First of all, I am not your typical doctor. My major in college was Latin American Literature. My thesis was on Gabriel Garcia Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the Colombian Nobel laureate. I love magical realism and I'm prone to write that way.
Then after 11 years as an OBGyn, where I was working over 100 hours a week, I was diagnosed with HIV in 1996, I stopped working. For a few years I just traveled and partied, thinking I was going to die.
A divorce, a new lover, a new lease on life. What to do? I was driving my new boyfriend crazy because I could not lay still. So one day he ordered me to sit down in front of the computer and start typing all the stories I have told him. That became book one--a magical realistic memoir.
Do you think there is a Latino queer aesthetic different from mainstream queer sensibilities? If so, what would you say are its major features?
Just as the African-American population, the Latino population has a hard time admitting that they are gay. Lot's of men in Puerto Rico are on the down low. Puerto Rico has the highest percentage of new cases in the USA. We are ruled by the three dogmas of the Puerto Rican Society:
Machismo - where as a top is not gay but a bottom is (really!)
Religion - 95% Catholics who are dealing with guilt and deception. Strong morals that place men on top, women way low and homosexuals even lower in the social strata. Unfortunately HIV positive men/women are at the bottom of the scale
Family Traditions – you do not leave your home until you get married (lots of activity in the outdoors) and you are supposed to reproduce so that your family name does not die. (The biggest thing my mother holds against me – but then again she prays the rosary for fun)
How would you describe the ways you hope your writing, your activism impacts the Latino community? The LGBT community?
Latinos and Puerto Ricans have lost their sense of identity. We are taught by the white man to assimilate or you will not get ahead. In the process we do not know who we are anymore. In Puerto Rico I’m looked as an Americano, here I’m seen as a Latino. When I first came to Chicago I learned of the concept of “Safe Space”. Safe space is a place where a Latino man or woman can feel safe and does not need to “cover” for the white man to pass as a member of our society.
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