and muddy an admittedly complex terrain to audiences to justify intervention and pull Washington’s purse strings. Inevitably, Blumenthal ends up playing defense for the Assad regime in Syria, pointing out untrue propaganda against his regime, a move his critics see as apologetic but I see as simply nuanced. Blumenthal can be seen as a tankie by some, and that’s probably inevitable for a writer who spends so much time countering hyperbolic US propaganda against its enemy nations, who are of course as flawed and complex as any other nation. I particularly appreciated Blumenthal’s writing on the rise of Alex Jones, who had an early career as a 9/11 truther through documentaries like Loose Change, which I had watched as a middle schooler. I never connected the dots from Loose Change to the Sandy Hook massacre denialism to the rise of Trump. Blumenthal includes a skillful argument about how neocon and neolib US military interventions led to the rise of Trump by destabilizing once functional countries and increasing the amount of terrorism and refugees in Europe. This increase led to a rise in ultranationalism and xenophobia the far right thrives on. As someone who was too young during the 9/11 era and didn’t pay enough attention to the interventionist wars during the Obama era, Blumenthal provided an incisive and clarifying narration of the history I lived.  4/5 

Pimp / Iceberg Slim / 1967

Pimp / Iceberg Slim / 1967

Pimp is the memoir of Robert Lee Maupin, who spent 24 years of his life enslaving women in sex work and performing a variety of other cons for a life of lavish, fear, drugs, degradation, and prison. I’d like to imagine that this memoir is simply unpublishable these days, but we have a rapist in the White House. America likely has the appetite for a Pimp 2.0. 

Maupin narrates his life with stunning narrative clarity and verve. Pimp is a masterclass on pacing. Reading Pimp is like watching a car crash in hi-definition with multiple camera angles to zoom and hawk out: it’s spellbinding and horrible. Pimp combines flashy writing with probing observation and reflection. Maupin doesn’t cut himself much slack in acknowledging the wretchedness of his crimes. He doesn’t try the readers’ patience in asking for a forgiveness or compassion he doesn’t deserve. In this way, Maupin creates an enticing ethos, giving the reader the sense that they are truly glimpsing into the life of a hardened Black criminal underworld. Maupin makes the reader a trick, using their morbid curiosity and desire to eat the other as a hook for his self-mythos. Likewise, the rugged oscillation between cold observation and confessional trauma dumping on the page likely mirror the same charisma that ensnared a number of young women in the flesh. 

As in any memoir, the writing obviously cuts away some of the complexities of life, using composite characters and so forth, to present a narrative that’s easier to follow. Sometimes, the narrative voice is so street it’s comic. By the third time, Maupin claims to “skull-note” something, I’m facepalming at how goofy he sounds. There’s also a scene where Maupin describes his first con--dressing in drag to lure in and rob white tricks eager for Black pussy--which reminded me of the homoerotic and genderbending scenes of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle. Early on, I realized that Paul Beatty actually satirizes Iceberg Slim’s voice in The White Boy Shuffle, from the slang to the fishbowl voyeurism into Black poverty to the queer scenes. 

I wanted to read Pimp to potentially teach it in a hip-hop literature course alongside To Pimp a Butterfly. Unfortunately, it feels irresponsible to teach Pimp. It provides too much fodder for an undergraduates’ racist biases. Even if you had an undergraduate class with the social savvy and chops to engage the text, it is simply too misogynistic, foul, and horrifying to expect many people to stomach it. In the copy, Maupin calls Pimp a manual, akin to the Art of War by Sun Tzu. It’s true enough. Maupin does provide the rationale and strategy for enslaving women and dodging the law. It’s definitely outdated by now, but some principles likely still apply. Yet, I’m still tempted to teach it. Like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, Pimp opens with a first-person description of the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. Pimp is another side of the coin of the violences of racism, poverty, patriarchy, and misogyny. What it says about America is horrifying, but bitterly honest. 

Pimp ends with a story of Maupin’s reformation into a best-selling writer with a wife and three daughters, living a square-ass life. Whether Maupin deserved this redemption or not, his story does demonstrate the ability of people to grow and change into functional members of society. His stints in prison were truly wretched, but justice and healing aren’t transactional. In any ethical world, Maupin would have carried the weight of his crimes for life and he likely did. Some of the best writing in Pimp comes from his descriptions of prison--including an eye-popping prison break. I want to talk with prison abolitionists about Pimp. Maupin’s stunning writing, reformation, and reflection raise questions about abolition, crime, and justice worth teasing out if you can bear the disgusting realities of its world.  

5/5

Huida Constante / Manuel Tzoc / 2016

Constante Hida / Manuel Tzoc / 2016

My friend brought me back Constante Huida by Manuel Tzoc back from Guatemala this past fall. I've been itching to read their work for years and was so grateful! Tzoc is a monumental queer Maya writer from Guatemala, one of the first voices you’ll have recommended to you when you ask. That said, I’m not sure if this is the collection by which to get to know Tzoc’s work. Most of the collection is a well-crafted irreverent queer ennui diatribe. While Tzoc sprinkles the collection with playful puns and eye-catching images here and there, there are one too many poems bemoaning the challenges of writing for me to understand where all the pomp was coming from. There are definitely glimpses of real pathos on the page, such as “por el día/por los días.” Either way, I’m glad to have read it and will be seeking out more of his work. 2 out 5

The Undocumented Americans / Karla Cornejo Villavicencio / 2020

As an employee at a refugee-serving organization and former megaphone-wielding activist for undocumented folks, I admit I’m likely a mark for stories like the ones in The Undocumented Americans. However, since I spend quite a bit of time with these stories and the discourse around them, I usually have my fair share of critiques of how the stories are being told or used. Cornejo Villavicencio’s unvarnished depictions of the undocumented in all their human oddity, mundanity, and trauma resists the common romanticization of the immigrant community and creates an infinitely more familiar portrait of the undocumented. Cornejo’s coverage of Flint’s undocumented community and the undocumented who served as first-responders during 9/11 are especially provocative examples of the injustices undocumented folks suffer that usually get overlooked within the explosion of discourse around them. My only real criticism of the book is that at one point Cornejo Villavicencio critiques newspapers for referring to the undocumented as “undocumented workers as if all these men are worth is their labor” (paraphrase). For a community afforded so little, I get where this critique is coming from; however, I do see value in hearkening to the labor rights traditions of the left and in acknowledging the contributions of undocumented folks.  Regardless, I cried several times when reading this book and found its stories a useful reminder of the actual conditions too often invisibilized in the US. 5 out of 5.

Pornografía para piromaníacos / Wenceslao Bruciaga / 2023

I picked this book up at a Guatemalan bookstore based off the title and premise alone, and I was blown away. My interest in erotic literature started with Anais Nin earlier this year, where I was surprised that something that was ostensibly smut could have so much to say about intimacy, queerness, and relationships, veering into the unsayable aspects of human experience. I entered Pornografia para piromaniacos piqued by its inciting incident: the suicide of a gay Latinx porn actor and closeted trans woman that rattles the industry. The novel follows two characters, Pedro and Jeff, in the aftermath of this loss. Both are aging porn stars struggling to adapt to a gentrifying San Francisco, an ever-evolving queer culture, and unsatisfying relationships. 

Pedro sees himself as the breadwinner for a nonbinary trophy husband, who is also a porn actor, who manages Pedro’s social media platforms, as well as his own up-to-date queer influencer channel. Through their relationship, porn scenes, and flashbacks we learn about the traumatic origins of Pedro’s queer discovery and the dark circumstances of his migration to the United States from Mexico. Pedro lives his life in fear of cancellation, as he has seen many of his peers go down for a mix of different toxicities. His precarious economic well-being depends on his reputation, and the pressure makes him act out violently periodically throughout the novel. 

Jeff, on the other hand, is reeling from a heartbreak with a closeted baseball star. While Pedro’s excellence and hotness provides him with a sense of power and purpose, Jeff’s relationship to pornography and sexuality feels more reflexive, an escape he cannot wield with discipline. Interestingly, Jeff was raised by two lesbians who hate pornography. Jeff and his parents make faint efforts to rekindle their relationship, as Jeff’s musical stardom begins to rise. Jeff’s musical allusions flood the novel, providing several playlists worth of listening material that will dizzy anyone unfamiliar with 90s rock. I spent a lot and not enough time looking up songs and listening to the soundscape they provided. Like Pedro, Jeff also violently lashes out against those who betray him. 

The novel is full of sharp observations. Porn scenes have the bawdy, campy language of porn scenes, but manage to do more than simply convey raw masculine lust. The scenes often intersect with challenges in the actors’ personal lives, frequently include complex and/or traumatic dynamics between actors and directors, and trigger devastating and soulful flashbacks. Bruciaga manages to say something heartbreaking and ugly about masculinity through these scenes. Bruciaga conveys brutality with tenderness. 

Pornografia para piromaniacos ends with pessimistic conclusions on masculinity and its toxicities. There is something about Jeff and Pedro’s many rants in the book, however, that give me a sense of hope. If the voices of aging queers continue to be silenced or disappear as times shift and their voices become inconvenient to some, the book provides a space where the voices of some of our queer elders can be heard. They provide some well-argued critiques of contemporary queer culture, even if they as characters fall victim to their own toxicities, ultimately proving themselves wrong. 

I’m on the lookout for more erotic novels this brilliant. Sex undergirds far too much of human life to not read writing about it seriously. I would love to translate it one day… it’d be a dream.  5/5