A Queer Friendship

Author(s): Carmelita Tropicana

Source: QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 138-141
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/qed.1.3.0138
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((( FORUM

A Queer Friendship
Carmelita Tropicana

José, me dejaste con la miel en la boca. You left me with honey on my lips. That was
an expression my grandmother used when my visits were not long enough.
I met José in 1994 when he spearheaded a Latino/a Representation in the
Media conference at Duke University, a who’s who of Latino/a academics, that
included Chon Noriega and Ana Lopez. I was booked to perform “Milk of
Amnesia” and my sister Ela, a film director, would show the film “Carmelita
Tropicana: Your Kunst is Your Waffen.” When I asked José about the perfor-
mance space, lights and sound, he had a blank look. He’d not thought about
tech. I yelled: “I have my period and am angry and I can yell at you because I’m
going to a shrink.” Academics mobilize— carry lights, projector, screen—and the
performance is a makeshift DIY esthetics befitting a solo about Cuba where
people have to “resolver” resolve. And that was the beginning of our queer
friendship.
José and I bonded instantly over Cubanidad, exile, humor, dogs, food, art and
the queers—maybe not in that order. Our Cubanidad was a shortcut to our
mutual understanding, with our shared national and similar familial baggage.
We suffered exile el exilio. His was a southern Florida style, mine a northern New
York. He could joder, a Spanish verb that means to fuck, tease, and be a pain in
the ass. On one of my birthdays he told me my performances were missing
something and gave me what would improve them—a rubber chicken. I used
that chicken until it disintegrated.
I was one of the lucky queer and people of color artists José wrote about. He
was the perfect interlocutor, framing the work and putting it in context. José
wrote about choteo, a Cuban brand of irreverent humor in my work associated

Copyright © 2014 Michigan State University. Carmelita Tropicana, “A Queer Friendship,” QED: A
Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1.3 (2014): 138–141. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved.

138

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 A Queer Friendship ) 139

with the hoi polloi. He elevated humor, which is often denigrated in the
academy, validating the work, making it visible. He was a special academic who
cultivated friendships with artists, breaking down barriers between art practice
and theory, academic critic and artist, sharing intimacies that he acknowledged
helped his critical thinking. But support did not stop with the writing: he
attended shows, helped secure teaching and performance gigs, booked you for
classes and conferences.
In the first decade of our friendship we saw each other frequently. I partied
with him, though less hardy than others. Lady Bully, his beloved bulldog, stayed
in my apartment and peed on my sofa. We saw each other at conferences in
Montréal and Monterrey, and traveled to Madrid (José’s first European trip) to
a literary conference. The Madrid conference was special because it was mostly
just the two of us. The moment we landed he insisted on looking for los
gays—research. I performed and was the object of José’s lecture; we went to
Sevilla and tasted manchego and jamon pata negra. When José went to write in
L.A., I spent time with him. I remember we traded sexual dalliances and he told
me of Fred Herko, an artist he was writing about while he drove and we listened
to The Magnetic Fields and bought clip-ons for the sun for our glasses at Venice
Beach.
José both inspired and influenced my work. When I was commissioned to
write a comedy for Dixon Place, I heard José on my answering machine’s usual
greeting: “Oye chusmita, call me.” Suddenly I had the theme. Chusmita is the
diminutive of chusma, a term laden with racial, class, and ethnic connotations
meaning excessive, loud, tacky behavior associated with the lower classes. He tells
me to work with two inexperienced thespians, Rebecca Sumner Burgos, his
student, and Ana Margaret Sanchez, his friend. The result was “Chicas 2000,” a
sci-fi satire where Carmelita, a carrier of the chusma gene, gets cloned. Uzi Parnes
handily transformed Rebecca and Ana into my nubile blue-wigged clones. And
then there was “Single Wet Female.” José, at one of his parties, insisted I work
with Marga Gomez. Marga and I knew each other from WOW Café days, but
always eyed each other suspiciously. Not surprisingly, Marga and I wrote and
performed “Single Wet Female” and in a telenovela monologue revealed the
name of the main character’s father—José Esteban Muñoz.
José was great with names and helped me find the title for my book, a
collection of work (some scripts written in collaboration with Uzi Parnes and Ela
Troyano) with Chon Noriega as editor. Over dinner we tossed names around.
Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu came to mind. The title
was found: I, Carmelita Tropicana, to which Chon added Performing between
Cultures.

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140 ( Carmelita Tropicana

We were intimates but an artistic friendship with José demanded an open

flexibility. I was one in a growing number of José’s harem who had to share him.
If you accepted the inevitable—that there would be newcomers taking center
stage—you’d be the richer for it. José shared friends like the brilliant Guin
Turner, the dark-witted Antonio Viego, the Cuban Vulcan playwright Jorge
Ignacio Cortinas, and erudite colleagues like Barbara Shimekawa, Ann Pel-
legrini, Lisa Duggan, Tavia Nyong’o, Barbara Browning, and Jennifer Doyle.
And there were José’s “children,” the students he mentored throughout the years:
Alexandra Vazquez, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Jeanne Vaccaro, Ricardo Montez,
Aliza Shvarts, Josh Guzmán, Leon Hilton, and Josh Lubin-Levy. The list goes
on. In the ’80s I had the WOW Café—a community, a place to create lifelong
friendships, a think tank. In the ’90s and until 2013 I had José and his apartment.
At the memorial, José’s mother Elena took the stage and spoke of her recurring
image of José, “the son she carries in her heart.” “José was always in a hurry to get
there,” a phrase she repeated. I thought of the then and there of queer futurity.
Maybe José was destined to write about Utopia because he had been mapping it
out since he got to New York in what he called his TBZ—the three-block zone
with his apartment at the center. There was the home for misfits, the gathering
place for the queer family he created, a salon for intellectual and gossip exchange,
a place to forge friendships and hook ups, to meet collaborators, memorialize his
beloved bulldogs, and celebrate. José loved to celebrate in unison with many.
Truman Capote had his black and white galas, José had the egalitarian
proletarian Fourth of July Salads of the World Unite festivities. Together with
his partner, John Andrews, José hosted a salad competition with categories that
included most subaltern, best in show, most gay. I was a shoe-in to win most
butch because José named my broccoli salad “the colon brush.” After the
competition, there was the ritual. José gathered everyone and would burn in
effigy someone or something that were symbols of oppression. One year it was
Governor Jan Brewer.
I have never sobbed so much for anyone as I have for José or seen so many do
the same. One woman wailed, “I loved him most.” Another moaned, “No, you
loved him first.” José would have loved seeing us all in our excessive wild abandon
pulling our hair out, acting very Greek tragedy. We are bereft. He was the center
of our world, our home.
José named his last beloved bulldog Lydia after Lydia Cabrera, the Cuban
anthropologist and poet known to collect Afro Cuban aphorisms. Un dia es fiesta
el otro velorio (One day it’s a party, the other a funeral). Then I remember las
nalgas son el sillon del pobre (buttocks are the rocking chair of the poor), and I hear
José laughing.

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 A Queer Friendship ) 141

Here’s to the Cuban Upstairs, José Esteban Muñoz, mi amigo del alma.

)))
Carmelita Tropicana is an Obie-award–winning performer and writer. Her
work has been produced/presented at INTAR Theatre, New York City;
Performance Space 122, New York City; Institute of Contemporary Art,
London; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; El Museo del
Barrio, New York City; and the Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin. Her book I,
Carmelita Tropicana; Performing Between Cultures is a collection of work that
includes “Memories of the Revolution,” “Milk of Amnesia,” and “Carmelita
Tropicana: Your Kunst is Your Waffen,” winner of the Teddy Bear Award at
the Berlin International Film Festival.

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