Ponce-Cordero 1 Coming out as coming in?

On the constitution of a homosexual subject in Manuel Puigs Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ricardo Piglias Money to Burn

Roberto Ponce-Cordero University of Pittsburgh

Hay quienes cantan y quienes cuentan. El cuento implica una moral, para el que escucha unos deberes. El canto invoca divinidades y hace rodar en las alturas gases de gasa voluminosa en la rejilla de saetas, la voz es pura iridiscencia Nstor Perlongher 1

The narrative of coming out as a discrete trope of identity-building and expression of ones personal self, as the moment in which someone finally confesses his or her internal truth 2 and turns into someone else (to allude to the Greek etymology of the term trope), thereby achieving completion as an autonomous individual, is a distinctly modern one, not simply in the sense of being one of recent apparition but also, of course and much more fundamentally, in the sense of being one only thinkable after the Great Paradigm Shift from which the dispositif of control and codifying that is sexuality as we know it today emerged and of which it itself was constitutive (Sedgwick 44). 3 This shift, as is well known, was most prominently marked by the invention of homosexuality in Western Europe in 1870 (Foucault 43). It makes no sense, indeed, for a subject to come out from a metaphorical closet to openly adopt a homosexual identity if there is no such identity to adopt, to begin with, or if the limits

Ponce-Cordero 2 between the closet and the outside have not really been established and are, therefore, not there. As Jos Quiroga puts it in his study of Latin American and Latino queer identities, Tropics of Desire, the issue of openness should be considered within a cultural context, for outness itself is not a constant, universal, normative way of being (15). As a historically contingent trope belonging to Western modernity, then, the narrative of coming out is far from being the only one through which homosexual identities can be articulated, let alone the only one through which sexual subjectivities that by far exceed archetypical modern concepts like homosexual and identities themselves can be articulated. Moreover, despite the post-Stonewall ethics of liberation, and despite the somehow more extreme ethics of outing proposed by the likes of the Polish/German Rosa von Praunheim, the American Michael Rogers or the British Peter Tatchell, as well all of whom are, not incidentally, both male and white, the value of coming out as a positive political act (Out of the closets and into the streets!) is not self-evident. On the contrary, it seems to be, upon closer scrutiny, one that can only be applied with any analytical rigor to a minority of queer subjects, namely to one formed by male, white, middle-class, urban, and Western subjects. In other words, and to quote a passage from Judith Butlers Bodies that Matter in which she deals with the term queer (adapting it, without changes, to this papers discussion of coming out an adaptation that, however, appears possible without doing violence to the text itself, since Butlers use of the term outness seems to allow it): As much as identity terms must be used, as much as outness is to be affirmed, these same notions must become subject to a critique of the exclusionary operations of their own production: For whom is outness a

Ponce-Cordero 3 historically available and affordable option? Is there an unmarked class character to the demand for universal outness? Who is represented by which use of the term, and who is excluded? For whom does the term present an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation and sexual politics? What kinds of policies are enabled by what kinds of usages, and which are backgrounded or erased from view? (227) Queer subjects are excluded by the narrative of coming out along several axes of difference. For instance, in her book about lesbian representation in Western culture, Annamarie Jagose contends that the politically efficacious task is less to determine under what conditions the lesbian can be seen than to consider the implications of the fact that, invisible or visible, lesbianism depends for its figuration on derivation, and not as a mark of its inadequacy but as the condition of its possibility (7), showing that a politics other than the political performance of coming out to openness can be worth pursuing. For his part, and in respect to the concrete experience of Latin American and Latino queer artists and intellectuals, Quiroga states that [t]he question of the homosexual voice here is not necessarily a question of the closet. The public that knows and can read the code [i.e. the language of same-sex sexual implications] will know exactly what to read, while the writers go on with their social affairs (25). In fact, he adds, these figures inhabited a cultural space that had already been queered to a degree that was perhaps unthought of in the United States (19), and that regardless of their reluctance, or even regardless of their discursive inability, to perform a straightforward coming out (more on the oxymoronic character of this expression later).

Ponce-Cordero 4 This having been said, it is important to emphasize that, in a process concomitant with the successes of queer incorporation into the domains of consumer markets and social recognition in the post-civil rights, late twentieth century (Puar xii), the strictly local history of gay, white, Western coming out has become, to an extent commensurate to homosexualitys own non-hegemonic and yet not exactly, or at least not necessarily, marginal anymore position on the discursive fields of Western spheres of influence, a global design that has colonized the ways identities are imagined and narratives of self-construction are organized across different cultures and populations. 4 It is indeed a globalized world that we are talking about, now, a world in which a significant part of Western queerness has been successfully co-opted, and in which Western (or rather pro-Western) homonationalisms, i.e. more or less institutionalized queernesses that have convivial relations to nationalism (Puar xiv), 5 have begun to proliferate. Under such circumstances, there is ultimately no condition of possibility for spaces of autonomy for constructions of sexual identities and subjectivities that radically differ from the ones most closely related to the trope of coming out. Thus, while most articulations of sexual diversity do not entirely and not even considerably comply with this narrative, they all are touched and affected by it, inasmuch as they are perceived as variations or deviations from it in the accounts of both mainstream queer discourse and the allegedly ever more diverse and queer-friendlier heteronormative outside. 6 Besides, it is doubtful that such an unthinkability of narratives completely autonomous from the trope of coming out can really be considered a unique post-civil rights phenomenon. The discourse of civil rights itself, for instance, is a Western discourse, as is the classical narrative of individual self-construction by the white, male

Ponce-Cordero 5 subject that has informed literary genres like the Bildungsroman, social models like the self-made man, and deviant subjectivities like the enfant terrible and the romantic revolutionist. In a combination of the civil rights and individual self-construction narratives that is negotiated, precisely, through the trope of coming out, the performance of which inscribes the homosexual subjectivity into the discourses of democracy and liberal rationality, the ideal of gay liberation sedimented itself in the fields of radical politics and identity formation almost simultaneously, during the 1960s and 1970s, throughout the Western world and in relatively Western(ized) cultural contexts like those of the Southern Cone, as the example of the late Argentinean poet, writer, anthropologist and political militant Nstor Perlongher (1949-1992) shows (Rapisardi 5-6). Coming from a vernacular version of Trotskyism, Perlongher joined, in 1971, the Frente de Liberacin Homosexual (FLH), whereupon this reformist organization that had tried, albeit timidly, to integrate homosexual concerns in the framework of trade unionism and class struggle, became, under Perlonghers influence, the main pioneer of specific gay identity politics in the country (Bollig 1). Instead of accepting the classic Marxist narratives concerning homosexuality (neither the ones in the it is a decadent bourgeois phenomenon nor the ones in the it is a legitimate question which is nonetheless secondary to the class question traditions), from 1971 on the FLH radically attempted, under Perlonghers leadership, 7 to make the existence and the problems / potentials of (male) homosexuality visible as such as opposed to as determined by, say, the current state of the fight for socialism in Latin America, specifically focusing its work of agitation on the militants of the myriad of very masculinistic left-wing groups of the period. He insisted, for example, on the necessity of the FLH to participate in the

Ponce-Cordero 6 political mobilizations that welcomed General Juan Domingo Pern from his Spanish exile
in 1973, which heralded a new (first optimistically expected, but in the end tragic) era in Argentinean history. He even got the group of gay activists that followed this idea to carry

a banner quoting, and obviously queering, one of the verses of the Marcha Peronista, Love and equality shall govern among the people, in a conscious act of provocation of the whole system of politics, both to the left and to the right (Rapisardi 8, my translation). It is, indeed, as if the early Argentinean gay movement, as led and represented by the openly homosexual, extravagantly marginal and intentionally scandalous Perlongher, would have emerged as a political force and a significant cultural player only by committing a collective act of coming out, by turning into something else through the confession of truth and its assumption, as well as through the passing from a reformist politics of containment to the aggressive confrontation of the rest of the periods left with the truth that, suddenly, was out there. Thus, whether as an almost immediate import of Western ideas or as an expression of purely native realities equivalent to Western ones, and most probably as something in between these two alternatives or at least arising from the mixture of both, the narrative of coming out as a process of selfconstruction and completion as a full human / political individual is, in places like Argentina, the main one through which the articulation of sexual diversity pursuing intelligibility is accomplished, and it can even be said to have been, in fact, always already embedded in the notion of modern homosexual identity itself, at least in the case of its explicitly political, and politically resistant, versions. 8 Perhaps fundamentally (one is tempted to say essentially), then, the trope of coming out stabilizes meaning by enabling (homo)sexual difference to articulate itself and become intelligible in a heteronormative matrix that is therefore changed and made

Ponce-Cordero 7 diverse but never broken, since it allows for homonormativity, too (Halberstam 9), and maybe even more poignantly since the realm of individual self-construction and, by extension, of politics itself is ultimately conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then tends to transmit to the future (Edelman 3). 9 Coming out should, hence, not solely be understood as coming out but also, and always simultaneously, as an act of coming in, as the moment of interpellation and constitution of a stabilized political subject who tries to achieve a position in the (hetero- and homonormative) realm of the sayable and who, charged and electrified, as it were, with the vitality provided by his / her seeming subjective completion, says this position loudly, demonstratively, performatively: We are queer, we are here, get used to it. But, as Amy Kaminsky points out in her article Hacia un verbo queer (Towards a queer verb), it is possible that [this slogan], popularized by ACT-UP, contains its own contradiction. Once society gets used to queerness and to queers, it is very well possible that they cease being queer (7, my translation). This is why the apparent oxymoron straightforward coming out was used before: to suggest the links between such a queer act as coming out against heterosexuality (almost automatically assuming a subversive position) and the reinforcement of the otherwise very normative ideal of stable identity and individual entity in which one is supposed to be able to act (up), or, to put it in less words, to suggest that coming out is always both subversive and power-stabilizing. And it is in the tension present in that apparent oxymoron, in fact, that the perspective must be situated from which, in this paper, selected novels by the contemporary Argentinean writers Manuel Puig (1932-1990) and Ricardo Piglia (1990) will be interrogated as to their specific articulations of sexual

Ponce-Cordero 8 diversity and as of the mechanics of confession of an alleged personal truth, namely the truth of sexual identity. Their texts, Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) and Money to Burn (1997), respectively, are not merely separated by time, but most importantly by the traumatic experience of the hitherto last Argentinean dictatorship that, between 1976 and 1983, destroyed almost all networks of opposition within [the country], culminating in the deaths of around 30,000 people linked, either directly or in the eyes of the military, to the organized left (Bollig 5). Furthermore, they exemplify two different approaches to the question of male characters have sex with other male characters and confess their internal truths, or come out from somewhere to somewhere else in order to become someone else and convert, without constituting, however, neither perfectly delineated coming out narratives nor necessarily modern homosexual narratives as such. For it seems that the influence of the narrative of coming out is indeed pervasive in the context of the notably very Western-like Argentina, yet not total. It also seems that the theoretical fact that coming out ultimately means coming in does not preclude (or does it?) processes of subject constitution whose inherent ambivalent character an ambivalence that, of course, applies to their (constantly) resulting subjects, as well make them, in a sense, ungraspable, lacking of sense, and thus resistant to normativity (heteroand homo-), again. The making of complete subjects: conversions in Kiss of the Spider Woman Published in Spain in 1976 the same year that the military coup of March 24 changed the history of Argentina forever and translated into English just two years later, Manuel Puigs Kiss of the Spider Woman is, arguably, the obligatory referent for anyone interested in the Latin American novel of sexual diversity, or at least for anyone

Ponce-Cordero 9 interested in the manifestations of this subgenre in the Southern Cone and, more specifically yet, in Argentina. 10 A proto-queer theorist ad hoc, Puig always refused being reduced to a sexual category and, further, famously declared that identity cannot be derived from sexual activity. [Presently, it is derived from it], but this will stop. It has to stop Homosexuality doesnt exist in nature and heterosexuality doesnt either. The concepts as they are now are just figments of the reactionary mind (Bacarisse 220). Nevertheless, both his life and his work, and especially this book, have been since homonormatively appropriated by the international gay movement as expressions of gayness and even of gay power. 11 As blogger Peter Rivendell canonically puts it in Gay for Today (a weblog that, by the way, celebrates and illustrates the incredible variety, contribution and existence of gay men throughout our culture and recent history), [b]y portraying the gay Molina as sympathetically complex, Puig counteracted [in Kiss] the Hispanic world's intolerance toward homosexuality. It is, in fact, as if Kiss were being praised for having supposedly performed an act of meta-coming out, on the literary terrain, just like the aforementioned FLH actions under Perlonghers leadership were a coming out of sorts in the realm of politics: a coming out from earlier representational traditions of homosexuality as an utterly abject formation due to be exterminated (Giorgi 11), but also in into sympathetic complexity, or into an order of diversity within the limits imposed by the norm (either hetero- or homo- or both). Molinas character, however, one of the two protagonists of Puigs book (and the one with by far the longest text in this almost entirely dialogical novel), and whose name is a last name and, therefore, does not have to be neither masculine nor feminine (but, because of his ending -a, sounds rather feminine to a

Ponce-Cordero 10 Spanish-speaking listener), does not easily fit into the category of gay, and resembles more closely the categories of either the modern inverted or the postmodern transgender. Right at the beginning of the story, for instance, he is interpellated as of the reasons for his peculiar being by his cellmate Valentin, the hyper-masculine leftist political prisoner whose name reminds of the adjective valiente (brave) and who, night after night, listens to the movies Molina recounts in order to get some sleep and, thus, to ephemerally escape from the cell. Searching for an answer, Molina quite consciously constructs an identity for himself by creating a narrative of stubborn perversion which virtually has nothing to do with his own life, but rather with what is projected into that life by the heteronormative world. Not surprisingly at all, moreover, his tale starts at his infancy (Foucault 43): And now I have to put up with you while you tell me the same old thing everybody tells me. [] Youre all alike, always coming to me with the same business, always! [] How they spoiled me too much as a kid, and thats why Im the way I am, how I was tied to my mothers apron strings and now Im this way, and how a person can always straighten out though, and what I really need is a woman, because a womans the best there is. [] Yes, and my answer is this great! I agree! And since a womans the best there is I want to be one. (19) 12 Later in the novel, during a conversation regarding marriage and monogamy, Valentin jokingly accuses Molina, because of the latters apparently conservative ideals, of being a regular bourgeois gentleman at heart, whereby Molina replies that he is

Ponce-Cordero 11 actually a [b]ourgeois lady, thank you (44). Soon thereafter, and also jokingly, Molina will say that his real name is Carmen, like the one in Bizet (65). But probably much more significant is the passage in which Molina tells, for once, a story that is real, as opposed to one either taken from a movie or internalized as real due to the pervasiveness of homophobia (like the one about his infancy). In this story, which is directly related to Molinas desire for biological males who are male-gendered, as well, the main protagonist talks about a former object of desire of his (a waiter he befriended before getting arrested) and defines his own concept of masculinity, from which he tacitly excludes himself by the use of the third person singular to refer to man: And whats masculine in your terms? [asks Valentin] Its lots of things, but for me well, the nicest thing about a man

is just that, to be marvelous-looking, and strong, but without making any fuss about it, and also walking very tall. Walking absolutely straight, 13 like my waiter, whos not afraid to say anything. (61) Shortly before, in fact, while recounting his first meeting with this ideal masculine waiter, Molina has already presented himself as a woman (and not as a gay man): But dont get the idea he acted very haughty not at all, perfectly

detached, handled the whole situation. So immediately my nose tells me theres something unusual, a real man. So the next week this woman heads straight to the same restaurant, but this time alone. What woman? Listen, Im sorry but when it comes to him I cant talk about

myself like a man, because I dont feel like one. (60)

Ponce-Cordero 12 If Molina comes out, then, it is not as a gay man, but rather as a biological male who, at least when it comes down to interact with men, identifies with the female gender. Indeed, he even makes an explicit difference between himself and his friends (in Spanish amigas, although it is understood that Molina is speaking of male persons) and homosexuals when Valentin asks him if all of them are the same: No, theres the other kind who fall in love with one another. But as for my friends and myself, were a hundred percent female. We dont go in for those little games thats strictly for homos. Were normal women; we sleep with men (203, my emphasis). It is remarkable how Molina, in his attempts to make sense of himself and, by doing this, to make sense as a subject, as well, strives for an identity that, while being the wrong one for his body, at least according to the heteronormative or, in this aspect, mainly to the dimorphologist matrix (i.e., the two-sex system), is nonetheless one provided by this matrix (or by these matrices). In other words, his act of subversion of stable relations between sex and gender is not, ultimately, guided by the wish to alter the alleged content of the gender categories he finds in the world he lives in, a world represented metaphorically by the cell of the novel and a world which, in fact, has thrown him into jail because of his subversion. What he wants is, in the final analysis, to make sense and belong, somehow, to the order of stable subjects who are legible in the heteronormative matrix, however diverse it may have become as a result of his inclusion. Both sadly and luckily for Molina, this moment of simultaneous subversion and stabilization of power amounts to his disappearance as the unstable (queer) subject that he is, or to the end of his radical uncertainty and his insertion into the realm of the stable. In this manner, once he is perfectly happy, after having sex with Valentin, Molina tells

Ponce-Cordero 13 him, in a statement that only superficially resembles a clich: And know what else I felt, Valentin? [] For just a second, it seemed like I wasnt here not here or anywhere out there either [] It seemed as if I wasnt here at all like it was you all alone. [] Or like it wasnt me anymore. As if now, somehow I were you (219). Still, both Molinas male body and his incompliance to masculinity via the assumption of femininity are so salient and always already out there, and notoriously out there, that it could be objected that to speak of coming out, in this case, and however loosely we apply the term, can strike as misleading. In fact, the true coming out of Kiss apart from the aforementioned meta-coming out of sorts the novel itself is implicitly supposed to have represented in the body of Latin American literature is not anything experienced or performed by Molina but rather the conversion of Valentin, who discovers his own subjectivity or, better, who discovers the possibility of expression of an internal subjectivity, quite literally, thanks to the touch of his queer cellmate. Thus, he who at first claimed that his life was a mere function of political struggle (27), 14 and who thought that revolution was whats important, and gratifying the senses [was] only secondary (28), ends up not only indulging into the pleasures of food, narration, and memory, but also, and in this context more relevantly, into the pleasures of sex and of sex with another man at that. And this in an increasingly conscious way that gets, progressively, ever more way out but never quite abandons the discourse of rationality. For instance, if Valentin was reluctant, in the beginning, to engage into physical contact of any kind with Molina, at the end of the novel he comes pretty close to performing the bottom part of a sexual act: You dont feel that way, youve been fed an old wives tale by whoever filled your head with that nonsense. To be a woman you dont

Ponce-Cordero 14 have to be [] a martyr. [] If it werent for the fact that it must hurt a hell of a lot, Id tell you to do it to me, to demonstrate that this business of being a man, it doesnt give any special rights to anyone (244). In a sense, then, Valentin truly comes out and discovers a whole world of possible pleasures and relationships that was completely absent from his early life dedicated to the paradigmatically oppositional, and at least in 1970s Argentina almost by default masculinist, field of revolutionary politics. His coming out, however, ultimately stabilizes his newly acquired subjectivity and takes any potentially subversive charge from it, as he gets to be a more complete individual provided of free will and who, precisely because of his sudden feminization, is able to better assume a position on the universal island of the diversified heteronormative matrix to fight, within the confines of that island, for social and sexual revolution, or for a new order of ever expanding diversity as opposed to oppression, but never for the end of sexuality as an order: In a sense were perfectly free to behave however we choose with respect to one another []. Its as if we were on some desert island. An island on which we may have to remain alone together for years. Because, well, outside of this cell we may have our oppressors, yes, but not inside. Here no one oppresses the other. The only thing that seems to disturb me because Im exhausted, or conditioned or perverted 15 is that someone wants to be nice to me, without asking anything back for it. (202) A queer utopia, indeed, but one determined, from its very origin, by a system of oppression from the outside, and also one almost explicitly inscribed into a language of liberation and classlessness reminiscent of the heteronormative narrative of Marxism.

Ponce-Cordero 15 The coming out that is not? On the uncertainty of Money to Burn If anything is startling about Money to Burn, Ricardo Piglias 1997 tale of a violent robbery and its devastating consequences, it is its matter-of-factness: fully devoid of the more classically literary language and structure we encounter in some of its contemporary Argentinian fiction (say, in Toms Eloy Martnez El vuelo de la reina [2002]), but also of Puigs uncanny precision for the sound of dialogue and human interaction, Money to Burn resembles, on the one hand, the oral telling of an anecdote (Rodrguez Prsico 113) and, on the other, a non-fictional report in the best tradition of investigative journalism (Clayton 135). This is, of course, intentional: as the famous first sentence of the epilogue unmistakably states, [t]his novel tells a true story (204). Besides this utterances being interesting in itself, as an attempt to synthesize the two opposing poles of fiction and reality, this revelation at the end of the book encapsulates, as it were, the trope of the confession of a truth that, once acknowledged, retroactively changes the subject who confesses it. In this case, the final confession of the truth involves, precisely, the true character of the events recounted in the novel, and it in fact so influences the way the story then lingers in the readers imagination that, significantly, the location of this confession at the end of the narrative was even maintained in the film adaptation of the book, directed by Marcelo Pieyro and released in 2000. Granted, this would be of at best tangential relevance to the trope of coming out in the sexual sense, or in other words to the topic of this paper, if it were not for the fact that the two main protagonists of the novel, two young, ruthless criminals called the Kid and the Blond Gaucho, live, love and die as a same-sex couple. The novel starts, indeed, and from the very first line, with a somewhat ambiguous declaration about their mutual

Ponce-Cordero 16 relationship that is, for anyone able to decode it (which virtually includes anyone sufficiently immersed in Western or Western[ized] imaginaries of sexual diversity to be able to read Spanish or English), a quite obvious however veiled assertion of their homosexual behavior: They are called the twins because theyre inseparable. But they arent brothers, nor do they even look like one another. In fact, it would be hard to find two more different physical types (1). Their sui generis relationship does not go unnoticed by other characters of the story, either. For instance, when a hierarchically superior criminal called Malito is in the process of hiring the Kid for the robbery that triggers the action of the novel, the latter puts ahead his own conditions: Ill come in with the Blond Gaucho as my second. Otherwise you count me out. Who do you think you are? asked Malito. Man and wife? Of course, cretin, answered the Kid. (59) 16 To consider this a coming out would be a clear over-interpretation. Despite of the fact that the information however cynically provided by the Kid does belong to the order of truth, it is neither intended nor received as a revelation of anything, let alone as a revelation of a specific subjectivity, but is, in a way, a plain assessment of a given. Furthermore, and just as matter-of-factly as the Kid himself, the novels narrator addresses the question of his protagonists relation matter-of-factly enough. One example of this is the aforementioned beginning of the book; another takes place right after the dialogue quoted above, when the narrator neutrally ascertains that [w]hen the flesh urged they shared a bed, the Kid and the Blond Gaucho, but generally less and less (59).

Ponce-Cordero 17 The figures of both the Kid and the Blond Gaucho, then, seem to resemble less the category of gay than the post-AIDS category of men who have sex with men or, perhaps, the more polymorph or at least less binary taxonomies of the premodern occasional sodomites who, famously, cannot be considered a species yet (Foucault 43). It is not so much that no explanations, in form of psychological or sociological narratives that could be constructed into identities, are provided for the characters acts, for there are some, as will be immediately show. It is rather that the explanations offered, partly due to the general unattached report style of the novel, and partly because of the outlaw and nihilistic attitude of the characters, do neither amount to a consistent narrative with beginning, middle, and end, nor are grounded on the logic of cause and effect. Thus, the Blonde Gaucho is said to have been sent, as a teenager, to a psychiatric hospital in which the first night he was raped by three male nurses. One made him suck him off, the next held him down, and the third stuffed him up the arse. A dick as big as this. [The Blond Gaucho] indicated the size with his hands. And I dont want to boast, or anything (56). He himself obturates, however, any narrative or explanatory attempt of his peculiar destiny and of the ways it is related to his internal truth: Wickedness, said [the Blond Gaucho], flying high on the mixture of speed and coke, is not something that happens with intention, its a bright shining light that comes and carries you away (55). As for the Kid, he is presented as an upper-class boy who, after killing his father of a heart attack when he heard the news that his son (the Kid) was going to jail for a crime which he, by the way, did not commit (73), freely elects a life as an outlaw and, once again matter-of-factly, proclaims the following: In clink (he would sometimes recount) I learnt what life is: youre inside and they buy you, and you soon learn to lie

Ponce-Cordero 18 and to swallow the venom inside you. It was in jail that I turned into a rent-boy [puto in the Spanish original], a drug-addict, I became a real thief, a Peronist, and a card sharp (74). But what first sounds almost glamorous is not, at a second glance: thats why youre banged up, to stop you [from] fucking, and thats why you fill up with poison, theyve got you in an ice box, they put you in a cage full of males and none of you can fuck, you want to and they [humiliate you with their actions, i.e. they rape you] 17 , or worse, they make you feel like a beggar [who possibly begs for sex], a hobo, you end up talking to yourself, hallucinating (74-75) In other words, there is no narrative of coming out here because, in a sense, there is no narrative at all, only immanent violence and abjection that virtually emerges from the contours of reality and, at the same time, delineates these contours. What the Kid and the Blond Gaucho are is, to put it simply, nothing more or less than what they are. There is a key scene in Money, however, in which the Kid talks about his relationship with the Blond Gaucho to a female prostitute called either Giselle or Margarita, who already knows that he sometimes performs sexual acts with other men. Not that the Kid defines this relationship as an explicitly sexual one (he does not), but the Kid nonetheless confesses that, for all practical purposes, he and the Blond Gaucho are, indeed, a couple, and a loving couple at that: I like men, from time to time, cause when Ive spent a long while without going out, I get bored. Im married and my wife is a teacher, we live in a house in Liniers, and Ive two sons. [] But family life doesnt interest me. My wife is a saint, and my children are real little pigs. I only get along

Ponce-Cordero 19 with my brother, Ive a twin brother. Non-identical. Did I tell you about him? []. I look after him, and care more about him than about my wife and sons. Is there anything wrong in that? (91-92) Once again, this confession falls short of the schematic narrative of coming out because of several reasons: first, it is based on a lie, since the Kid, of course, does not have a wife and kids, at least as far as anything is certain in this novel / report; second, it does not lead to the Kid internal truth even though he is, in this passage, in the process of saying the truth for the very first time, without obscuring it with cynicism; and finally, it has more the character of a factual description than the character of the assertion of an identity. Yet the lie on which the confession is based, namely the Kids imaginary heterosexual life, can be read as the denial of heterosexualitys alleged ontological superiority (Jagose 35) and as its revelation as a lie, as well; the truth he never quite utters, i.e. that he and the Blond Gaucho are lovers, is one that can function as a mask that not only masks that truth, and thus cannot count as a confession at all, but prominently displays itself as mask (Quiroga 19), too, and therefore constitutes, at least arguably, a confession (or a coming out) of sorts; and, to address the final point, if it is true that no identity is being embraced by the Kid through his speaking out loudly of his truth, let alone a gay identity, the moment has still far-reaching consequences on the diegetic plane and can be considered, in fact, the novels most important turning point. For, perhaps surprisingly, the Kids opening, this exteriorization of his internal selfs truth, leads to the beginning of an ephemeral but decisive heterosexual relationship with Giselle / Margarita, as well as to an emotional turmoil that may or may not be directly connected to the narrations violent ending, but which certainly sets the stage for it.

Ponce-Cordero 20 It is indeed unclear if Gisella / Margarita betrays the Kid and the Gaucho, who seek refuge from the police siege they are object of in her apartment: the narrator seems to doubt the very possibility of finding out the actual truth of this matter when he submits that, [i]f this is an accurate account of what transpired [the operation to detain the criminals], and everything leading to it (113), she had nothing to do with it, all the while acknowledging that her flat was stuffed [] with microphones (114). But the Blond Gaucho definitely believes she does: It was the whore, he says, to which the Kid simply answers Dont think so (129). Regardless of the truth, which throughout Money is presented as an ultimately ungraspable entity, anyway, the fact remains that the final clash between the police and the male same-sex couple takes place in the apartment that was the setting of the Kids confession of an affective relationship with the Blond Gaucho, as opposed to the performance of mere genital acts with members of the same sex, as well as the setting of his resulting trip into heterosexuality, as opposed, again, to the performance of mere genital acts with women. In a way, then, the moment in which the Kid acknowledges his truth is simultaneously the one in which he begins to make sense, both for himself and for the world (the mystery of his relationship with the Blond Gaucho finally, if hesitatingly, explained), and the one in which he inserts himself, through the expression of affection and of an ethical attitude towards the other (either the Blond Gaucho or Giselle / Margarita) thoroughly absent from his otherwise outlaw self, into the order of heterosexuality, or at least into the order of a heteronormative matrix diverse enough to include the homoerotic impulses he has and explicitly comments.

Ponce-Cordero 21 But the novels title is not Money to Burn for nothing, and the place of the confession, the place of this coming out of sorts, and hence of subversion and stabilization at the same time, turns out to be, in the end, not the one of the stable subject but the one of the complete lack of sense. Indeed, it is the place where the male lovers find themselves surrounded by the police, at the end of the novel, and choose to burn the money they had robbed, and for which they are, in fact, ostensibly fighting the police. In so doing, they cut their links to the world of human order, including the order of sexuality, in order to embrace death, no stable subjects there: that had to mean they had no morals nor motives, that they acted and killed gratuitously, out of a taste of evil, out of pure evil, that they were born assassins, insensate criminals, [inhuman beings] (157). 18 (No) Conclusion In this papers epigraph, Nstor Perlongher poetically postulates the existence of two different kinds of subjects: the ones who sing and the ones who tell stories. He then proceeds to remark that the telling of stories implies a moral and a space of communication in which the listener has certain tasks, whereas singing establishes a connection with a divine order beyond narrative and meaning, an order so totally different from the human social order (in all its variations) that it probably cannot be called an order but, both more simply and in a manner more hopelessly complicated, the place where the voice, instead of making sense, solely iridesces, and this purely. Let us now consider the main thesis of this paper, again, namely that the trope of coming out constitutes, in the very process of subverting a certain heteronormative order, subjects who strive for stability and, in fact, get as much stability as one can get in form of a narrative of individual completion and self-construction, thus reinforcing a

Ponce-Cordero 22 heteronormativity that now diverse or diversified allows for homonormativity, too. If we put this thesis into dialogue with Perlonghers fragment, we can associate the ones who tell stories with narrativity itself, or rather with the ones who, through the telling and through the concurrent construction of their own lives narratives, create the social and moral order in which everyone is immerse, and in which everyone is supposed to have an entity, a position, and a task. As for the ones who sing, they can be read as the ones who refuse to make sense, in a way, and thus defy the order because, after all, they aim to be not against it but beyond it, or maybe they do not even aim for that would presuppose a kind of narrative but just are. As a narrative, then, coming out would necessarily mean, for the subject who performs it, an instance of coming in. And this is the case of the conversions that take place in Puigs Kiss of the Spider Woman, in spite of the fact that both of its two converted subjects meet death it is a heroic death. However, to deny oneself to narrative, on the other hand, and assume nothing, or almost nothing, of the identity one is supposed to assume after a moment of coming out, can be tantamount to breaking the (p)act and refusing to definitely come either in or out. That is what the Kid of Money to Burn does when he confesses and does not, when he turns into something and into nothing, and when he not just embraces death but, literally, burns money. Are not the colors and the shapes that this fire allows us to see, if only for a fleeting instant, the sensible manifestations of the iridescence of the voice Perlongher sings us about?

Ponce-Cordero 23

There are the ones who sing and there are the ones who tell stories. / Telling implies a moral, as well as

some tasks for the listener. / Singing invokes deities and, in the heights, / it lets voluminous gauze fumes go round and turn, / the voice is pure iridescence Taken from the poem Chorreo de las iluminaciones en el combate bicolor, in Perlonghers Poemas completos, p. 310 (my translation).
2

I employ the concept of internal truth here in the sense Foucault gives it in The History of Sexuality,

namely as that unknown and ultimately ungraspable personal entity which the discursive formation of sexuality is always pretending to search and which it actually, in the process of that searching, constantly (re)creates (8-12).
3

I use Sedgwick terms not only because of their conciseness but also because I am aware that this

conciseness is due to the fact that she is actually parodying mechanical readings of Foucault that retained the French philosophers extravagance and polemical bravado without, however, concentrating on the history of the present in order to destabilize both the notion of a transhistorical sexuality and the notion of a single modern sexuality as contraposed to pre-modern ones. In this aspect, her work is deepened by Halperins essay Forgetting Foucault, published as the first chapter of How to Do the History of Homosexuality (24-47), and in which the historian acknowledges her positions.
4

Here I am borrowing, of course, the terms with which Walter Mignolo deals in his whole book Local

Histories / Global Designs, even though he is not concerned with heteronormativity, let alone with homonormativity, but with the ways the colonial difference has been constituted, and in fact has to be constantly reconstituted, as the main objective reasons why some peoples can exert power and create knowledge, whereas other peoples are doomed to be objects of knowledge and subjects of power. Nevertheless, the idea that certain (Western) narratives are exported and, precisely because of the logic of colonial difference, become global truths, is a compelling one that seems to help to theorize the process by which the incorporation of homosexuality in the West has its effects on other parts of the globe in spite of all cultural differences and also in spite of the ongoing relevance of other historical lines of continuity of different traditions of sexual diversity.
5

And in fact not only to nationalism but also to militarism, securitization, war, terrorism, surveillance

technologies, empire, torture, [] globalization, fundamentalism, secularism, incarceration, detention, deportation, and neoliberalism (Puar xiv).

Ponce-Cordero 24

Very much like Foucaults famous apparatus of modern sexuality that, regardless of the traditional

misreading of the French philosopher commented on note 2, was superimposed on the previous one without supplanting it (as Gayle Rubin firmly underlines when Butler interviews her in Sexual Traffic [58]), the concept of coming out as a local history that to a certain extent has become a global design in queer discourse is not supposed to imply that other narratives of self-construction and of queer social interaction in a heteronormative world have thoroughly disappeared or been replaced, but rather that the limits in which they function and are deployed have been imposed by both heteronormative narratives and the trope of coming out.
7

The concept of leadership is not used lightly, here. In the words of Flavio Rapisardi, Perlonghers

overwhelming personality and capacity would assert itself until the FLH itself became distinctly identified with him. And this is no metaphor. He alone, based on his own judgment, would decide if some of his comrades were allowed to stay in the movement or not. His anti-hierarchic positions did not include him all the times, in fact (7, my translation).
8

I make this specification in order to exclude, for the purposes of this paper, the homosexual identity

created by classical foucaultian discourses of psychology, criminology and medicine around 1900, for which the trope of coming out is arguably much less important than for the homosexual as a political subject. For the standard study of the discursive invention of homosexuality in Argentina, see Jorge Salessis Mdicos, maleantes y maricas.
9

This is the reason why, throughout this essay, I privilege the term diversity over difference, since it

seems to better accommodate the process by which a subversive subjectivity enters the realm of the sayable through an act of coming out and, thus, makes this realm diverse without fundamentally questioning it.
10

I use the notion of subgenre here in order to take into account that the queer subtext or the subtext of

sexual diversity appears in different literary genres and probably cannot be stabilized in a genre of its own.
11

This process of appropriation would be worth a paper in itself, indeed. Of course, as a book whose initial

international bestseller value was exponentially enhanced by its 1985 filmic adaptation by Hector Babenco a movie that was nominated for four of the most important Academy Awards, including in the categories of best picture and best director, and for which leading actor William Hurt, who portrays the

Ponce-Cordero 25

gay character Molina, indeed got the Oscar, making it an even more appealing artifact for the gay movement to appropriate and display as a success of the politics of diversity.
12

I will not start using feminine pronouns for Molina because it would, I think, make the tension between

his male body and his at least partially female identity unclear, and probably contribute to stabilize a politically correct version of this character that would in fact contradict what I am trying to say here.
13

I do think that the pun here is intended by the translator, since the Spanish original reads seguro, a

word which means, in this context, something closer to self-confident, but which rather interestingly could also mean safe or certain.
14

This is my translation of the Spanish sentence vivo en funcin de una lucha poltica. The translation in

the edition Im using reads my life is dedicated to political struggle, which somehow does not account for the complete dissolution of Valentins being into the ideal that the original conveys.
15

Once again, the pun seems to be intended by the translation, for the original reads mente deformada,

which sounds Marxist (or which at least appears to be related to the concept of false consciousness) and completely lacks the sexual connotations of the English version.
16

Here, the English formulation is unable to convey what is being said in the original, which in my opinion

is due to a bad translation and not to the use of some untranslatable nuances. Thus, what Malito asks is not Who do you think you are? but What are you?
17

The English edition translates the Spanish verduguear, which is slang for humiliate, into the English

to beat, which to my knowledge primarily carries the meaning of hitting and hence does not allow as much possibility for genital interactions such as rape. Because of this, where the Spanish text is ambiguous and open to interpretation, the English version seems to be closed and, in this passage at least, rather dull in comparison.
18

Here the translation fails because of the translators attempt to exploit the queerness of the protagonists

for maximal effect. Thus, whereas the Spanish original reads inhumanos, the English translation offered is, rather surprisingly, pervert, which has obvious sexual connotations but does not convey the sense of complete rupture with the world of human order the word inhuman possesses.

Ponce-Cordero 26

Works cited

Bacarisse, Pamela. Interview with Manuel Puig (Rio de Janeiro, 10 August 1987). In Carnal Knowledge. Essays on the Flesh, Sex and Sexuality in Hispanic Letters and Film. Ed. Pamela Bacarisse. Pittsburgh: Ediciones Tres Ros, 1993, pp. 217-223. Bollig, Ben. Nstor Perlongher: The Poetic Search for an Argentine Marginal Voice. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Clayton, Michelle. Cmo habla la plata. In Ricardo Piglia: una potica sin lmites. Comp. Adriana Rodrguez Prsico. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2004, pp. 135-144. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Giorgi, Gabriel. Sueos de exterminio: homosexualidad y representacin en la literatura argentina contempornea. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2004. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Halperin, David M. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Jagose, Annamarie. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Kaminsky, Amy. Hacia un verbo queer. Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXXIV, Number 225. October-December 2008, pp. 879-895. Mignolo, Walter. Local Histories / Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Perlongher, Nstor. Poemas completos (1980-1992). Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1997.

Ponce-Cordero 27

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. 1976. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Piglia, Ricardo. Money to Burn. 1997. Trans. Amanda Hopkinson. London: Granta Books, 2003. Quiroga, Jos. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Rapisardi, Flavio. Escritura y lucha poltica en la cultura argentina: identidades y hegemona en el movimiento de diversidades sexuales entre 1970 y 2000. Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXXIV, Number 225. October-December 2008, pp. 973-995. Rivendell, Peter. Manuel Puig. Weblog entry. Gay for today. 28 December 2008. 21 April 2009. <http://gayfortoday.blogspot.com/2007/12/manuel-puig.html>. Rodrguez Prsico, Adriana. Plata quemada o un mito para el policial argentino. In Ricardo Piglia: una potica sin lmites. Comp. Adriana Rodrguez Prsico. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2004, pp. 113121. Rubin, Gayle and Judith Butler. Sexual Traffic: Gayle Rubin interviewed by Judith Butler. In Coming Out of Feminism? Ed. Mandy Merck, Naomi Segal, and Elizabeth Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 36-73. Salessi, Jorge. Mdicos, maleantes y maricas: higiene, criminologa y homosexualidad en la creacin de la nacin argentina (Buenos Aires: 1871-1914). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1995. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.