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GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE
August 28, 2009
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www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com
The Piers in the '90s
Poet's dark novel of growing up shines in reissue
by Anthony Glassman
The name Emanuel Xavier is highly evocative.
He's not the leader of the X-Men, the comic book team of superhero outsiders. That's Charles Xavier, you nitwits.
Those deeply in the know are familiar with Emanuel's poetry, both written and performed on the slam circuit.
However, there is more to this queer
color made a community for themselves, perhaps turning a trick or buying and selling drugs.
They also practice their voguing skills, having dance battles to prepare them for the evenings ahead at the clubs and balls.
He goes through a series of unsatisfying relationships, forever marred by the abuse in his childhood and unable to love himself, much less others, the question “Tu eres maricon?" echoing endlessly in his head.
harkening to the Torch Song Trilogy line where Arnold's mother tells him that if she spoke to her mother as he does to her, he would be talking "to a woman with a sizesix wedgie sticking out of her forehead."
The wittiest of the footnotes, however, is when he first defines munching as giving a blowjob, being munched as getting a blowjob, and then defines blowjob as "munched" in three rapid-fire footnotes.
He now freely admits that, while fic-
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Nuyorican literary icon than his poetry, which draws deeply on his youth, his forays into the sex trade and drug dealing.
Deep in the darkest recesses of his past, there is a novel ..
Long out of print the publishing house went belly-up shortly after releasing it--Christ Like became an almost mythical beast, like the Loch Ness Monster, the Lake Erie Monster, or intelligent network television.
Sure, some claimed to have seen itthere might even have been a copy in the short-lived Suspect Thoughts Bookstore on Clark Avenue in Cleveland, although it wasn't for sale but like the black panthers supposedly roaming the woodlands of Michigan, there was little proof of its exist-
ence.
Until now, that is. Until Rebel Satori Press released a tenth anniversary edition on their Queermojo imprint.
The story is as simple as a quagmire of sexual and physical abuse, drug use, sexfor-sale and New York City house culture can be.
It follows Mikey X from his childhood, the progeny of a Puerto Rican mother and an Ecuadorean father who runs off when he discovers she is pregnant.
She moves in with family members, not knowing that her toddler son is being routinely raped by his older cousin.
She find love in the arms of Ernesto, who treats her well. That is, until he starts beating her.
Mikey realizes he is gay and escapes to the Piers, where other young queer people of
"Are you a faggot?" as his mother's boyfriend once asked him in Spanish.
While this was in the mid-90s, and HIV medication research was making great strides, the last people it would reach would be the poor black and Latinos surrounding Mikey, so he saw friends and former lovers sicken and die, all while numbing his pain with an alphabet of designer drugs-C, E, K.
Xavier doesn't take the easy way out at the end of the novel. The denouement is no more happy and pat than the rest of the book, but Mikey X would probably wither and die in the constraints of suburban nuclear familial hell.
The author also took the opportunity of the re-release to correct spelling, grammar, chapter breaks and pronoun usage for transgender characters. It could probably have used a bit more editing, but once you really get into it, flawed punctuation falls aside like a discarded T-shirt in a too-hot dance club.
His most sublime addition to the new edition is footnotes, letting white folks and those who were not particularly aware in the 1990s in on the subtext. He did not translate the Spanish or the Spanglish, because, according to the introduction, "I wanted to be a bit of a hard-ass."
He defines cha-cha queen as “A gay man of Latino origin and ethnic proportions," one of the most sublime puns ever put on paper.
Later, he describes his mother's chanclas as "Spanish for slipper or any easily removable footwear that could be used as a weapon,"
tional, there is a strong autobiographical element to the novel. There is exaggeration, and there is no longer a Hollywood ending, but there is an engaging story.
It's still rough, and could possibly benefit from a stronger hand in the editing. It's mostly punctuation that suffers, and it can be distracting, but overall Christ Like is the must-have queer read of the year.
CHRIST LIKE