A Letter of Gratitude to Juan Gabriel
“Soy honesto con ella y contigo, a ella la quiero, a ti te he olvidado si tú quieres, seremos amigos— yo te ayudo a olvidar el pasado” blasts from the somehow still functioning radio in my aunt 's living room. Warm coffee sits and ripples slightly to the music on a mahogany dining table (only blaring sound systems will do in this house), establishing itself by way of a ring of liquid forming beneath its mug. What joy Juan Gabriel’s music brought to the mothers and cousins gossiping and laughing around the kitchen and living room. What joy he brings my mother when she reminisces about her childhood, her loved ones. I believe these bonds and pure moments of joyfulness are forms of queerness. People don’t experience that kind of love or dance under authoritarian and colonial rules, or at their 9-5 underpaying and overworking jobs birthed from imperial imaginations.
I’m dedicating this letter to Juan Gabriel as a testament to my evolving relationship to queerness even though Gabriel never “came out” as queer himself, and in fact made it a point to keep that part of his identity relatively mystified. He is described by many as “an openly gender queer Mexican man who dedicated his life to (and was creatively unmatched at) singing about love and heartache,” and at the same time as one whose “own homosexuality is considered to be the best-kept secret in Mexico, despite the fact that everyone is aware of it.” Gabriel danced within this in-between space, with pompadour, glitter suits and all. Even though to many in the West this space is considered rigid, oppressive, and a result of a “closeted mentality” (all of which could be true for Gabriel, I admit, though we’ll never truly know), Gabriel’s performances of gender that included mixing and bending the feminine with/against the masculine save the literal recognition of such gender-queering itself harbored a different kind of power for both the singer as well as for many of his fans. I’d argue Gabriel existed as one of many “subjects whose identities are formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny-cultural logics that…work to undergird state power.” In other words, within his specific cultural context, Gabriel indeed still resisted heteronormative bindings by way of his unnamed performance of gender and sexuality. As violently anti-queer the US is, one can only imagine being and performing as Gabriel in Mexico’s public eye during this time, having no whiteness to protect him nor citizenship of the world’s largest colonial and imperial superpower (or its cultural/musical lexicon, for that matter).
As mentioned previously, Juan Gabriel means a lot to many people— many queer people in particular. As for my case, the singer and I have little in common, save a particular ethnic background and for argument’s sake queer. But I starkly remember watching videos of him on my aunt’s iPod as per request and being stunned. What a performer he was! And my god, the styling was good. It was so obviously queer. It was even more queer because it was playing while my other family was in the house. It was like he was playing in contrast to where he was being played and who he was being played for. Queerness alone, queerness by contrast. As I got older, it always puzzled me how such a fundamentalist anti-queer crowd like my family (except for my aunt) could enjoy his music as much as they did. It made me a little upset to learn that he never acknowledged his own queerness, since it appeared as though people with the views of my family members got to consume his life’s work and still hate what everyone knew he clearly, at the very least, represented. But it also seemed like a cheeky secret between me and Gabriel, this whole queer thing. Before I knew it, I’d be discovering my own identities didn't exactly line up with what I’d previously believed. But like Gabriel, I never “came out.” I came to understand my fluid sexuality and gender identity through performance and expression. I love that I got to share that with the imagined support of Gabriel’s music.
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