Perlongher alludes to Stonewall in several of his texts, almost always in an ambivalent manner, although sometimes quite critically. That said, it is the Chilean Pedro Lemebel who most openly denounces the global monumentalization and mobilization of Stonewall. In one of his “Crónicas de Nueva York” (New York Chronicles), included in the Spanish edition of Loco afán: Crónicas de sidario (Crazy Craving: AIDS Chronicles), Lemebel offers an account of his visit to the Stonewall Inn, an establishment that became the stage for acts of apparently spontaneous resistance to the more predictable acts of police repression. Although Lemebel’s critique—or burlesque—is marred by inaccuracy (he confuses, for example, the date of the police raid, which happened in 1969, not, as he writes, in 1964) and by a tendency to take literally what he sees during a paid, short-term sojourn in the city (Lemebel is, in his own way, as much a tourist as “the touristic sodomite [who comes] to deposit its floral offering”), his unbridled irreverence for what he calls a “Gay grotto of Lourdes,” a “sacred shrine” (70) and a “cathedral of gay pride” (71) is instructive, in the best sense of the word. Through hyperbole, self-commiseration and uncompromising value judgments, which out of context might be hard to distinguish from those of the most bitter of homophobes, Lemebel’s chronicle seethes with exasperation towards U.S. models and myths that would impose themselves, around the globe, as all but indispensable to the articulation and defense of alternative sexualities.17 Shortly after the Stonewall revolt, poet Allen Ginsberg remarked that the rebels were “beautiful” and that they had “lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago” (Truscott, 18). Lemebel, at a distance of thirty years, thousands of kilometers, another language, another economic situation, and—it bears saying—an array of stereotypes and prejudices, feels threatened, even wounded, in the face of “that masculine power that causes you to panic, that belittles you as a Latin mosquito in this barrio of blonde sex” (71). Bitter, personalist, and historically flawed in some of his assertions, Lemebel scoffs at “these militant gringas, such devout traders in their political history” (70); rails against a solidarity dictated from the “Empire,” and brings to the foreground the enormous material differences between the “muscles and bodybuilders” of Christopher Street (71) and the “malnourishment of a third world queen” (71) like Lemebel himself. Although Lemebel seems to ignore or to silence the fact that queers of color, doubly vulnerable to prejudice and violence, were among the participants in the Stonewall riots, he recognizes that the event’s monumentalization has tended to be articulated in terms that in many respects reinforce the self-congratulatory rhetoric of U.S. nationalism, according to which ethnoracial and
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sexual difference would be annihilated in the crucible of a transcendent unity. Confronted with such rhetoric, it is not surprising that Lemebel remains skeptical about other gay symbols made in the USA: for instance, the multicolor flag that he sees unfurled throughout the Village, a flag comprising “every color of the gay rainbow. But which is instead really just one: white. Because perhaps gay is white” (71). Or perhaps not; not only does Lemebel appear to ignore, as already noted, that people of color participated in Stonewall, he also fails to note that people of color still frequent some of the few bars that remain on Christopher Street and, for that matter, that by the time Lemebel visited it, Christopher Street itself was no longer what it once was, having suffered reforms impelled by conservative politicians and voracious speculators who dramatically reshaped the neighborhood. It is not surprising, then, that Lemebel does not spend much time there and that he does not notice anything that does not conform to what he expects to see; nor, perhaps, is it surprising that, when faced with a “throng of … mainly fairskinned, blonde, and virile” types (72), he resorts to the hackneyed nineteenth-century concept of a “Latin soul” (72) and then skedaddles in “cowboy picture” style (72) in search of something, for him, less strange, more familiar. In his jaunt through Stonewall and the Village, Lemebel draws on a store of ethno-racial and national clichés with such campy abandon and vitriolic wit that he throws into relief the problematic status of Stonewall as the symbolic center of gay culture internationally. In so doing, he also allows us to see that the more recent queer counterculture, in contrast to which a gay counterculture is recast as assimilationist and conformist (marriage, military service, identity politics), is caught in a similar dynamic of hegemonic monumentalization. Lemebel has been able to do what Perlongher, who died in 1992, could not do: give testimony to the exhaustion, and tediousness, of an Anglo-American or gringo model of homosexuality in which AIDS goes from spelling the end of all homosexuals to spelling the end of many poor people, regardless of their sexual identity, especially in Africa and Asia. In “La desaparición de la homosexualidad” (The Disappearance of Homosexuality) published in November 1991, just a year before the author’s death, Perlongher took issue with “U.S. style gays with up-turned bristly little mustaches who, as paradigms of individualism, fall into the most abject tedium” (Prosa, 88–89). It matters little, I would submit, that Perlongher’s assessment, or Lemebel’s, is shot through with stereotype or that it is “fair” or “unfair” or that it corresponds or not to certain regional or national understandings of “historical truth.” What matters,