November 22

I woke up at Catalina O’Hara’s house. As I was having breakfast, very early, with Catalina and her son, Davy, who had to be taken to nursery school (María wasn’t there, everyone else was asleep), I remembered that the night before, when there were just a few of us left, Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn’t say so.

Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs and philenes. But the two main currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. Rubén Darío was a freak, in fact, the queen freak, the prototypical freak.

“In our language, of course,” he clarified. “In the wider world the reigning freak is still Verlaine the Generous.”

Freaks, according to San Epifanio, were closer to madhouse flamboyance and naked hallucination, while faggots and queers wandered in stagger-step from ethics to aesthetics and back again. Cernuda, dear Cernuda, was a nymph, and at moments of great bitterness, a faggot, whereas Guillén, Aleixandre, and Alberti could be considered a sissy, a butch, and a queer respectively. As a general rule, poets like Carlos Pellicer were butches, while poets like Tablada, Novo, and Renato Leduc were sissies. In fact, there was a dearth of faggots in Mexican poetry, although some optimists might point to López Velarde and Efraín Huerta. There were a lot of queers, on the other hand, from the mauler (although for a second I heard mobster) Días Mirón to the illustrious Homero Aridjis. It was necessary to go all the way back to Amado Nervo (whistles) to find a real poet, a faggot poet, this is, and not a philene like the resurrected and now renowned Manuel José Othón from San Luis Potosí, a bore if ever there was one. And speaking of bores: Manuel Acuña was a fairy and José Joaquín Pesado was a Grecian wood nymph, both longtime pimps of a certain kind of Mexican lyrical verse.

“And Efrén Rebolledo?” I asked.

“An extremely minor queer. His only virtue is that he was the first, if not the only, Mexican poet to publish a book in Tokyo: Japanese Poems, 1909. He was a diplomat, of course.”

Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggots and queer poets to seize control of the word. Sissies, according to San Epifanio, were faggot poets by birth, who out of weakness or for comfort’s sake lived within the accepted—most of the time—the aesthetic and personal parameters of the queers. In Spain, France, and Italy, queer poets have always been legion, he said, although a superficial reader might never guess. What happens is that a faggot poet like Leopardi, for example, somehow reconstructs queers like Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo, the deadly trio.

“In the same way, Pasolini redraws contemporary Italian queerdom. Take the case of the poor Sanguinetti (I won’t start with Pavese, who was a sad freak, the only one of his kind, or Dino Campana, who dines at a separate table, the table of the hopeless freaks). Not to mention France, great country of devouring mouths, where one hundred faggot poets, from Villon to our beloved Sophie Podolski, have nurtured, still nurture, and will nurture with the blood of their tits ten thousand queer poets with their entourage of philenes, nymphs, butches, and sissies, lofty editors of literary magazines, great translators, petty bureaucrats, and grand diplomats of the Kingdom of Letters (see, if you must, the shameful and malicious reflections of the Tel Quel poets). And the less said the better about the faggotry of the Russian Revolution, which, if we’re to be honest, gave us just one faggot poet, a single one.”

“Who?” they asked him. “Mayakovsky?”

“No.”

“Esenin?”

“No.”

“Pasternak? Blok? Mandelstam? Akhmatova?”

“Hardly.”

“Come on, Ernesto, tell us, the suspense is killing us.”

“There was only one,” said San Epifanio, “and now I’ll tell you who it was, but he was the real thing, a steppes-and-snow faggot, a faggot from head to toe: Khlebnikov.”
There was an opinion for every taste.

“And in Latin America, how many true faggots do we find? Vallejo and Martín Adan. Period. New Paragraph. Macedonio Fernández, (although some of his poems are authentically faggotty), butches like León de Greiff, butch nymphs like Pablo de Rokha (with bursts of freakishness that would’ve driven Lecan crazy), sissies like Lezama Lima, a guided reader of Góngora, and, along with Lezama, all the poets of the Cuban Revolution (Diego, Vitier, horrible Retamar, pathetic Guillén, inconsolable Fina Garcia) except for Rogelio Nogueras, who is a darling an a nymph with the spirit of a playful faggot. But moving on. In Nicaragua most poets are fairies like Coronel Urtecho or queers who wish they were philenes, like Ernesto Cardenal. The Mexican Contemporaries are queers too…”

“No!” shouted Belano. “Not Gilberto Owen!”

“In fact,” San Epifanio continued unruffled, “Gorotiza’s Death Without End, along with the poetry of Paz, is the ‘Marseillaise’ of the highly nervous and sedentary Mexican Queer Poets. More names:Gelman, nymph; Bendetti, queer; Nacanor Parra, fairy with a hint of faggot; Wesphalen, freak; Enrique Lihn, sissy; Girondo, fairy; Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, fairy butch; Sabines, butchy butch; our beloved, untouchable Josemilio P., freak;. And back to Spain, back to the beginning”—whistles—“Gongora and Quevedo, queers; san Juan de la Cruz and Fray Luis de León, faggots. End of story. And now, some differences between queers and faggots. Even in their sleep, the former beg for a twelve-inch cock to plow and fertilize them, but at the moment of truth, mountains must be moved to get them into bed with the pimps they love. Faggots, on the other hand, live as if a stake is permanently churning their insides and they look at themselves in the mirror (something they both love and hate to do with all their heart), they see the Pimp of Death in their own sunken eyes. For faggots and queers, pimp is the one word that can cross unscathed through the realms of nothingness (or silence or otherness). But then, too, nothing prevents queers and faggots from being good friends if they so desire, from neatly ripping one another off, criticizing or praising one another, publishing or burying one another in the frantic and moribund world of letters.”

“And what about Cesárea Tinajero? Is she a faggot or queer?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice.

“Oh, Cesárea Tinajero is horror itself,” said San Epifanio.