2018 Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities PDF

6 CENTRO Journal
volume xxx • number ii • summer 2018
Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican

Sexualities: Queer Futures,
Reinventions,and Un-Disciplined
Archives—Introduction
lawrence la fountain-stokes and yolanda martínez-san miguel
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (lawrlafo@umich.edu) is Associate Professor of American

Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the acting director of the Latina/o Studies Program (2018–2019).
He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University on
Minnesota Press, 2009), Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (Bilingual Review Press,
2009), Abolición del pato (Terranova, 2013), A Brief and Transformative Account of Queer
History (Enciclopedia Deiknumena, 2016), Escenas transcaribeñas: ensayos sobre teatro, per-
formance y cultura (Editorial Isla Negra, 2018), and co-editor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies
(New York University Press, 2017). He previously co-edited an issue of CENTRO Journal on
Puerto Rican Queer Sexualities (Spring 2007) and is currently writing on Puerto Rican trans-
gender and drag performance and activism. He performs as Lola von Miramar since 2010.
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (ymm34@miami.edu) is the Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin

American Studies at the University of Miami. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos:
subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Instituto Internacional de Literatura
Iberoamericana, 1999); Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico
(Callejón, 2003); From Lack to Excess: Minor Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse
(Bucknell University Press, 2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial
Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). She recently co-edited two
anthologies: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
and Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (Rutgers University Press, 2016).
She is co-editing an anthology with Michelle Stephens titled Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New
Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations and working on her fifth book project,
Archipiélagos de ultramar: Rethinking Colonial and Caribbean Studies.
Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities • Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel 7
After nearly fifty years of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ)
Puerto Rican activism, even more decades of homoerotic gay and lesbian Puerto Ri-
can literature and culture, and extremely valuable queer academic and community
scholarship, we now live in a radically transformed environment marked by much
progress but also by exclusions and new challenges.1 This special issue on Revisit-
ing Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities: Queer Futures, Reinventions, and Un-Disciplined
Archives looks to the future as well as to the past to help map the new queer Puerto
Rican literary, cultural, political and scholarly landscape in the archipelago and its
diaspora.2 What does the word “queer” currently mean in Puerto Rican contexts?
What is the status of Puerto Rican sexuality studies, more broadly defined than
simply the sphere of the queer or LGBT? What are its intersections with feminism,
environmentalism, decoloniality, reproductive justice, equal marriage and parent-
ing rights, health, transgender politics, and cultural and activist expression? What
are the strengths and weaknesses of Puerto Rican queer and sexuality studies? How
have things changed since the publication of the previous CENTRO Journal special
issue on this topic in the Spring of 2007, particularly given historic changes in mar-
riage law, the dramatic rise of transgender visibility and activism, advances in HIV/
AIDS medications, and the resurgence of conservatism in Puerto Rico and the United
States? And how are queer Puerto Ricans reckoning with the impact of the fiscal cri-
sis and of Hurricanes Irma and María?
I. Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, we have witnessed fierce struggles and remark-
able legal gains, but also numerous setbacks. These struggles build upon the legacy of
pioneers such as Puerto Rican transgender activists Sylvia Rivera and Cristina Hay-
worth, both of whom participated in the historic Stonewall revolt in 1969, and on the
achievements of many additional groups, organizations, and individual activists in
Puerto Rico and the diaspora.3 The intensity of contemporary debates in Puerto Rico
over sodomy, protection against domestic violence, same-sex couples’ marriage and
adoption rights, transgender persons’ name and gender change on legal documents,
ability to run for political office, and education, highlights the extremely contentious
nature of these matters up to our day. These debates include the refusal of courts in
Puerto Rico to protect individuals in same-sex relationships from domestic violence
in 2002; the decriminalization of sodomy in 2003 at the local and federal level; failed
court cases to achieve marriage equality in 2014 superseded by Obergefell v. Hodges
in 2015; and over twenty years of legal challenges by transgender individuals for the
right to amend their birth certificates, as Joel Castro Pérez discusses in his article in
this issue. Other debates include the controversies started in 2006 over the Puerto
Rico Department of Education “Carta Circular” regarding “equidad de género” (gen-
der equity), which became a defining issue in the senate confirmation hearings of
Julia Keleher for Secretary of Education in 2017, who promised that the circulars
would be repealed, which she did later that year.4
8 centro journal • volume xxx • number ii • summer 2018
The fact that demands for basic civil rights generate public resistance signals
profound biases, frequently the result of intolerance linked to traditional patriar-
chal and sexist thinking. Many times this conservative framework has religious ties,
whether to the Catholic Church or to the numerous Pentecostal and Evangelical
churches that dominate political debates in Puerto Rico, as Gazir Sued (2013) and
Luis N. Rivera Pagán (2015, 2016) have documented; religious beliefs also impact
the health care that nurses offer patients living with HIV/AIDS (Reyes-Estrada et
al. 2018).5 At the same time, dedicated activists such as Margarita Sánchez de León,
Olga Orraca Paredes, Pedro Julio Serrano, Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, Ada Conde, Pe-
dro Peters Maldonado, José Joaquín Mulinelli-Rodríguez, Moisés Agosto-Rosario,
Wilfred W. Labiosa, Luz Guerra, Victoria Rodríguez Roldán, and many others have
consistently worked to advance the rights of LGBTQ populations.6
In the last contribution to this issue (“Recent Developments in Queer Puerto Rican
History, Politics, and Culture”), Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes has curated a timeline
and analyzed some key events in this recent history, which include legal cases, educa-
tional directives in Puerto Rico and the United States, the naming of LGBT judges, and
important developments in media, literature, theater, performance, and film, but also
dramatic violent events, such as the murder of Jorge Steven López Mercado in 2009
and the Orlando-Pulse massacre in 2016. In the second and third parts of this introduc-
tion, we offer a summary of the articles in this issue and reflect on the status of Puerto
Rican Queer Studies. At the end, we include a bibliography.
II. Queering Puerto Rican Studies Redux: Themes

We have chosen to organize the articles in this special issue of CENTRO Journal in
three thematic sections. The first of these brings together articles and oral histories
focusing mostly on gay literature and culture, and takes us back to the 1930s queer
diaspora in New York, highlighting the contributions of author Pedro Caballero, and
then transitions to the 1970s and ‘80s to the leading openly-gay writer Manuel Ramos
Otero (including his dialogue with Rosario Ferré), and more recently to Rane Arroyo,
Jorge Merced, Charles Rice-González, Louie A. Ortiz-Fonseca, and Lío Villahermosa,
as portrayed in a documentary by Gisela Rosario Ramos. The second thematic
nucleus centers on women writers and includes scholarly articles focusing on the
contributions of Ana Lydia Vega, Mayra Santos-Febres, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, and
Gabby Rivera, and also includes a poem by Mariposa Fernández. Our third and final
section highlights women’s activism, the role of mothers of LGB children, the spaces
of academia, and trans activism and representation, focusing on the life stories and
politics of Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, Madeline Román, Mildred Braulio, Las “Buenas
Amigas,” Lissette Rolón Collazo, Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Sylvia Rivera, and the
numerous trans activists that fought to achieve legal rights in Puerto Rico since the
1990s. This section includes academic articles as well as interviews.
In her article “The Early Latinx Camp Aesthetics of Pedro Caballero’s Paca
Antillana (1931),” Cristina Pérez Jiménez analyzes an early example of Puerto Rican
Ano Malia in The Real Housewives of Santa Rita. Photograph by Jo Cosme. © Jo Cosme.
All photographs are reprinted by permission.
diasporic writing. As she demonstrates, in his 1931 novel Paca Antillana: novela
pedagógica puertorriqueña, Pedro Caballero “formulates a specifically Latinx camp
aesthetics that both responds to and destabilizes implicitly Anglo queer cultural
practices.” The article highlights migration from Puerto Rico to New York as a
strategy to deal with racism and homophobia in 1920s Puerto Rico. Pérez Jiménez
recurs to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1985, 2008) theorizations about secrecy and the
closet to understand Caballero’s narrative strategies; this discussion resonates with
Dominican-American scholar Carlos Ulises Decena’s (2011) ideas about tacit subjects
or silencing that which is mutually understood and best left unsaid. As Pérez Jiménez
indicates, we can see Paca Antillana in dialogue with other early representations
of queerness by Puerto Rican authors, such as José de Diego Padró’s 1924 novella
Sebastián Guenard, also written in New York.7 Pérez Jiménez also provocatively
highlights the possibilities for reading another Puerto Rican diasporic writer’s
gesture, specifically Pedro Labarthe’s defense of homosexuality in his novel Mary
Smith (1958), as a queer literary pioneer.
The next three pieces highlight Ramos Otero’s work, who is widely considered to
be the most important openly-gay Puerto Rican author of the late twentieth century.
In her article “Clara Gardenia Otero, Palmira Parés y el feminismo queer de Manuel
Ramos Otero” (Clara Gardenia Otero, Palmira Parés and Manuel Ramos Otero’s
Queer Feminism), Dinorah Cortés-Vélez analyzes two short stories, “Romance
de Clara Gardenia Otero” and “El cuento de la Mujer del Mar,” to,” as she says,
“reveal the way in which Ramos Otero’s writing adopts the sign of the feminine as
an empowering archetype.” Cortés-Vélez uses a decolonial framework, referencing
Aníbal Quijano (coloniality of power), Walter Mignolo (coloniality, strategies of
“delinking” colonial logics), María Lugones (coloniality of gender), and Kimberlé
W. Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality to analyze the links between women and
Puerto Rican decolonization processes.
In her essay “Las Isabeles de Rosario Ferré y Manuel Ramos Otero: Modelos de
desconstrucción de género y sexualidad en la literatura puertorriqueña de la década
del setenta,” Tania Carrasquillo Hernández analyzes the literary representation of a
historical figure, the Afro-Puerto Rican brothel owner Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer,
as portrayed in the short stories “Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres” by
Rosario Ferré and “La última plena que bailó Luberza” by Manuel Ramos Otero. Both
of these stories were originally published in the seventh edition of the groundbreaking
literary journal Zona. Carga y Descarga (1972–1975). Carrasquillo Hernández
highlights the transformative role of this publication, proposing a lesbian reading of
Ferré’s short story and seeing Ramos Otero’s story as an example of sinvergüencería
(La Fountain-Stokes 2011), where a radical exiled author presents a female character
challenging social conventions and power structures.
For her article “The Travelling Theater of Manuel Ramos Otero,” journalist
Carmen Graciela Díaz conducted twenty interviews and carried out archival research
at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She examines the
author’s life in New York, the centrality of theatricality in his work, and his impact in
Puerto Rican sexualities through literature. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes’s interview
“Translocalizando a la draga: una entrevista inédita de 2002 con el actor y director Jorge
B. Merced” (Translocalizing the Drag Queen: An Unpublished Interview from 2002 with
the Actor and Director Jorge B. Merced) offers insights on the performance career of
actor and director Jorge B. Merced, particularly his adaptation of Manuel Ramos Otero’s
short story “Loca la de la locura” (The Queen of Madness) for Pregones Theater in 1997.
Meanwhile, Andrew Viñales’s “Varones in the Archive: A Queer Oral History Analysis
with Two Black Puerto Rican Gay Men” focuses on novelist, playwright, and Bronx
Academy of Art and Dance (BAAD!) co-founder Charles Rice-González and on The
Gran Varones legacy project co-founder Louie A. Ortiz-Fonseca, two inspiring gay Afro-
Puerto Rican men who meditate on the intersection of sexuality, race, and gender.8
In her essay “El hijo de Ruby: Memorias de un futuro queer,” Anastasia Valecce
discusses a short documentary film produced in 2014 by independent artist and film
director Gisela Rosario Ramos, who is also known as a performer under the name of
Macha Colón.9 El hijo de Ruby [Ruby’s Son] focuses on Puerto Rican artist Lionel (Lío)
Villahermosa, renowned for performing the traditional Puerto Rican dance of bomba
while wearing the skirt typically worn by women dancers.10 In the film, Villahermosa
shares his family history and his relationship with an absent paternal figure who
succumbed to drug abuse. Building on José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 2009), Valecce
interprets Villahermosa’s gesture of dancing with skirts as a moment of disidentifica-
tion and utopia, envisioning a different queer possibility for Puerto Rico. Valecce’s
reading suggests a different interpretation from La Fountain-Stokes’s (2009, 153–6)
analysis of Arthur Avilés dancing in skirts in the dance-theater piece Arturella.
Finally, concluding this section on gay literature and culture, María DeGuzmán
explores “Rane Arroyo’s Astronomical Optics in ‘Solar Constant.’” In this photo-text
essay, the researcher and photographer offers an analysis, illuminated by her own
photo-tableaux, of the “Solar Constant” poem sequence from queer Puerto Rican,
Chicago-born poet Rane Arroyo’s last book of poetry, the 2009 The Sky’s Weight, pub-
lished before his death in May 2010. As DeGuzmán states, “Arroyo advances a new
materialist queer critique of narrow notions of ‘Nature’ and ‘natural law’ as well as
of what it means to belong ‘here’—on earth and in the so-called ‘New World,’ in the
Americas, in the United States—as a queer Puerto Rican Latinx writer.” This hybrid
piece integrates photos by DeGuzmán in a type of dialogue with Rane Arroyo. These
photos continue the tradition DeGuzmán had employed in illustrating her 2007 ar-
ticle on Mariana Romo-Carmona’s Living at Night (1997), which formed part of our
previous special issue on Puerto Rican queer sexualities. Rane Arroyo’s interest in
scientific discovery and in outer space coincides with the achievements of Puerto
Rican astronaut Joseph Acaba and with the work of the Puerto Rican astronomer and
experimental photographer José Francisco Salgado.
Our second set of essays, which focuses on women writers, begins with Carmen
R. Lugo-Lugo’s “Getting to the Colonial Status through Sexuality: Lessons on Puerto
Rico’s Political Predicament from Women Writers,” a meditation on literature as a

tool for the representation and discussion of queer nationality and of colonialism
and anti-colonialism. In this engaging piece, Lugo-Lugo offers a useful discussion
of Puerto Rican queer studies, expanding on Frances Negrón-Muntaner’s claim that
Puerto Rico is “one of the world’s politically queerest places” (2007, 1) and on Negrón-
Muntaner’s engagement with W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “double consciousness.”
From the series “The Art of Keeping a Secret.” Photograph by Jo Cosme. © Jo Cosme.
Lugo-Lugo uses the concept of “political queerness” to discuss strategies for the
negotiation of colonialism in the texts of two authors, Ana Lydia Vega and Mayra
Santos-Febres. She also sees Puerto Ricans engaging in “Global North drag” and
offers an expansive view of queerness: “Queerness is about asserting and embracing
ways of being and behaving that are deemed deviant by mainstream ideologies.”
In addition, she engages the writings of Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Yolanda
Martínez-San Miguel, Juana María Rodríguez, and Rubén Ríos Ávila, and discusses
Ana Lydia Vega’s vegetarianism as presented in a crónica in El tramo ancla (1991) as
a queer anticolonial stance, contrasting this to the work of openly lesbian organic
farm/vegetarian Tara Rodriguez Besosa from El Departamento de la Comida.11
Finally, Lugo-Lugo discusses Sirena Selena (2000) by Mayra Santos-Febres.
While the short stories and novels might appear at first glance homonormative
( following heteronormative conventions), Large argues for more complex readings of
subversion, highlighting intertextual rewritings ( for example, Violeta as a rewriting
of Caparazones) and controversial themes, for example that of menstruation or
particularly menstrual blood, which recurs in several short stories in diverse ways.
We then proceed to three academic essays on the literary and activist work of
the prolific Puerto Rican lesbian author Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro. In her essay “El
activismo queer, feminista y decolonial en la literatura de Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro:
por un pensamiento de la Relación,” French scholar Sophie Large, previously known
for her research on Central and South American women authors, focuses on an
expansive corpus of works by the Puerto Rican writer, including many short stories
and the novels Caparazones (2010) and Violeta (2013). While the short stories and
novels might appear at first glance homonormative (following heteronormative
conventions), Large argues for more complex readings of subversion, highlighting
intertextual rewritings (for example, Violeta as a rewriting of Caparazones) and
controversial themes, for example that of menstruation or particularly menstrual
blood, which recurs in several short stories in diverse ways. Large is particularly
interested in the relations between works, highlighting Édouard Glissant’s concepts
of relationality and opacity and Homi K. Bhabha’s notions of the ambivalence
of mimetism, referring to the “coherencia epistemológica” (epistemological
coherence) of Arroyo Pizarro’s work. Large places Arroyo Pizarro in relation to
Latin American decolonial feminism, highlighting figures such as the Dominican
theorists Ochy Curiel and Yuderkis Espinosa Miñoso, the Argentinean-American
María Lugones, the Central-American American Breny Mendoza, and the Brazilian
Sueli Carneiro. She also points to Arroyo Pizarro and to Zulma Oliveras Vega’s
activism and public visibility as spokespersons for lesbians and more broadly the
LGBTQ community in Puerto Rico.
Meanwhile, Mónica C. Lladó Ortega, in “El cuerpo y la praxis del flujo en la

narrativa de Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro,” analyzes three of Arroyo Pizarro’s books of short
stories: Lesbofilias (2014), Menorragia: Histerias de octubre (2015), and Transmutadxs
(2016), focusing on flows (conceptual, physical, metaphorical) and fluids, particularly
those of the body. Lladó Ortega points out Arroyo Pizarro’s emphasis on menstrual
blood (similar to Sophie Large’s analysis) and on the body, highlighting fluidity
and movement that envision women’s relationships to their bodies as a space of
multiple possibilities, not limited or bound to essentialist conceptions. Engaging the
theoretical framework of Judith Butler and Rosi Braidotti, the author analyzes how
Arroyo Pizarro’s writing challenges heteronormativity.
Complementing these two essays, Elena Valdez offers a close reading of one of
Arroyo Pizarro’s best received works: her 2013 novel Violeta (“Visibilizando la sexo-
diversidad: el contrapunteo de la mononormatividad y los poliamores en Violeta de
Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro”). Valdez argues that Arroyo Pizarro’s work undermines the
heterosexual matrix of Puerto Ricanness, which promotes monogamy, heteropatri-
archal family, and the experiences of kinships and motherhood as forcefully imposed
on feminine sexuality. According to Valdez, the sexual dissidence of Arroyo Pizarro’s
lesbian characters favors the creation of sexually diverse environments and polyamo-
ry at the same time as the juxtaposition of their erotic autonomy and racial tensions
make visible the experiences of Afro-Puerto Rican lesbians.
We are delighted to be able to include well-known Nuyorican performance poet
Mariposa (María Teresa) Fernández’s landmark poem “Pussyology,” which the artist
performed frequently in the mid-1990s in diverse New York City venues such as the
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center and the Nuyorican Poet’s
Café, but which she had not published until recently.12 In the poem, “my pussy” be-
comes a thematic and spatial elsewhere, an embodied location of identity and desire
that lies beyond the possibility of heteropatriarchal comprehension and apprehension:
My pussy’s got a name / she ain’t a honey or a dummy

Though you treat her as such just the same
You really need to check that shit
And know that my pussy’s got a name.
My pussy’s got personality

Likes and dislikes / preferences not gendered based
She welcomes the lips of sistahs or brothas
Who can appreciate her sweet salty taste
The lyrical voice insists on invoking the existence of a name for her sexuality and desire
that goes beyond existing categories for sexual orientation, like straight, bisexual or
gay, but that also goes beyond traditional definitions of postcolonial and transnational
Puerto Ricanness, white Latinidad, and identity markers like the nation, ethnicity or
Boy Wonder. Photograph by Jo Cosme, in collaboration with stylist Adrideki. © Jo Cosme.
gender. Invisible to male desires of sexual possession and consumption, in this poem
the female sexual organ is reclaimed as an embodied location of the ultimate queer-
ness, conceived as the resistance to accept, assume, or reclaim one single identification
that could reduce the incommensurate otherness of female desire. In many respects,
the poem claims the impossibility of heteropatriarchal language to grasp the meaning,
personality, and real name of “my pussy,” as a survivor of patriarchal violence, gay and
lesbian homonormativity, as well as restrictive conceptualizations of feminism, nation-
alism, colonialism and Latinidad. As a consequence, “my pussy”’s name is announced

but never revealed or uttered, as if to preserve its ungraspable meaning within the ex-
istent modes of expression and understanding for Latina non-normative female desire.
We close this thematic cluster on women’s literature with Consuelo Martínez-
Reyes’s essay “Lesbian ‘Growth’ and Epistemic Disobedience: Placing Gabby Rivera’s
Juliet Takes a Breath within Puerto Rican Literature and Queer Theory.” This article
discusses the young adult novel Juliet Takes a Breath (2016) by Gabby Rivera in dia-
logue with Magali García Ramis’s Felices días, tío Sergio (1985). The author highlights
the lack of queer Puerto Rican novels focusing on adolescent and young female pro-
tagonists. This essay also offers a detailed analysis of the phrases “palante” and “echar
pa’lante” and discusses the desire for a Latinx queer and feminist framework and vo-
cabulary that responds to the needs and realities of young queer Latinx persons. Final-
ly, Martínez-Reyes sees these narratives in tension with dominant white feminism and
(mainstream or hegemonic) queer practices that do not respond to Latinx experience.
Our third cluster is the most heterogeneous and in many ways, the most unusual
and exciting, as it signals a range of activist histories (past and present), current ef-
forts and interventions, and revalorizations of diverse archival materials and cultural
productions. In her set of interviews titled “‘Can You Imagine?’: Puerto Rican Lesbian
Activisms, 1972–1991,” Frances Negrón-Muntaner offers three oral histories with lead-
ing lesbian Puerto Rican activists conducted in 1990 and translated and edited for this
issue of CENTRO Journal. These interviews with Ana Irma Rivera Lassén, Madeline
Román, and Mildred Braulio explore the tensions between nationalism, feminism and
lesbian identities in Puerto Rican social and grassroots movements. The three activ-
ists and thinkers interviewed reflect on the invisibility of women, and of lesbians more
specifically, in the social and political initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s. In her intro-
duction, Negrón-Muntaner reflects on the current difficulties and challenges faced by
those interested in showcasing the centrality of lesbians in Puerto Rican political and
social activism since the “absent” archives are in many respects already there: “…lesbi-
ans in Puerto Rico and the diaspora have been actively listening to others as a way to
produce various forms of public knowledge about the past since at least the 1970s.” She
proposes that lesbian oral histories and interviews respond to the ethics of feminist and
queer politics, and we would like to add epistemologies as well, since these archival
methods “often aim to highlight and validate the individuality of experience, plurality
of perspectives, and incommensurability of memory.” The interviews were originally
conducted in Spanish and were edited and translated into English for this special issue.
In her essay “Las ‘Buenas Amigas,’” Elizabeth Crespo Kebler traces the history
of Las “Buenas Amigas,” the first organization of Latina lesbians in New York City,
which was established in 1986. This essay has important points of contact with
the interviews edited and analyzed by Frances Negrón-Muntaner. Like Negrón-
Muntaner, Crespo Kebler highlights the history of feminist and lesbian organizing
in Puerto Rico, such as Mujer Intégrate Ahora (MIA) and Alianza Feminista por
la Liberación Humana (AFLH). The article discusses the formation of the lesbian
social group “Las Buenas Amigas” in the context of broader legal frameworks and
debates in New York City from the late 1980s onwards. Some of the women sharing
their life stories also participated in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and in other
types of organizations such as Taller Salud, a feminist health organization. Crespo
Kebler’s narrative representation of the interviews also describes participation
in international encuentros or gatherings of lesbian feminists throughout Latin
America. This piece traces the complex origins of the group’s founders and the
process of incorporation and expansion, including opening the group to new
members and meeting at the New York Lesbian and Gay Community Center and
their participation in the Gay Pride and Puerto Rican Day parades. Crespo Kebler’s
article is an interesting counterpoint to Lourdes Torres’s analysis of Latina lesbian
activism in Chicago published in GLQ (2014) and in Out in Chicago (La Fountain-
Stokes, Torres, and Rivera-Servera 2011), where Torres documents the history of
LLENA (1988–1992) and of Amigas Latinas (1995–present), and to Torres’s 2007
CENTRO Journal piece, where the well-regarded scholar discusses Puerto Rican
lesbian cultural production.13 It is notable that Latina women in New York City and
Chicago recurred to the trope of “amigas” to name their organizations.
In their essay “Puerto Rican Mothers’ Conversations about Sexual Health with
Non-Heterosexual Youth,” Leandra Smollin, Josibel C. García Valles, Maria Idalí Torres,
and Phillip J. Granberry provide us with analysis of a subset of 13 interviews culled from a
larger sample collected in Springfield, Massachusetts, to see how mothers discuss issues
of sexuality with their non-heterosexual adolescent children. This essay proposes a very
useful engagement with the relevant critical bibliography on LGBTQ youth and their
relationship with their mothers. The essay concludes with several policy suggestions,
and advances a more complex understanding of Latinx motherhood.
Meanwhile, Christopher Powers and Jocelyn A. Géliga Vargas’s “Del otro la’o:
Boricuir Praxis from Mayagüez. An Interview with Lissette Rolón Collazo and Beatriz
Llenín Figueroa,” highlights the history of the Coloquio Del Otro Lao, including the
multiple challenges it has faced and the collective process behind the articulation of
these series of conferences held in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, since 2006.14 The interview
advances a neologism, the term “boricuir” or “Boricuir,” as a local variant and Boricua
creolization of the English-language term “queer.” As they state, it is
[a] privileged perspective from the liminal, from the unstable border of the Boricua
occupying the Caribbean archipelago and other islands and spaces (like Manhattan, the
Bronx, and the Barrio, among other peripheries), with a foreign passport and without
a nationality recognized in international forums. Boricuir is an essential impossibility,
forged and celebrated in daily acts like abject sexualities, without necessarily
determining the characteristics of identity according to the usual conventions of our
beleaguered modernity.
This new term responds to regional needs; Lissette Rolón Collazo sees it in dialogue with
Rosamond S. King’s (2014) “Caribglobal”: “The boricuir is necessarily hybrid, fugitive,
borderland, weird, queer and implies all of the strangeness that emanates from the
Boricua experience of our Caribglobal (a concept coined by Rosamond S. King, one of
our keynote speakers in the VI Coloquio), with an emphasis on rebel bodies and desires.”
We conclude our special issue with two pioneering articles. Gabriel Mayora
focuses on representations of Sylvia Rivera in his piece “‘Where’s My Thanks’: The
Regulation, Memorialization, and Resistance of Sylvia Rivera in Fictional Stonewall
Films.” Mayora analyzes the fictionalization of New York Puerto Rican and Venezuelan
transgender activist and Stonewall veteran Sylvia Rivera in gay British director Nigel
Finch’s 1995 film Stonewall. Mayora argues that this fictionalization engages in a
regulatory, imperialist process that seeks to sanitize Rivera’s unruly, public queer
Puerto Rican expression, subjugating her radical politics in favor of neoliberal,
multicultural, and teleological celebrations of LGBT rights and representation.
Furthermore, he argues that a critical analysis of Finch’s fictionalization of Rivera
explores avenues of resistance through which radical trans Puerto Ricans challenge
normative modes of LGBT citizenship and visibility.
In his article “La lucha por el derecho a ser: una historia de transfobia
institucional, 1995–2018,” Joel I. Castro Pérez analyzes how between 1995 and 2018,
members of the transgender community in Puerto Rico fought on diverse fronts of the
island to achieve the change of sex/gender in their official identification documents.
Castro Pérez narrates and analyzes how the three constitutional powers denied to
this community, during the best part of these two decades, the right to identify with
the right gender, particularly with respect to the legal cases of Alexandra Andino
Torres, Alexandra Delgado Hernández, Lisa Marie Rodríguez Rodríguez, Daniela
Arroyo González, Victoria Rodríguez-Roldán, and J.C. (a trans man who wished to
keep his identity private), and of the organization Puerto Rico para tod@s.
III. Devenir Pato: Methodological Meditations
«Devenir —dice en Mil Mesetas— es, a partir de las formas que se tiene, del sujeto que
se es, de los órganos que se posee o de las funciones que se ocupa, extraer partículas,
entre las cuales se instauran relaciones de movimiento y de reposo, de velocidad y de
lentitud, bien próximas a lo que se está deviniendo y por las cuales se deviene. En ese
sentido, el devenir es un proceso del deseo». Devenir no es transformarse en otro,
sino entrar en alianza (aberrante), en contagio, en inmistión con el (lo) diferente.
—Perlongher (2016, 130).15
C A R N E. Photograph by Jo Cosme. © Jo Cosme.

From the series “The Art of Keeping a Secret.” Photograph by Jo Cosme. © Jo Cosme.
We would like to take Néstor Perlongher’s thought-provoking rearticulation

of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “devenir” in Perlongher’s essay “Los deveni-
res minoritarios” as a point of departure for a brief meditation of the status of the
methodological interventions that are proposed by the essays compiled in this spe-
cial issue. For Perlongher, “devenir” and identity should not be confused, since the
point of interacting with otherness is not unification or transformation, but the
establishment of tense and aberrant relationships with difference. In this founda-
tional essay, Perlongher is concerned with the privileging of identity politics over
profound theorizations of differences that ultimately transform our understand-
ing of human experience, social subjects, and the political projects and systems of
knowledge that they can create, build, or promote. It is precisely this focus on the
process of becoming in the difficult interaction with otherness, instead of the fan-
tasy of harmony in inclusion and integration, that we would like to take as a point
of departure to think about Puerto Rican queerness today.
When CENTRO Journal edited its first issue on “Puerto Rican Sexualities” in 2007
several questions were key: what are some of the significant transformations taking
place in Puerto Rican studies with the emergence of “the relatively new field of ‘queer
Puerto Rican studies’” (Aponte-Parés et al. 2007, 5)?; what is the history of the Puerto
Rican LGBTQ political and epistemic mobilizations?; how can the institutionalization of
fields like ethnic and sexuality studies contribute to break the barriers between studies in
the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to promote a truly interdisciplinary
mode of inquiry lead by questions and not by specific disciplinary methods?; and how can
the journal contribute to the documenting of LGBTQ histories by expanding archives,

literary and cultural corpuses and by serving as a platform to publish and disseminate
the work of scholars, activist, artists and thinkers? Some areas of inquiry had recently
emerged, like the work that challenged the patriarchal and heteronormative founda-
tions of nationalist discourses and the study of trans subjectivities. Others were pressing
questions that are still in search of answers today, such as the problematic invisibility of
women in sexuality studies and their hypervisibility in gender and feminist studies at
the expense of other genders. Yet it is evident that this second CENTRO Journal issue
does not have to contend with the institutionalization and visibilization of sexuality and
gender studies to justify the need for a special issue on “Puerto Rican Queer Sexualities.”
If the first issue took five years to compile, the second issue has taken us less than two
years, with a significant part of the delay being produced by the destruction of the island
by hurricanes Irma and María, and not by the absence of enough scholars and thinkers
willing to engage in this research project.
Eleven years later, this second issue returns to some central questions about
the need to keep documenting LGBTQ Puerto Rican, Caribbean and Latina/o/x dis-
courses, modes of representation and lives, but the methodological questions are
somewhat different. For example, this issue showcases the significant transforma-
tion in our conceptualization of gender after the emergence and institutionalization
of trans studies. Topics like gender expression intersect with issues of class, race,
and sexuality in ways that allow us to engage in more nuanced analysis of each one
of these elements as they are produced in the inter-relation and interaction that ex-
ists between them. Many of the essays in this issue further explore the intimate yet
tense relationship between feminist, ethnic, gender, queer, and trans studies in the
articulation of new knowledge formations (Carrasquillo, Cortés Vélez, DeGuzmán,
Lugo-Lugo, Martínez-Reyes, and Powers and Géliga Vargas).
Since many of the contributions engage cultural, artistic and symbolic representations of
gender and sexuality, there are questions about the role of imagination and creativity in
the articulation and/or exploration of different dimensions of human identity.
This special issue was also conceived around a central question—the gaps in
the archives on queer Puerto Rican identities—that is supplemented by a concern
about the disciplinary methods and the media available to create, curate, and pre-
serve the corpus and/or archives that contain queer identities. The issue of gaps in
the archive is perhaps easier to identify. Some of those gaps were: lesbians, wom-
en’s sexuality more broadly, trans subjects, as well as documents and texts referring
to queer, non-binary, and non-conforming subjectivities that were written before
the public emergence of a lesbian and gay movement in the United States in the
late 1960s. The issue of disciplinary methods is perhaps a little more complex and
allowed us to explore a whole series of inter-related questions. For example, what

kinds of collaborations should we solicit? In the call for papers we invited “articles,
essays, interviews, oral histories, ethnographic studies, and other written and vi-
sual documentation related to Puerto Rican sexualities in both Puerto Rico and
the diaspora, including little-known primary sources.” The idea was to cast a wide
net that would allow us to collect contributions in a broad variety of formats that
would allow us to expand the existing acervo (archive) of materials available to
study Puerto Rican queer subjectivities and discourses over time.
The resulting collection of twenty interventions showcase, evidently, a partial re-
sponse to some of these disciplinary and methodological queries. Among these twenty
collaborations, twelve are essays in cultural studies, while one is in legal studies and
one in public health; four are interviews that explore the limits between oral histories
and ethnographic studies. Several of the pieces are creative interventions exploring the
complex intersectionalities between Puerto Ricanness, ethnic and racialized identities,
gender, sexuality and colonialism, whether through a journalistic/scholarly essay or
through poetry. We have reorganized the collaborations among three common topics,
and we have not separated creative interventions from academic work. Yet even within
this apparently disciplinary and generic division, several methodological innovations
are evident. First, many of the essays engage topics, time periods or experiences with
which the authors were personally implicated or involved. The traditional separation
between the researcher and the object of study is therefore questioned as a gold stan-
dard for the production of knowledge, showcasing the importance of embodiment, ex-
perience and positionality in the expansion and transformation of objects into subjects
of study. Second, in many instances, our collaborators were queerly aware of the role
their work performed in curating and legitimating new archives, sources, and docu-
ments for the study of Puerto Rican notions of gender, sexuality, desire and political
activism (Castro Pérez, Crespo Kebler, Díaz, La Fountain-Stokes, Negrón-Muntaner,
Pérez Jiménez, Smollin et al., Valecce, and Viñales). Contributors explore questions
around how to articulate new archives, what kinds of materials make it or not to the
archive and what are some of the experiences, lives, embodiments, and knowledges
that resist becoming traditional sources. The cluster of essays on the published works
by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (Large, Lladó-Ortega and Valdez), as well as the essays
exploring new aspects of Manuel Ramos Otero’s work at times using the new docu-
ments made available at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia Univer-
sity thanks to the leadership of Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Carrasquillo, Cortés-Vélez,
Díaz, La Fountain-Stokes), are good examples of this important trend.16 But other es-
says and creative pieces push for the implementation of queer readings of canonical
authors who have not usually self-identified as queer or non-binary, but who explore
in their works articulations of identity that depict these dimensions of identity as cen-
tral in Puerto Rican history, social and political experiences, and cultural representa-
tions (Carrasquillo on Rosario Ferré, Cortés-Vélez in her study of the representation
of women in Manuel Ramos Otero’s works, Fernández, Lugo-Lugo, and Valecce). In
these essays and creative works, queer methodologies inform the way in which liter-
ary and cultural discourses, as well as historical and legal documents, are reviewed in
order to elicit non-normative dimensions of gender (both cis and trans), masculinity,
femininity, race, ethnicity and sexuality in Puerto Rican discourses. Third, many of the
essays included in this anthology insist in pushing against the boundaries of existing
disciplines, to explore the multiple intersectionalities of gender, sexuality, ethnicity,
race, and political subjectivities and agencies (DeGuzmán, Large, Lugo-Lugo, Mayora,
Negrón-Muntaner, Valecce, and Viñales). Since many of the contributions engage cul-
tural, artistic and symbolic representations of gender and sexuality, there are questions
about the role of imagination and creativity in the articulation and/or exploration of
different dimensions of human identity. Finally, although the HIV/AIDS pandemic
is now a historical period open for study (as has been already the case in important
work done by Adriana Garriga López, Carlos Rodríguez-Díaz, Nelson Varas-Díaz and
Ricardo Vargas Molina, among others), several of our essays collect testimonies about
the impact of the AIDS pandemic in the rearticulation of the LGBTQ movement in the
United States and Puerto Rico (Díaz, La Fountain-Stokes, and Viñales).17 The explora-
tion of the intergenerational perception of this crucial (and still tragic) moment for
the LGBTQ community is central for some of the contributions collected in this issue.
This issue also explores another important insight: the centrality of women, and
feminist ways of knowing and scholarship, in the articulation of crucial strategies in-
forming several of the political and epistemic projects on minority subjects and dif-
ference (Carrasquillo, Castro-Pérez, Cortés-Vélez, Crespo Kebler, Fernández, Large,
Lladó-Ortega, Lugo-Lugo, Martínez-Reyes, Mayora, Negrón-Muntaner, Powers and
Géliga Vargas, Smollin et al., Valdez, and Valecce). In that regard, as editors we made a
concerted effort to reach out to collaborators working on women’s and lesbian studies
to fill a gap that is still prevalent in many anthologies and special issues on gender and
sexuality studies. At a moment in which some of the historical programs of Women’s
Studies are discussing the possibility of changing their names to Gender and Sexual-
ity Studies, our special issue follows an alternative insight from Perlongher’s thinking:
Moleculares, minoritarios, «todos los devenires comienzan y pasan por el devenir

mujer», clave de otros devenires. ¿Por qué? Porque las mujeres —«únicos depositarios
autorizados para devenir cuerpo sexuado»— ocupan una posición minoritaria con
relación al paradigma de hombre mayoritario —machista, blanco, adulto, heterosexual,
cuerdo, padre de familia, habitante de las ciudades...—. Hay, o puede haber, devenires
del hombre, pero no un «devenir hombre», ya que el hombre es el mayoritario por
excelencia, mientras que todo devenir es minoritario. (2016, 132–3)
The way in which we understand this intervention is that there is a crucial

genealogy of thinking sexual and gender dissidence that is informed by the important
work done around the social and political construction of womanhood. That
foundational asymmetry of heteropatriarchy informs many of the epistemic and
intellectual moves behind Subaltern, Queer, and Sexuality Studies. Many of the
essays included in this special issue either reflect on the alternative spaces in which
women’s and lesbian histories are documented, contained, conceptualized or reflect
on the centrality of motherhood, womanhood, transfeminism, and lesbianism in the
articulation of legal and political movements that have transformed Puerto Rican
perspective and identities. Likewise, important work on feminist and women’s studies
scholarship informs the problematization of gender proposed by several of the essays
included in this special issue. In this way, we have tried to address the methodological
gap in Sexuality and Gender Studies that invisibilizes the foundational role of Women’s
Studies and feminist scholarship in more recent articulations of Gender, Sexuality,
and Trans Studies (Castro-Pérez, Martínez-Reyes, Negrón-Muntaner, Mayora and
Valecce). At the same time, our collaborators explore the ways in which recent work in
Sexuality, Trans, and Gender Studies has significantly transformed central disciplinary
and methodological tenets in Women’s and Feminist Studies.
One final question that these contributions explore, either explicitly or implic-
itly, is how are Queer and Trans Studies transformed specifically by Puerto Rican,
Ethnic, and Latino Studies and vice-versa. Ethnic and Sexuality and Gender Studies
share some common epistemic foundations. First, these are all areas of inquiry that
emerge out of very direct engagements with experiences of social, political, symbolic,
and epistemic exclusion and marginalization. Second, all of these fields question the
traditional boundaries between disciplines and are what Nelson Maldonado-Torres
(2012) conceives as question-based modes of research and knowledge acquisition.
As such, Ethnic, Queer and Trans Studies interrogate the implicit and explicit bi-
ases of mainstream research methods that claim to be objective and therefore blind
to embodied and social specificies like gender, gender expression, race, ethnicity,
sexual orientation, and social class. As a consequence, these fields advance situated
knowledges (Haraway 1988) that question the possibilities and limits of inclusion of
different voices within a single institutional system of knowledge production vs. the
need to transform the very ways in which research methods and disciplines have
been historically structured to invisibilize embodied, localized, subjective knowl-
edges (Smith 2012). Many of the contributions included here interrogate and engage
directly the limits between mainstream disciplines like literary and cinema studies,
sociology, history and anthropology, with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary en-
gagements structured around questions of Puerto Rican sexuality, gender expression
and ethnic identification, both in the islands of Puerto Rico and elsewhere.
Evidently, each one of these fields has developed different modes of knowledge
production, since gender, gender expression, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and
class are different objects of study that are conceived, visualized and experienced
differently by different subjects located in very specific social contexts. Therefore, as
much as there are synergistic and productive collaborations that take place between
these different fields, there are also tensions that emerge as a result of the incommen-
surable difference of ethnicity/race, gender/sexuality, and class. The twenty contri-
butions included here often explore some of the tensions between queer and Puerto
Rican studies, in many cases expressed in the difficulties of conceptualizing the in-
tractability of the social visibility of gender, race, ethnicity, and gender expression vs.
the performance or consciousness of national identity, and sexuality.
Some new questions emerge from the intersection of these two areas of inquiry.
For example, how has Puerto Rican Studies configured its very specific form of
intersectionality? Is there such thing as a Boricua-style intersectionality? How have
Puerto Rican subjects explored the intersections between blackness, queerness, and
Boricuaness? How was the AIDS pandemic experienced by communities of color?
How is the queer Puerto Rican diaspora similar and different from other racialized
and colonial diasporas in the United States? What are the productive intersections and
tensions between Puerto Rican nationalism, feminism, and their queer communities?
What are some of the specific problems or experiences of the island-based and the
diasporic Puerto Rican communities that remain invisible in transnational, hemispheric,
or global approaches to Queer and Trans Studies? How can colonialism and decolonial
approaches allow us to study the historical and political dimensions of gender, racial,
ethnic, and sexual formations, as is the case in works by Gloria Anzadúa (1987), María
Lugones (2007), Chela Sandoval (2000) and Michael Horswell (2005)? What are the
specific moments in the story of Trans mobilization in Puerto Rico, and how is it similar
or different from that of other communities in the islands and their diaspora?
They also revisit the tense and uncomfortable boundaries still existing between Puerto
Ricanness (as ethnic identity or as a nationalist project) and other axes of identification
like gender, gender expression, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Beyond the very productive intersections of interdisciplinarity and multidis-

ciplinarity, many of the contributions included in this issue also showcase the im-
portance of transdisciplinarity and undisciplined or undisciplinary knowledges. In
this respect, the work done by many of the essays included here dialogue closely
with Christina Sharpe’s invitation to scholars who study Blackness to “become un-
disciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and
teaching; new ways of entering and leaving the archives of slavery, of undoing the
‘racial calculus and . . . political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago’
(Hartman 2008, 6) and that live into the present” (2016, 13). Maldonado-Torres,
thinking more specifically about Decolonial and Ethnic Studies, conceptualizes
these new methods of knowledge production as transdisciplinary or undisciplined,
referring to “the primacy of problems vis-à-vis methods, objects of study, and the
comparison between different methods or between objects of study” (2012, 266).
Both of these thinkers, following insights from Sylvia Wynter (1984), Frantz Fanon
(1952), W.E.B. Du Bois (1903), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), among others, redefine
knowledge production, research and teaching as problem- or question-centered

endeavors, instead of disciplined or method-based forms of inquiry. We would
like to propose that the contributions included in this issue take these insights as
a source of inspiration and propose some answers and new questions around the
issue of queerness and puertorriqueñidad.
The essays included also propose innovative terms ranging from Boricuir (Powers
and Géliga Vargas), flujo/fluir (Lladó Ortega), queer feminism (Cortés-Vélez), queer
activism /activismo de la relación (Large via Glissant), and transracial fantasy (Pérez
Jiménez), among others. Most of the collaborations include new voices that propose
different relatos (stories) of the Puerto Rican experience through the prism of gender,
sexuality, and gender expression. They also revisit the tense and uncomfortable bound-
aries still existing between Puerto Ricanness (as ethnic identity or as a nationalist proj-
ect) and other axes of identification like gender, gender expression, race, ethnicity, and
sexuality. It is our hope that these twenty contributions are received as a sample of
some of the new directions of Puerto Rican queer explorations. They identify new ar-
eas of inquiry, and they evidence the vitality and richness of the activist, academic, and
cultural panorama. They also make clear that there is still much work to do to trans-
form Puerto Rican Studies and Puerto Ricanness by locating embodied experiences at
the center of their lines of inquiry, and by allowing for the process of what Perlongher
described as the aberrant alliances with otherness to take place. In this space between
bodies, subjects, differences, and desire, the uses of the erotic as conceived by Audre
Lorde are activated, allowing for a sharing with the other by forming “a bridge between
the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared be-
tween them, and lessens the threat of their difference” (2007, 56).
IV. Coda
The cover of this issue of CENTRO Journal features several images by the Puerto Rican
photographer and multidisciplinary artist Jo Cosme.18 A graduate of the Escuela de Artes
Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico (EAPD) located in San Juan, Cosme’s images explore
non-binary queer embodiments and represent them in a complete moment of subjectivity
and not in moments of crisis, culpa (shame), or negation. The images included on the
cover of this issue explore different dimensions and embodiments of the intersections
between queerness and femininity, signaling to the broad range of gestural, corporeal,
social, sexual, sensual, and material manifestations of gender in contemporary Puerto
Rican communities. Lesbian intimacy, the articulation of femininity through clothes and
gestures, and the celebration of female and feminine bodies are all at the center of the
nuanced exploration of gendered and sexual identities depicted in Cosme’s visual work,
which blurs traditional conceptions of cisgender and transgender, male and female,
gay and straight. Not featured in this issue, Cosme’s post-Hurricane María artwork
titled Crónicas de un Futuro Catastrófico (Chronicles of a Catastrophic Future), which
Cosme first envisioned “during one of those many dark nights without electricity,” has
received significant media attention.19 The piece consists of a “Post-María Major Arcana
Tarot influenced deck,” a book with personal anecdotes, and a series of prints. We see
Cosme’s work in dialogue with the queer Puerto Rican artists we profiled in this journal
in 2007, namely painter David Antonio Cruz, whose 2006 painting Puerto Rican Pietà
appeared on the cover and now forms part of the Museo del Barrio permanent collection;
photographer Luis Carle; and visual artist Mari de Pedro.20
As we noted earlier, this issue of CENTRO Journal includes a robust contingent of
essays in literary and cultural studies. Even though our call for papers was open to con-
tributions from all fields and disciplines, fictional, artistic, visual, and cinematic repre-
sentations are the focus of most of the interventions included in this special issue. Oral
histories and interviews were also central in a smaller cluster of essays that were re-
sponding to our invitation to identify areas in need of primary sources, as well a broader
engagement by scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Although we were able
to include some contributions more closely related to the natural sciences (the study of
optics, health), there is still much ground to cover to entice our colleagues from the hard
sciences to engage with Puerto Rican Queer Studies in a venue like CENTRO Journal.
We would like to thank Edwin Meléndez, CENTRO Journal, and Xavier Totti
for hosting this second issue on Revisiting Puerto Rican Queer Sexualities. Edwin,
in his role as Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, first
suggested embarking on this project at a plenary session of the first Puerto Rico,
Puerto Ricans: A Diaspora Summit held at Hunter College in April of 2016, which
included an LGBT roundtable featuring Luis Aponte-Parés, Erika Gisela Abad
Merced, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Nelson Rafael Román, and Pedro Julio
Serrano. Xavier’s enthusiastic support of this special issue, as well as his guidance in
the curating and editing process, has been key for the successful completion of this
issue. The editorial team of CENTRO Journal helped us in the final copyediting and
layout of the texts included in this issue. The anonymous readers and peer evaluators
of these essays provided constructive and very useful suggestions to strengthen the
essays included in this issue. An anonymous helpful librarian in Puerto Rico assisted
us greatly in the preparation of the historical chronology that appears in La Fountain-
Stokes’s essay on “Recent Developments in Queer Puerto Rican History, Politics, and
Culture” and in the bibliography included in the final section of this introduction.
Laura Pérez Muñoz (Harvard University) helped us to reach out to Jo Cosme, while
Francheska Alers assisted us with the editing, translation, and final revisions of
some of the articles. Jo Cosme generously allowed us to use their artwork on the
cover of this volume. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel wants to thank the intellectual
generosity of Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, for inviting her to collaborate as co-
editor of this issue, and for leading the final editing of articles and the preparation
of the introduction when she confronted logistical and health complications at the
end of the Summer of 2018. Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes will be forever grateful
to Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel for accepting his invitation to collaborate on this
issue. Both of us are very grateful to all of the collaborators and to those who, for
whatever reason, did not have their submissions included in this volume.
The bibliography that accompanies this introduction includes works cited

but also a variety of highlights from recent Puerto Rican queer studies scholarship,
particularly from the legal field. It also includes recent Puerto Rican LGBT literary
sources. This bibliography can be seen as a complement and expansion of the one
offered in the Spring 2007 issue of CENTRO Journal (Aponte-Parés et al. 2007). La
Fountain-Stokes also offers an extensive supplementary bibliography in his final
piece (“Recent Developments”).
Notes
1
For a general overview see Jusino Díaz (2019) and Méndez-Méndez (2015).
2
This special issue follows up the discussions and research presented in CENTRO Journal
19(1), which was published in Spring 2007. In the original call for papers for the current issue
released in June 2016 we had named it “Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities: Queer
Futures, Reinventions, and Exclusions.”
3
A photo by Luis Carle of Sylvia Rivera, who appears with Hayworth, is now at the Smithson-
ian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; see Neese (2015). Rivera is the first trans-
gender person included in this museum. The previous issue of CENTRO Journal on Puerto
Rican Queer Sexualities included a dossier on Sylvia Rivera; see Gan (2007), Retzloff (2007),
Rivera (2007). On Christina Hayworth, see Méndez-Méndez (2015, 258), Rodríguez Guerra
(2003), “Transexual busca convertirse en senador de la Palma” (2011), “Transexual Christina
Hayworth vive en condiciones infrahumanas” (2013).
4
See Caribbean Business (2017).
5
See López Peña (2016) and Maldonado Miranda (2008) for examples of homophobic reli-
gious sentiment. Regarding the impact of sexual orientation on health care in Puerto Rico, see
De León et al. (2016).
6
See, for example, Agosto-Rosario (2015), Guerra (2015), Labiosa (2015), Orraca Paredes
(2015), Vidal-Ortiz (2015).
7
For a discussion of De Diego Padró, see La Fountain-Stokes (2016d).
8
On Rice-González, see La Fountain-Stokes (2016b).
9
On Gisela Rosario and Macha Colón, see “La lucha de una artista boricua ‘brutalmente hon-
esta’” (2015), Vallejo González (2015).
10
See Colón (2016).
11
Lugo-Lugo’s reading is very suggestive, as it opens the space for future reinterpretations of
Vega’s vegetarianism in relation to Luisa Capetillo’s meditations about her own dietary convic-
tions in her early anarchist writings. On Rodríguez Besosa, see Ferber (2017), Jackson (2018a).
12
On Mariposa, see Richardson (2015). “Pussyology” has also recently appeared in the literary
journal A Gathering of the Tribes, see Fernández (2017).
13
Also see Torres (2009, 2017).
14
See Llenín Figueroa (2013, 2015), Ríos Torres (2007), Rolón Collazo (2009, 2011, 2017).
15
Originally written during Felix Guattari’s visit to Brazil in 1981, Perlongher’s essay was first
published in 1991 in El lenguaje libertario, vol. 2, compiled by Christian Ferrer.
16
Regarding the acquisition of Manuel Ramos Otero’s archives, see Columbia University
Libraries (2014).
17
See, for example, Garriga López (2009, 2010), Rodríguez-Díaz et al. (2015, 2016).
18
On Cosme, see Women We Heart 2018 and the artist’s website, <http://www.jocosme.com/>.
Cosme’s photos frequently appear in the media, for example their images of Tara Rodríguez
Besosa (Jackson 2018a).
19
See Jackson (2018b), Uszerowicz (2018), <http://www.jocosme.com/introduction-to-croni-
cas-catastroficas/>.
20
See “Chronicles for an Intimate Narrative” (2007), “Luis Carle” (2007). Both portfolios
included brief introductory statements by curator José Vidal. Carle received major coverage in
the New York Times in 2017 (Naughton 2017).
R e f e r e nc e s an d S e l e ct e d B i bl i o g raphy
Acevedo, David Caleb, Moisés Agosto Rosario, and Luis Negrón, eds. 2007. Los otros cuerpos:
antología de temática gay, lésbica y queer desde Puerto Rico y su diáspora. San Juan:
Editorial Tiempo Nuevo.
Agosto-Rosario, Moisés. 2015. Latinas/os and the AIDS Treatment Advocacy Movement. In
Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, ed. Uriel Quesada,
Letitia Gomez, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. 171–82. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press.
Aponte-Parés, Luis, Jossianna Arroyo, Elizabeth Crespo Kebler, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes,
and Frances Negrón-Muntaner. 2007. Puerto Rican Queer Sexualities: Introduction.
CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 19(1), 4–24.
Arroyo Pizarro, Yolanda. 2007. Ojos de luna. San Juan: Terranova Editores.
__________. 2010a. Cachaperismos: poesía y narrativa lesboerótica. Carolina, PR: Boreales.
__________. 2010b. Caparazones. Carolina, PR: Boreales.
__________. 2011. Caparazones. Barcelona-Madrid: Egales.
__________. 2013. Violeta. Carolina, PR: Boreales.
__________. 2014. Lesbofilias: incluye los cuentos de Lesbianas en clave caribeña: cuentos de ma-
rimachas, buchas y camioneras, femmes, patas y cachaperas. Cabo Rojo, PR: Editora
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6 CENTRO Journal

volume xxx • number ii • summer 2018

Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (lawrlafo@umich.edu) is Associate Professor of American

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (ymm34@miami.edu) is the Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin

I. Historical, Political, and Cultural Contexts

II. Queering Puerto Rican Studies Redux: Themes

Rico’s Political Predicament from Women Writers,” a meditation on literature as a

Meanwhile, Mónica C. Lladó Ortega, in “El cuerpo y la praxis del flujo en la

My pussy’s got a name / she ain’t a honey or a dummy

My pussy’s got personality

Boy Wonder. Photograph by Jo Cosme, in collaboration with stylist Adrideki. © Jo Cosme.

alism, colonialism and Latinidad. As a consequence, “my pussy”’s name is announced

III. Devenir Pato: Methodological Meditations

C A R N E. Photograph by Jo Cosme. © Jo Cosme.

We would like to take Néstor Perlongher’s thought-provoking rearticulation

the journal contribute to the documenting of LGBTQ histories by expanding archives,

allowed us to explore a whole series of inter-related questions. For example, what

Moleculares, minoritarios, «todos los devenires comienzan y pasan por el devenir

The way in which we understand this intervention is that there is a crucial

Beyond the very productive intersections of interdisciplinarity and multidis-

knowledge production, research and teaching as problem- or question-centered

The bibliography that accompanies this introduction includes works cited

Carreras Rivera, Edwin R. 2013. Un análisis crítico: la constitucionalidad ilegítima de la de-

__________. 2011a. Female Sexiles?: Towards an Archeology of Displacement of Sexual Minori-

__________. 2012b. Hacia la nueva profecía. Cuatro poetas puertorriqueñas contemporáneas:

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