Homosexuality and Bisexuality in Literature

Literary representations of the experience of sexual minorities have been an important strand of Latin American literature since the publication in Brazil of Adolfo Caminha's Bom-Crioulo (1895; English trans., The Black Man and the Cabin Boy, 1982), a path-breaking novel about a romance between an ex-slave and a cabin boy. Other early texts in this vein include the short story "El hombre que parecía un caballo" (1914; English trans., "The Man Who Looked Like a Horse"), about the Colombian poet Porfirio Barba Jacob, by the Guatemalan Rafael Arévalo Martínez; a novel about a priest in love with an altar boy, Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto (1924; Passion and death of Father Deusto), by the Chilean Augusto D'Halmar; several texts from Cuba, Hernández Catá's El ángel de Sodoma (1928; The angel of sodom), Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta's La vida manda (1929; Life commands), and Carlos Montenegro's Hombres sin mujer (1935; Men without women); and the writings of members of the Mexican Contemporáneos group, especially Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Elías Nandino. Major novels of the 1950s and 1960s that focus on same-sex desire are João Guimaráes Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas (Brazil, 1956; English trans., The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, 1963); José Donoso's El lugar sin límites (Chile, 1966; English trans., Hell Has No Limits, 1995); and José Lezama Lima's Paradiso (Cuba, 1966; English trans., 1974). Two key texts in the contemporary tradition on these topics come from Argentina: Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña (1976; English trans., Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1979), and Sylvia Molloy's En breve cárcel (1981; English trans., Certificate of Absence, 1989). Since the 1980s there has been an explosion of writing on this topic; key figures include Luis Zapata and Carlos Monsiváis (Mexico); Senel Paz, Ena Lucía Portela, Norge Espinosa, and Pedro de Jesús (Cuba); Fernando Vallejo, Albalucía Angel, and Alonso Sánchez Baute (Colombia); Armando Rojas Guardia (Venezuela); Jaime Bayly (Peru); Caio Fernando Abreu and Márcia Denser (Brazil); Juan Pablo Sutherland and Pedro Lemebel (Chile); and Néstor Perlongher, Diana Bellessi, Osvaldo Bazán, and María Moreno (Argentina). Critical attention has also been devoted to recovering homoerotic elements in a variety of canonical writers from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the colonial Mexican nun, to Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945.

See alsoLiterature: Brazil; Literature: Spanish America; Sexuality: Same-sex Behavior in Latin America, Modern Period; Sexuality: Same-sex Behavior in Latin America, Pre-Conquest to Independence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balderston, Daniel. El deseo, enorme cicatriz luminosa: Ensayos sobre homosexualidades latinoamericanas. Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004.

Balderston, Daniel, and José Maristany. "The Lesbian and Gay Novel in Latin America." In The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, edited by Efraín Kristal, pp. 200-216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Balderston, Daniel, and José Quiroga. Sexualidades en disputa. Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, 2005.

Foster, David William, ed. Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Quiroga, José. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

                                        Daniel Balderston