A Queer Friendship

Abstract

Jose, me dejaste con la miel en la boca. You left me with honey on my lips. That was an expression my grandmother used when my visits were not long enough. I met Jose in 1994 when he spearheaded a Latino/a Representation in the Media conference at Duke University, a who’s who of Latino/a academics, that included Chon Noriega and Ana Lopez. I was booked to perform “Milk of Amnesia” and my sister Ela, a film director, would show the film “Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst is Your Waffen.” When I asked Jose about the performance space, lights and sound, he had a blank look. He’d not thought about tech. I yelled: “I have my period and am angry and I can yell at you because I’m going to a shrink.” Academics mobilize—carry lights, projector, screen—and the performance is a makeshift DIY esthetics befitting a solo about Cuba where people have to “resolver” resolve. And that was the beginning of our queer friendship. Jose and I bonded instantly over Cubanidad, exile, humor, dogs, food, art and the queers—maybe not in that order. Our Cubanidad was a shortcut to our mutual understanding, with our shared national and similar familial baggage. We suffered exile el exilio. His was a southern Florida style, mine a northern New York. He could joder, a Spanish verb that means to fuck, tease, and be a pain in the ass. On one of my birthdays he told me my performances were missing something and gave me what would improve them—a rubber chicken. I used that chicken until it disintegrated. I was one of the lucky queer and people of color artists Jose wrote about. He was the perfect interlocutor, framing the work and putting it in context. Jose wrote about choteo, a Cuban brand of irreverent humor in my work associated