For Marcelo Secron Bessa
Translated from the Portuguese by Raquel Parrine, Lauren Darnell, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes1
We remain unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge, even to ourselves: and with good reason. We have never sought after ourselves—so how should we one day find ourselves? It has rightly been said that: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE2
There was a time, during the latter part of the ‘90s, when the travesti reached a privileged moment of visibility in pop culture.i Coming from the ghettos and the underground, the travesti, through their drag queen version,ii was incorporated into the constantly growing clubber culture, arriving to fashion shows around the world, to MTV and Hollywood, not to mention television variety programs, talk shows, and more or less serious journalistic news series in particular—creating media personalities. In Brazil, it was the same. Joining the long tradition of Brazilian carnival travestimento, Roberta Close became a sexual symbol and the television presence of travestis was no longer a theme exclusive to police programs or exotic attraction. It must not be forgotten that it was through the travesti—perhaps due to being the most visible facet of a gay subculture, though not constrained by it—that many of the issues of homosexuality entered the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ranging from the classical studies of Harold Garfinkel and Esther Newton on drag to recent works on the Brazilian travesti. Now that drag style seems to return and stabilize almost as a cliché, leaving fad aside, it’s time to rethink the travesti not as a social group to be studied and observed, nor as a metaphor of transitive possibilities in contemporary sexuality, a position enshrined by North American gay and lesbian studies as a result of the controversy caused by the release of Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning (1990), a moving documentary about drag balls in Harlem, New York, where gay Latino and Black men vogued. The travesti isn’t simply an intellectual construction that places artifice as a central category in our society of images, in which performative identities are constructed, well in advance of actual debates about body and technology. It is not a question of speaking about the Other, stigmatized and/or spectacularized, but rather speaking about travestimento—as something that penetrates our desires and emotions, our uncertainties, and our place in the world. As such, here—in this mixture of testimony, autobiographical critique, and disidentificatory performance, incorporating dangerous or contradictory elements of an identity (Muñoz 1999, 11–12), constructed by fragments of texts and images—here a travesti speaks.
1
I was always fascinated by and not attracted to travestis—to the same degree I was attracted to strong men without being fascinated by them—although I have never worn dresses, high heels, or makeup, nor do I have mannerisms or affectations when I speak. It doesn’t matter. I always felt that, if I had a soul, it would be travesti. Don’t ask me why or how. I only sense that each part of me passes through genders and desires that I am less and less able to identify. Now that my distressing adolescence and subsequent need for homosexual affirmation become progressively distant, it is the travesti in me and their game of masks that constitute me and make me what I am. It’s good to stop here, or not? Too confessional? To be a travesti takes me away from adolescent melancholy, it throws me into the theater of joy, into a reality affirming joy, in all of its nuances and fantasies, it makes me present. Now that I am 30 years old, I seem to reconquer the desire of discovery. Please, Coco Peru,3 guide me through this path that I begin to forge. So many stories left to live. In life and in text, transimages, transwriting, transdiary.iii
2
The possibilities of the game that enliven subjectivity through the use of masks reside in an understanding of the image-oriented nature of current society. The mask is not a disguise of an existential void, rather a strategy for coexisting in a society where the primacy is one of velocity. There is a permanent clash, represented especially by the protagonist of Silviano Santiago’s Stella Manhattan, between memory and gaze, narcissism and tribalism. Its centering in intimate, personal life is configured as a complex strategy and difficult to be maintained against the changes of the exterior world. Stella Manhattan, a modest Brazilian consular officer in New York, is a present-day Madame Bovary, divided between reality and fantasy. Far from Brazil, exiled by her parents after the discovery of her homosexuality, Stella longs for the beach, the sun of Rio de Janeiro, and Ricky, in whom she sees a reincarnated James Dean, the possibility of great passion, and not just a mere hustler.4 Stella Manhattan is a novel of shattered illusions, of frustrated formation, or perhaps of a modern impossibility to adequately express the ephemeral and lasting in personal relationships. Stella, at the end, can say “Now I am a star.” Even if she had died in an American prison, raped by the prisoners (one of the versions of the ending), what is more beautiful and terrible than a death atop mud? Or a death in midair like a star? Stella, in fact, doesn’t die; she disappears in the words of the other characters. Her body is scattered. “Viado não morre, vira purpurina” (A faggot doesn’t die, he turns into glitter) (Laura de Vison).
3
No more built-up resentment, nor silence, nor disappearance. “No more crying games.” New games in which roles are exchanged, in which we are open when the unexpected enters our life, that the ridiculous doesn’t prevent us from appearing fully dressed5 in drag in the harshest desert, completely made up, like in the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, only in order to fulfill a dream, only by a gratuitous act of affirmation. A simple gesture reveals a world.
4
The travesti is the aristocrat of the imagination, the achievable aristocrat, elegant in the gutter. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, by Manuel Puig, his most resounding success, adapted to the stage and cinema, melodramatic films, generally with a notable feminine character, told by Molina to Valentín, his prison mate, are not only the obverse of the disgusting cell or the minimal space of dreams in times of oppression but also the form of communication that is established among such diverse characters. Molina will ultimately construct himself in enigma through films, a spider woman that “traps men in her web.” His search for the feminine is nothing more than a search for androgyny, for ambiguity. Identity as a process.
5
I pursue a theater of desire, breaking expectations, placing more and more the dimension of experience in the critical act. It’s time to forget past readings and see what remains of them on the body. Recover the affirmation of spectacle present in the baroque world and set aside theorists such as Debord (1997) and Jameson (1994), who fail to see beyond the image as a last step of commodification and of empty aestheticism that populates narratives without history. It’s necessary to recover spectacle as an existential condition and destiny. From the simulacrum return to the theater of the world to free ourselves from boredom and indifference before the excess of images, without falling into nostalgic fascination of authenticity. In the ruins, playing is not just a passive attitude but an affirmation of life.
6
In Cobra, Severo Sarduy, as a good heir to the neo-baroque Cuban novel, the fear is not, as it is in the baroque, of a tension between the world and transcendence but between the copy and the original (Chiampi 1994, 19) or, rather, the precariousness of the simulacrum. Cobra is a sort of heir to the melancholic prince,“the martyr of exile in a simulating body” (ibid. 19). His dilemma, at first, is particularly crystallized in the size of the feet. “My God . . . why was I born if not to look absolutely divine?” (Sarduy 1981, 11). But the sequence of violence, of remedies, culminate in a poetic metamorphosis: from Cobra’s feet, flowers grow (ibid. 37). The victory of poetry over the limitations of nature and habit.
7
My body renews itself, takes off the chains of fears and exposes itself free, strong. Upon each look, it becomes different, attentive of the other’s gaze. I make myself a spectacle, in the street, in the classroom, when I write right now. I gently grab my coat. I protect myself. I walk. It’s time to take chances, time for the metamorphosis. The movements of labor intensify. I am born with an unknown voice. The song is chained inside the throat. It will start. It is starting.
8
Being superficial, today, is not necessarily equal to banality, to vulgarity, but it reintroduces the ludic aspect of the social relationship. I always keep in mind the voice of the diva Grace Jones, in “Private Life,” as a motto and a challenge: “I’m very superficial / I hate everything official.” The chameleonic concern is not just a strategy to maintain the existential and aesthetic singularity from the mass media’s ferocious desire for new things, but it is a strategy to revalorize pleasure—from the modernist dandies to the New Romantics, from disco to technopop—or even to bet on the political, ethical, and epistemological possibilities of the becoming and on the surface between the thinkers of difference (see especially Deleuze 1996, 11–38). There is a constant struggle against the institutionalization of the appearance, which, however, never ceases to happen. The melancholy for the loss of the unity of the self coexists with new tribal rites, such as voguing, whose name originated from the famous fashion magazine. In this dance, people mimic poses from models and stars, or they want to behave like such, as we are told by one of its supporters, Malcolm McLaren: “I liked the idea of those people trying to look important, trying to be noticed. Being a star for just a moment, on the dance floor . . . When they leave the nightclub, they may be nothing. It was this romantic tragedy that I found fabulous.” This style booms globally with Madonna and the song “Vogue”: “If the music is pumping it will give you new life / You’re a superstar / yes, that’s what you are, you know it.” The fascination with the night: the desire for orgiastic integration and loneliness in the middle of the crowd. Romantic myth? It’s as if the movie stars from the 1930s and 1940s had descended on Earth and sprinkled their flair where there was fantasy. Beyond the dance floor, in the meandering paths of the metropolis, the elegance glows momentarily. They are perceived as beautiful when they are moving. Can sentimentality exist in the crazy world of fashion? I think of Liza Minnelli singing “New York, New York”: her arms want to detach themselves from the body; the body wants to get away from itself in an explosion, in a dispersion. I remember Judy Garland, at the end of The Pirate, affirming joy: “Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown.” I remember Rita Lee6 singing “I wanna be a star,” even if she was the one who said she is the black sheep7 of the family. My body explodes in references and images of shine and of what lies beyond shine, beyond fugacity.
9
I just wanted to write something so simple and direct that would make you happy, but the only thing I can think about are texts and images already made. My feelings are songs. My desires, movie scenes. My dreams, literature. I want to unbare myself, but I always find the pose, the affectation, the écriture. Life is not enough for me, except when it is theater.
10
I pull up the dress a little bit. Smoothly, I go down the stairs. I am happy, just happy. In the middle of the stairs. I continue to descend the stairs. The right foot is suspended. The right arm gains speed. The head lifts up, proud. It’s time.
11
The search for fame, for being a star, doesn’t represent only a projection of the social imaginary, which is frustrating, in general. Alternatively, this search is a condition in which the appearance, the present being becomes more important than a fixed identity. Such desire affects also the intellectual environment. The reactions to the predominance of the image can be marked by an almost nostalgic resignation: “There is nothing I can do about it. I have to pass through the image. The image is like a social military service. I can’t be exempted, I can’t be reformed, I can’t desert, etc. To know one’s own image becomes a passionate grueling quest (one never makes it), which is analogue to the stubbornness of who wants to know if it’s right to be jealous” (Roland Barthes). There are still the ones who seek, at any cost, their one minute of glory, not the fifteen minutes of fame anymore. They take the challenge of a mutant personality, which is, in this sense, superficial. “I prefer to remain a mystery. I never speak about where I came from, about who I am. And, in any case, every time they ask me, I say different things. It’s not that it’s part of my image not to say anything. It’s just that I forget what I said yesterday and I have to make it up all over again. Anyway, I don’t think I have an image, favorable or unfavorable” (Andy Warhol). I tried the excess. I dreamt of success. My life, little moments. I wanted the words to give me what I do not have. Today, I only search for words equal to my stature. After searching for the shine, when I get home and I am aware of myself, I ask, “Which mask is this, which makes me company?” I laugh at all of this.
12
Before, I used to write to explain myself. I would gloss over sentiments with ideas and theories. I would hide behind the professor. I would grab the leftovers of readings and build texts. I would create an imposture: the novice intellectual. What remains now is me, before the text. I don’t want shield ideas or crutch ideas anymore. Let them die if they aren’t alive, if they don’t make the world speak. I change clothes. I feel challenged, insecure. I dive into the experience.
13
The old travesti doesn’t remember things when he gets drunk. In La duchesse de Langeais, by Michel Tremblay, a playwright who inserts the speeches and behaviors of common and marginalized people in Quebec’s theater, there is no atonement that comes from impurity, from criminality, from humiliation, as in Jean Genet. There is only loneliness, being with your own images. Norma Desmond always watches her own movies in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Maybe she wants the illusion of still being a star, maybe she just wants to exist. Growing old in that chair, in a hidden room, Saul, a character from the novel Onde andará Dulce Veiga? by Caio Fernando Abreu,8 is alone with his, with my memories, so passionately obsessed by Dulce Veiga, a synthesis of the MPB9 divas, to the point of wanting to be her. When is that coming? I know it is coming. I am afraid of it, but it is going to come. The few dead friends. The distant acquaintances. No one needs me anymore. I wanted a less dramatic scene. How wouldn’t it be dramatic? Come, death, carry me away like a knight-errant, like Percival in the Indian prairies. Make my pain my last mask, a piercing laughter, that was never heard. To die one thousand times in Venice? The shadows fall. It is only an old man with trembling hands, groping his body. A delicate fruit. The pulp takes time to decompose, to reveal the hard skeleton. The features gain new ambiguities, mountains, vales, rivers. The body’s relief gains diversity; it is not an endless flat plain anymore. I could get lost in my own skin. It is what I think today, 1999, when I am 33 years old, in another morning born in a hurry, with so many things to do.
14
The eyes coerce. I grow as if I would fall from myself. The head is a world of ideas. The lips are dry. The arms raise: lightning rod. The words multiply themselves rapidly. My voice erases time. The students are gone. Lost, I walk around the university. There is no stage anymore. Exhausted, I take the car. I can hardly drive. The city hurts. The loneliness is devastating. There is no voice for this helplessness. In the park. Every person I pass by, I wish I could penetrate their eyes, be another, be anybody. Anything that would make me forget, belong. I arrive at home and I write.
15
I have always liked divas and teens. Both would bring me images of happiness—a happiness born from pain, from doubt, from anger, from refusal, or simply from energy. Mystery played by the diva. The empty mystery of the teenager. The arranged pose and the savage look that offers itself, that provokes. One’s voice, the other’s body. The voice that devours the world devours myself. Body in which I dive, in which I dream. Got to be there. Chaka Khan, I feel love for you. How to evoke those desires in which the body becomes music and the image becomes desire? But when I look at the mirror, I don’t see a teenager but an adult man, still young, OK, but who doesn’t feel young always and likes it. He is a little fat, a little bald, has small glasses, even smaller eyes. People say that, when I had short hair, I looked like Mário de Andrade.10 Sometimes, I get tired of writing in the first person. Sometimes, it is all that I can do, incapable of creating characters and of distancing myself from what I feel, from what I live. Writing ends up being my better mirror, the one that I chose.
16
I also wanted to sing. I also wanted to play. I wanted to take home each handsome man, to take them all—all of them are mine, even when they aren’t. When that boy came to talk to me, I could only look at his mouth, I wanted to bite it. I could hardly concentrate on what he was saying. I forgot that a female student had made an appointment to talk to me. It looks like it is always that way. The swift fragmentary images occupy a space bigger and bigger. People don’t stay. Will my eyes get tired? Will I get tired? The loneliness strikes in every recess. Will writing be my only company, when everything changes pace? What waits for me when everything around me is no more? Why do I think about it? Everything is clichés and idioms. I try to start again, to search for the path between those ruins, but what can I do if every story, every idea hides a banality in the present or in the future?
17
I grab my bag. I leave the house. Quickly, by car. In the hallways, no longer (invaded), taken (aback) by every look. It does not matter any longer, looked at or not, I perform. Happy to be a man, woman, whatever I want, whatever you want. As the sun rises, I become another. Only here, in writing, is there a pause, a moment of suspension. A transformative or drag writing, to speak of the mask in order to speak of oneself. Every truth is an imposture; every affect, an affectation; every gesture, a pose; every moment, a scene; every voice, a song.
18
1, 2, 3, rolling. The curtains open now. The scene is about to begin. It already started. It is not a monologue. The characters multiply, do not stop coming by. Who will be able to help me when there is no longer anything to say, or reason why to act, nothing to do? Only that white light in front of my face.
19
I remember those Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick compilations I bought when I was 10, 12 years old. It’s so long ago that I only remember that back then I wanted to start a record collection, making sure to know better the singers I liked. It was the days of records and of the difficulties of imports. I liked Warwick’s elegant ballads and Ross’s disco tracks. “I’m coming out.” For sure, I did not know what the lyrics meant, but I liked the joy. Without being able to see Saturday Night Fever, I imitated John Travolta’s moves. Forbidden for those under 16, or was it 14? I only saw the film years later in an afternoon screening, without the magic it had had. I continued liking the record. “Dance well, dance poorly, dance without stop, without knowing how to stop!” (As Frenéticas).11 It was a hymn of liberty for the shy, studious young boy. Other times, so many changes, but this music did not change. I still remember the voice of Gal Costa singing: “You are no longer worth anything, you are a turned-over page, discarded from my book.” I, who created imaginary friends and masturbated looking at Robin on the Batman and Robin cartoons, how could I reject someone? Then came the dark era. Siouxsie and her Brazilian version, Marielle, from Arte no Escuro. Why do divas seem more interesting when we can’t see them or they are in the past? Marielle, so small on the stage. Siouxsie looked so ungainly in the recording of the show Nocturne, when seen years afterward. I used to like them because I wasn’t like them, but their energy, their eccentricity, made me accept who I am, or better, gave me the strength to accept my difference. Divas are also fragile, androgynous men, gays. The affected Morrissey, covered with flowers in the video for “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” when he still belonged to the Smiths, or dancing in a desert in “November Spawned a Monster,” later during his solo career. The fragile, ethereal voice of Robert Smith, the vocalist of the Cure, singing “Charlotte Sometimes,” the romantic diva, lost in dreams, from a different time. Then came David Bowie, with all his transformations, a stylish freak (Gutman and Thomson 1993). I rediscovered a different 1970s. Later, Bryan Ferry, no longer part of Roxy Music, eternal elegance, as I would later see in Sade and Duran Duran. Fashion as a type of ethereal beauty, seductive music, chic soul, a soft pain. There was also Madonna, Marina, Björk, certainly others.iv There were films with arrogant but good-hearted stars, with memorable quotes. There were the poems of Florbela Espanca,12 read during movie afternoons, and the first cigarettes, smoked in secret, in the gardens of the Conjunto Nacional shopping mall. Even the raging verses of Rosalía de Castro, heard in a scene of Wuthering Heights, the film, or in Gone with the Wind: “I shall not take care of the rose plants he left, or of the pigeons: let them dry as I dry; let them die as I die.” How I wanted someone like that to hate, to love, and to die for! Mrs Dalloway, lost in the London traffic, alone at high sea. But who is also, at the end, within sight of the person she loves. “For there she was.” All of these characters make me remember an article by Richard Dyer about Judy Garland and gay men. The drag queen of the epigraph who places in Garland her mark of exclusion and her strength: “I had rejection from all of them. I also had Judy Garland” (1987, 41). And Vito Russo, the author of The Celluloid Closet, a book about the history of homosexuality in cinema, saying he learned how to be gay with her. The joy of music can overcome the defect of alienation of any and all diversion, of all involvement, that should be suffocated by intellectual distancing, to not be accused of being naive, escapist, conformist, or fascist. Ultimately, the pleasure of crying and laughing in the cinema, without any explanation. Shakespeare’s motto (The Tempest), as well as Vincente Minnelli’s (The Band Wagon, 1953), “The whole world’s a stage,” would be updated in the great “Life is a cabaret” (Cabaret, Bob Fosse, 1972). Don’t you want to join us? Now, it seems that another time slowly appears. I hope there are always divas. But I don’t wish to be effaced by these permanent spectacles. Now I am a star.
20
Everyone notices her when she passes even if they don’t want to. I always stay quiet in my corner. Fantastic and imaginary stories happen to her. The beauty and the weight of the quotidian are my lot. She speaks, even when she writes. I write, even when I speak. She likes rash positions, unquestionable truths, even if she soon forgets them. I live with a pain, constantly. Depending on where and when they see us, not everyone perceives what one has to do with the other, who is who. When I write these phrases, every time I have more doubts about whom I am speaking about when I say she or I.
NOTES FROM TRANSLATORS
1. Originally published as Denilson Lopes, “E eu não sou um travesti também?,” in O homem que amava rapazes e outros ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2002), 67–88. Translated by Raquel Parrine, Lauren Darnell, and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Notes in Arabic numerals are by the translators.
2. On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
3. Miss Coco Peru is the drag persona of American actor, comedian, and drag performer Clinton Leupp.
4. Lopes uses the term michê for male hustler. See the important work of Néstor Perlongher, O negócio do michê: Prostituição viril em São Paulo (1987), translated into Spanish as El negocio del deseo: La prostitución masculina en San Pablo.
5. Lopes uses the term montado from montagem (production), fully produced or staged, with lots of elaborate makeup and clothing (costume) and hair (wigs).
6. Rita Lee is a very popular singer of MPB (Popular Brazilian Music). She was the lead singer of the legendary band Os Mutantes.
7. This is the title of one of Rita Lee’s most famous songs,“Ovelha negra.”
8. Caio Fernando Abreu was a gay Brazilian writer who wrote extensively about queerness and created the most notorious, seductive queer characters of Brazilian literature. He died of AIDS in 1996.
9. MPB (Música Popular Brasileira): Popular Brazilian Music.
10. Mário de Andrade was a Brazilian writer from the 1920s, one of the most prominent authors of the movement called Modernismo. His homosexuality is still regarded as a taboo in scholarly works.
11. As Frenéticas were an all-female, six-member Brazilian vocal group that appeared in 1976 in Rio de Janeiro during the heyday of discotheques.
12. Florbela Espanca was a Portuguese poet born in 1894 who died in 1930. A precursor of the feminist movement in Portugal, she had a tumultuous and eventful life that shaped her love, erotic, and feminine writings.
NOTES FROM AUTHOR
i. I use the term travesti in a wide sense, but it would be interesting to remember the difference between transsexual, travesti, and transformista (drag queen). They all entail crossing the borders between masculine and feminine. Transsexuals feel themselves to be a man or a woman, wish to cross the border in a radical way, even partaking of sex change operations. Travestis live 24 hours a day as travestis; they carry in their own bodies the ambiguities of masculinity and femininity and, above all those who work in prostitution, do not have a sex change operation. Now transformistas, in a long tradition in the theater and in the world of entertainment, such as drag queens, simply engage in the exchange of gender roles for work purposes, during a certain period of the day, not recurring to the use of hormones or other surgical procedures. It is clear that this division is not static and that there can be a movement from one to another. For more details, see Oliveira (1994, 38–48).
ii. See Wilkins (1996), Norbury (1994), Chermayeff et al. (1995), Fleisher (1996).
iii. For research on cross-dressing and autobiography, see Pat Califia (1997) and Maria Consuelo Cunha Campos (1999).
iv. There is an intense scholarly production about Madonna, ranging from the work of fans and anti-fans, such as I Love Madonna and I Hate Madonna, to the commentary of Camille Paglia (1993) and several anthologies (Schwichtenberg 1993; Frank and Smith 1993; Robertson 1996).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Since this essay is very marked by my memories, many references came from my head, and I no longer know where to find them.
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Chermayeff, Catherine, Jonathan David, and Nan Richardson. Drag Diaries. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1995.
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