Award winning author and Colombian born scholar Jaime Manrique is a legendary presence in the literary world and an icon to gay Latino writers and others. A former professor of creative writing at Columbia University (and elsewhere), he has crafted over a dozen fiction and non-fiction volumes such as Eminent Maricones, Twilight at the Equator, and Latin Moon in Manhattan (all by University of Wisconsin Press).
During the 1970s and 1980s, Jaime befriended the exiled Latin-American writers Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls) and Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spiderwoman), before they succumbed to AIDS. These experiences, plus his fascinating research on Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, make up the backbone of Eminent Maricones—the most notorious of all his gay-themed books.
Jaime’s essay, “The Last Days of Reinaldo Arenas”, has been recently republished by the University of Wisconsin Press in Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). I recently met with “Don Jaime” to discuss his literary achievements and future projects.
CV: Julian Schnabel’s movie “Before Night Falls” helped to immortalize Reinaldo Arenas; his persecution, alienation, sickness, and feverish opinions. Did you sense that Reinaldo would become a queer icon when you knew him, or did you suspect that his story would disappear, as has happened to so many renegade writers ravaged by political exploitation?
JM:When I knew him he was already a very important Latin-American writer—he had readers all over the world. Toward the end of his life he gave me a manuscript draft of Before Night Falls, his most famous book, and I realized that he’d written one of the great autobiographies of the 20th century. And although he was known as a “writer’s writer”, that book was very mainstream and was read by all kinds of people, gay and straight.
CV: I was moved by the literary flamboyance you employed in Eminent Maricones (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)—in terms of your striking use of denuding memoir and colorful biography on the other writers. Arenas was Cuban. Puig was Argentine. Lorca was Spanish and you are Colombian. What besides the Spanish tongue and your collective queerness is the thread that connected you all? Is there a queer Latino/Latin-American aesthetic and was it a motivation for writing this book?
JM: At the time I don’t think there was a Latino/Latin-American homosexual aesthetic—maybe there is one now, though. What we did have in common was that we were isolated figures and each very different, in many ways, in terms of style. They were the most important homosexual writers in the Spanish language as well. I had been fortunate to know Puig and Arenas and their lives had a really profound effect on me as a writer. Lorca was a different story because I couldn’t know him, but I was approached by a publisher to write a biography on him. When I wrote it and turned it in, it was rejected, but I continued to work on it. So when I wrote about Puig and Arenas, they seemed like they could be published together. With Lorca it was also more of a political piece of writing because when I began researching his life, like fifteen years ago, his homosexuality was barely acknowledged. It was whispered about and there was family censorship. So I wanted to deconstruct his work and show how his homosexuality expressed itself explicitly, and sometimes not. I wanted to write something that once and for all showed that Lorca was gay and that his work is not only great in many ways, but also homosexual in nature.
CV: And also his heated affair with surrealist king Salvador Dalí!
JM: That’s a very underwritten part of the story as well, which perhaps someone will someday flesh out further.
CV: You pointed out that Lorca’s time in New York was a turning point for him, in terms of his honesty, in regards to his gayness. He was painfully critical of New York and bemoaned it harshly, but didn’t you point out that his work was more open after his time here?
JM: Yes. Everything happened after New York; the love sonnets he wrote to a man later in his life, and his two best plays, The Public and When Five Years Pass. It was after New York that he finally came out. In the same way it could be said that Puig also wrote his most openly homosexual books here in New York, something he could not have done in Argentina at the time, because of death threats. Kiss of the Spiderwoman was eventually published worldwide, including Argentina, yet Puig never returned.
CV: I strongly identified with Santiago’s “double life” in Latin Moon in Manhattan (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)—his freer one in gay Manhattan, and his more traditional, painful, family-oriented existence in Queens. Latino machismo is a notorious fuel for homophobia, but do you think things are getting better in Spanish-speaking communities and in the Spanish-speaking world as a whole—in terms of acceptance and not just tolerance? El Diario-La Prensa (New York’s biggest Spanish-language newspaper) recently came out in favor of gay marriage, for example.
JM: It’s changed completely. People who are homophobic, they may not be as likely to be as vocal about it now as they were in the past. So I think that homophobes have to think twice about expressing their views more openly these days. When I lived in Colombia many years ago with my lover at the time, we were the only openly gay couple in Bogotá and probably in the whole country. There were many other gay couples of course, but it was all secret.
CV: I read Twilight at the Equator (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) after reading your autobiographical opening to Eminent Maricones. How much of this book is autobiographical?
JM: Everything we write is autobiographical, because everything we write is an expression of our true selves and who we are. The biography itself, the way certain events coincide with other events in my life—there are many points of reference, but there are also things in the text that aren’t autobiographical at all, since they didn’t happen. And I think that with Twilight at the Equator, the way I saw it and what I was going through at that time in my life, I wanted it to be something between fiction and autobiography. I don’t think there were many writers at the time who were deliberately blurring the barriers between biography and fiction—when they inform each other they create something more interesting than what actually happened to you. A lot of that book was also shaped by my travels and journals.
CV: The lesbian scholar Camille Paglia recently expressed that the gay marriage movement looks “childish” and “not sophisticated” for making radical demands on Obama, when the world is plagued with very serious crises—such as the global recession, the political and social upheaval in Iran, and North Korea’s recent threats of nuclear attack. Where do you stand on this hot-button issue, as a Colombian-born writer living in America—as someone who lived through the AIDS crisis, which claimed so many radical voices?
JM: If gay people want to get married they should get married. Personally, I don’t want to, but homosexual couples should have the same rights as heterosexual couples—that’s a no-brainer. The gay movement is very white, upper middle class, and Ivy League—and also profoundly conservative and conformist. Gays at one time found a new identity, a new way of being in the world, but what many are doing now is trying to replicate heterosexual models. I’m a socialist—I grew up in Latin America during a time when Marxism was the predominant philosophy. I see the family as an oppressive and patriarchal unit that mirrors the repression of the establishment. Many families are like mini repressive states. That’s not to say that I don’t love many people in my family. When I was growing up I was more interested in the relationship between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They loved each other, screwed other people, and never got married, they didn’t even live together—but they were completely loyal to each other. In a way that seems to me a more admirable kind of marriage.
CV: Can you tell us a little bit about what you are working on now?
JM: For the last ten years I’ve been writing historical novels. The most recent one was about the struggle for independence in South America and now I’m writing a novel about Cervantes—but in a way they’re not that different. I don’t think Cervantes was homosexual by any means—I don’t think the idea was even perceived at the time. But, he was very much an outsider. He spent many years of his life in jail and suffered as a lower-class boy in Spain—and perhaps also because he was Jewish. So it’s the idea of the outsider that attracts me and it’s what I’ve always tried to be—to question everything. I think that this is what Paglia is talking about. I’m not attacking parenthood, but I don’t want to spend my life going to church and to PTA meetings when we have so much injustice, famines, and wars raging all around us.
This interview © Charlie Vazquez and Jaime Manrique, 2009. All Rights Reserved.
Learn more about Jaime Manrique <here>
Learn more about Charlie Vazquez <here>
Read a Charlie Vazquez short story <here>
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