Speculating on Queer Pasts to Achieve a Queer Eternity for My Tío Cano

He had to have danced.

To Madonna, I’m sure, “Into The Groove” or “Material Girl,” two hits around his clubbing prime, his first years away from the home of his parents—my grandparents—in New Jersey. Janet’s “When I Think of You” is on and he’s getting messy, feeling himself, though his dancing is OK, in his feelings and in his body is all that matters. On a special night, one of the queer clubs has to play Eddie Santiago’s 1986 salsa hits, “Que Locura Enamorarme de Ti” or “Tú Me Quemas,” and he’s shaking those hips thinking of his Puerto Rican family he left behind, thinking of islands and barrios as he twists and turns with another man, with some girlfriends who celebrate his salsero femininity.

Or maybe to Rick Astley’s 1987 “Never Gunna Give You Up” was his jam, one of the last club hits he would listen to before he got a little too sick to stand, before the seizures incapacitated him, before he died from—as his obituary identified in secret, yet open, shame—“his illness.” Who knows. It was the eighties.

He had to have touched another man in a crowded nightclub. Kissed one, kissed many. Drink in hand, sloshing gin and tonic, sticky hands on sweaty bodies. Thin, unlike me, more malleable, bending over the arm of a lover. He had to have desired and lusted over other queer bodies, though none of my family knows this information, knows nothing and wanted to know nothing because they couldn’t handle the fact one of their own, their little macho, yearned for boy dicks and boy asses, yearned to fuck dangerously, to fuck until the end of days.

He had to have fucked in the club. On the floor of the bathroom. On a pool table in the back of a sleazy bar. He didn’t mind a little dirt and grime. Not that upscale kinda gay. Was he even gay? My mother speculates he was bisexual; when he returned to my grandparents’ home, too sick to care for himself, she remembers him reaching out to women to let them know of his status. Who knows, really, but I know he wasn’t an upper-crust kinda queer. My tío Cano.

He liked to get fucked and liked to fuck. He liked blowing men in Central Park, he liked eating ass on the piers with Jersey on the horizon. He was a slut. Proud of it, too, and all who knew him knew him to be so. But who did know him? Who claimed knowledge over his life in these years he was his full queer self? My tío Cano, who lived with and died of AIDS. My tío Cano, who took to his grave his years in the eighties, his years being wild and deviant, his years loving and fucking and caring for others like him.

But what do I know? I, the queer baby born a month after his tío’s passing from AIDS, born into the house still haunted by queer suffering and death. I, who came of queer age in the early years of the 2010s, dancing to Britney Spears, Rihanna, Ke$ha, and Beyoncé, miles and miles away from my family, like my tío Cano when he came of queer age. I, who came of age in the years of PrEP, the fear and stigma of HIV/AIDS not as controlling a force on our queer minds, queer Puerto Rican elders housing me when I have nowhere else to go telling me stories of survival, of loss, of joy through the decades. I, who came of age in the time of the Pulse Nightclub massacre, fearing every time I get a little loose, a little free of body, that bullets will enter my body and the bodies of those I care about. I, who speculate on a man I never knew and will never know and yet yearn to know.

Speculation, as a way of writing, analyzing, and imagining, is a powerful tool for recovering the lives of marginalized people, as Saidiya Hartman’s recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, demonstrates.

Hartman takes what she can from various archives—a case file, a newspaper article, a diary, a police report—and constructs accounts of Black girlhood and womanhood against the disciplinary goals that the sociologist, the philanthropist, the police, and other forces from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth had in mind.

“The beauty of the black ordinary,” as Hartman writes on the intentions behind her project, a note, in many ways, on her speculative method, “the beauty that resides in and animates the determination to live free, the beauty that propels the experiments in living otherwise.”

She continues: “Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of the enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”

How do I speculate on the life of my tío Cano? How do I find the “too much” and the beautiful possibilities within his life? Hartman does this work through careful elaboration: elaborating the desires, practices, challenges, and ways of being free that Black girls and women made possible in spite of a society which sought to eliminate them. Speculation becomes a way in which to bring to life that which was never made to come to life, made to be stuck forever as a police report, a sociological survey, a philanthropist’s diary.

How do I speculate on the life of my tío Cano? How do I find the “too much” and the beautiful possibilities within his life?

What do we do with bodies who lived and died and left no personal records behind? No notebooks, no diaries, no letters, no photos of my tío Cano when he was his queer freest. Medical reports of my tío Cano, the AIDS patient—there might be the start to my research, but no one seems to know the doctors he visited, the people who cared for him. There is no trace of him in which to even begin the research. Not a single detail of his queer Puerto Rican life in which to recover. Where do I start?

During my first few months in New York City, as an eighteen-year-old boy, dying to be queer, to be wild and free, I stumble upon a fortune teller in the Lower East Side who tells me I was born into a great and terrible sadness. Your mother was suffering through her whole pregnancy with you, she says, her voice now ominous yet sympathetic, and this suffering carries through to you to this day.

I know what suffering she speaks of. This suffering my family hides, this queer suffering that is their shame. But why is this my burden to bear? Why is this my queer inheritance, the legacy I must live with? I come to New York to go to gay clubs, to have a lot of sex, to not think about my family back in New Jersey.

But I know the fortune teller’s words to be true. I feel her prophecy in the pit of my belly. This pit that holds this unclaimed suffering, this loneliness, this grief. This pit where my mother’s turmoil—and all the rage and grief and untold stories of my tío Cano—reside. My body is the result of queer death.

For that reason, I pursue a person I have never known and will never know. For that reason, I need to see my tío Cano in someone. I need to know he lived.

*

My boyfriend points out how one of the people in Paris is Burning—a documentary film highlighting queer Black and Latinx ball culture in eighties New York—looks exactly like my uncle. Is it him? Was he there in Harlem, in the ball circuits, vogueing away, snapping fingers in applause? I don’t know. How can I know?

This person in the film looks awfully like my tío Cano. The bony body, the slim face, the long wavy hair, and the light brown skin. I don’t know how this person identified in terms of their gender then, I don’t know how they identify now, if there is even a now for a queer body of color like that one.

They are there in the first three minutes of the film, vogueing in a long shot, knees bending angularity and arms flinging precision, before Madonna made it cool, before Madonna profited from it. A few seconds later is a close-up shot. Trophy in their hands, leaning far over, stretching theatrically to be seen. Their hair is a lengthily wavy opulence. They are Puerto Rican, no doubt about it. One of those thousands upon thousands who migrated to the mainland, to New York City, to New Jersey, to Connecticut. Full of dreams yet dream-denied.

Look at me, their body says to the camera, look at me. Posing their body for the crowd around them, the camera in front of them, the viewer who will watch beyond the eighties, the nineties, the 2000s. They’re a winner, baby, and they want us to know, that imagined us, across space and time.

After holding the pose for a few seconds, a slight smile. Coyness in the upturn. They know something we don’t know. What it is it, girl, that’s behind that smile? What knowledge do you know that transcends your time, my time, all time? Tell us about the queer timeless. Tell us about queer eternity. How do we get there?

I watch the documentary for what seems to be the fifteenth time to scope out this body. This person is in several shots throughout the documentary. In one, they are kneeling over huddled with a group of queers. Their jaw furiously chews gum, chewing gum a femme aesthetic, chewing gum an art form. In another shot, they are applauding enthusiastically for another queen vogueing down the runway. Other quick glimpses. In each shot, they are always periphery. They speak no words. They have no name in the credits. They are no story within the filmic time.

But they are not alone in that regard. Think of all other Black and Brown bodies moving in and out of the documentary. The filmic flashes of unidentified bodies back-bending expertly, the bodies snapping fingers from the audience to egg on a performer, the riotous laughs prompted by a joke we will never know. All these bodies telling stories in gesture, in poses, in countenance. All these body stories if we just pay a little more attention to them.

I want to see my tío Cano in this person so much. I want to see him alive. Seeing him in movement, chewing gum, smoking a cigarette, getting himself all right to pose for the camera. I want to see him joyous. I want to see him in pleasure. I want to know that this queer inheritance of mine that the fortune teller prophesied does not have to be only suffering and pain. I need to believe there was joy and pleasure, too. That this pit of emotions in me explaining why I hurt and move and desire is not just about all the bad.

I want to believe that I inherited too ways of feeling joy, ways of finding pleasure, ways of being with other queers in raucous and wild ways. My watching is bent on only seeing this queer body that resembles my tío Cano. To see all that no one seemed to be able to imagine him doing. Yet, as committed as I am to seeing what I want to see, my attention wanders to other queer bodies.

I notice the way the camera focuses on a young unidentified Black body, lean and limber and lounging on a couch, as Pepper LaBeija, blurred and out of focus, discusses how young queers are kicked out of their home and come to him to be a mother/father figure. We are clearly meant to be listening to Pepper, but the camera focuses and clarifies, gearing our line of sight to their lounging on a couch in the eighties.

Halfway through the film, a shot outside a dance hall with two very young queers, one from Harlem and one from the Bronx, both definitely Puerto Rican. The one from Harlem speaks to the camera about queer family and what it means to choose one’s family. While philosophizing, the one from Harlem rests their shoulder on the other from the Bronx, playfully. Their hand, eventually, slides down the white beater of their Bronx companion, so gently, so slowly, so lovingly.

Are they lovers? So young and so in love? The hand sliding down the chest, not holding, not grasping, merely wanting to touch the other, to feel familiarity, to let the other know I will love you though your blood kin might not, loving you though we might not make it to tomorrow, loving beyond the eighties, beyond New York, beyond time and space.

These moments are little bursts of queer joy and pleasure. So brief, so fleeting, so unremarkably banal. Yet they hit me to my core. They remind me what being queer is all about. That it’s about the lounging on a couch with those you choose to call family. That it’s about the hand gently moving across a chest on the street for all to see. Being queer is about living for the everyday moment, the ordinary queerness of life, the remarkably unremarkable lives we live and have lived and will live.

Perhaps that’s what all of this is about. This speculating on queer pasts, this imagining of queer legacies: the paying attention to a detail and seeing what the detail can do to you. When the detail is all we get sometimes. Elaborating, speculating, amplifying, imagining with that one detail. The posing for a close-up that will only be three seconds long in an hour and half film. The lounging on a couch with the filmic gaze unable to turn away. The hand down a white beater. My watching a film for the fifteenth time. Constructing from a detail a life of queer fabulation. Speculating not on some future which is the rallying cry for most queer politics. The constant mobilizing on behalf of queers being just like cisheteros, fighting for us to just get married, have children, be monogamous, get the white picket fence and nice middle-class house.

Let’s speculate on queer pasts. Caring for those who are dead, who are dying, who might not have ever even lived. Caring for the queer elders who survived through those years of such unfathomable loss. Caring for the queers of color, the poor queers, the queers strutting down city blocks and the queers dancing down unpaved country roads, the queers who were never even given a chance to be as queer as they needed.

Perhaps that’s what all of this is about. This speculating on queer pasts: the paying attention to a detail . . . when the detail is all we get sometimes.

Imagine it. Another timeline. One where he had lived through 1991, where he had lived to see me born.

Had he made it through 1991, he would have taught me to dance in my grandparents’ living room. Teaching me salsa when no one was looking because he wanted to teach me how to swish my hips, how to bend my body, how to pose. He would have took me out for my first time at the queer club, letting me sip on his drink, telling me the chisme of the men he slept with. My tío Cano would have traveled the world tasting the flesh of strangers, and always returning to tell me about it.

Had he lived, he would have sat with my family and told them how he forgave them for staying away from the house, how he forgave them for not wanting to put their lips on the well-washed knives and forks and plates and cups, how he forgave them for writing up that draft of his obituary, which erased his cause of death.

But that is not my timeline. Mine is this one. This imagining a past that is not mine, and will never be anyone’s, really, because it is all speculation, a collage of details from documentaries, literature, and anecdotes from queer elders I have been fortunate enough to know.

All I can do is imagine that he had to have danced. He had to have touched another man. He had to have fucked in the club. He had to have lived, once upon a time, my tío Cano, in a nightclub, on the corner of the street, in a dimly lit bathroom, feeling his body free, loose and limber, touching and being touched, so beautifully alive. He just had to have.

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