By Bruno Díaz *

The Cock-Sucking Beggar, by  Pablo Pérez

"I threw myself at his feet, kissed his thing, and wet it with my tears." (Lorenzo Verdasco) Born from the queer South American publishing scene of the early nineties, El Mendigo Chupapijas (The Dick-Sucking Beggar) is one of the ripest (though no less acidic) fruits of beauty and happiness. It was first sold as a pamphlet (with a free toy!) and was later adapted into a short film. Pablo PérezThe author always pushes the boundaries a little further. Reissued by Mansalva in 2006, with its volatile prose, shrouded in the sordidness and humor characteristic of the world that survived HIV, it helps us rethink the meaning of love and makes us stop (and move) to consider the voraciousness of a beggar who, living through scarcity, devours everything in front of him. It's pleasurable even before you buy it. The reaction of some booksellers to the abject title and the double taboo of poverty and homosexuality in the same book is amusing. Not to be missed.

Intimacy – Roberto Videla

“I go to the movies on my own initiative. I enter, as always, somewhat embarrassed. The woman at the ticket booth greets me warmly, of course: I'm a regular customer. (…) She gives me a candy, which she reserves for her favorites, I suppose, which is good for my breath, in case I have to kiss.” A journey through the underworld of saunas, porn theaters, and cruising areas, recounted with the simplicity of someone describing Guernica without batting an eye. Gallantry of Roberto Videla (A theater director, actor, and writer) writes in the first person something that is clearly autobiographical. The author's dual enjoyment of the experiences he has and recounts, or even has yet to recount, is evident. Reading *La Intimidad* (Mansalva Publishers) is like encountering (the redundancy is fitting) an intimate diary published in a Sunday morning paper on an odd-numbered page, right at the top and in italics, where it becomes clear in each and every story that in the queer world, having non-monetary exchanges is as easy as entering a gas station bathroom at the appointed time. The meticulous detail of what seems like a taxonomy of bodies and fluids is highly enjoyable, as is the liberation from the limits imposed by the social self, in a subculture where it doesn't matter who you are or who you've been. An ode to shamelessness and lack of prejudice.

Cruel Plastic – José Sbarra

"Whether you love it or not, it's always terrible" (Marguerite Yourcenar) Cruel Plastic is the story of a love triangle between a transvestite, Bombón (poet and prostitute), Axel the Pig, a 17-year-old boy in love with a bourgeois girl from Buenos Aires society (Linda Morris, the plasticized woman), and Axel's penis, which captivates both Linda and Bombón equally. The story unfolds through dialogues, hallucinations, and traffic signs, in a highly cinematic book that is expected to be adapted for the stage this year by Naty Menstrual (Batido de Trolo, Continuadísimo) in the role of Bombón. Its author, José Sbarra, said in an interview with Enrique Symns: “I wrote Cruel Plastic to demonstrate that love doesn't exist. That love is cultural, that life is sex, that everything was clear in sex and I didn't achieve it.” His failure is the reader's delight in the work's poetry, which is undeniably hilarious. As a bonus, a final thought: Don't go. –This story is over. –Is there another type? –There are thousands of types. –All plastic. –They'll be more suitable for me, according to you. –Why don't you lie to them instead of lying to me? Tell them you love them, but cheat on them with me. Love only me, sleep with everyone, but love me. The Museum in Black – Paul B. Preciado “A rebellion of bodies is urgent and essential in the 21st century.”  A brilliant student of Derridas, an enfant terrible, Paul B. Preciado denounces the mercantilist logic of the museum, where the profit from artworks (the indication of their price rather than their value) is measured by the numbers shown on the box office receipts, under the (rather dubious) pretext of overcoming dependence on state funding, in a museum increasingly geared towards the tourist. His reflections on the bathroom as a site for verifying gender assignment are impeccable, where urinating = standing and defecating = sitting, where what matters in a bathroom is little more than the correspondence between one's appearance and the icon on the door (loafer-high heel, man-woman, mustache-flower), under penalty of social condemnation. Paul Preciado, born Beatriz Preciado, directs the research and artistic production project: Technologies of Gender and promotes the theoretical and political initiatives of drag king, post-pornography, and transgenderism. He was expelled from the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (in an episode reminiscent of the sad actions and subsequent censorship of León Ferrari at the Recoleta Cultural Center) after presenting the exhibition "La Bèstia i el Sobirà" (The Beast and the Sovereign), where a German Shepherd mounted the Bolivian activist Domitila Barrios, who in turn mounted King Juan Carlos. A beautiful surprise that, exposing the behind-the-scenes workings of cultural productions, it was published by MALBA.

Gualicho – Gael Policano Rossi

“All of life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        James Joyce. The first novel by poet and playwright Gael Policano Rossi features a man on all fours on its cover. Paradoxically, the publishing house (run by Mariano Blatt and Francisco Visconti) is called De Parado (Standing Up) and describes itself as “the gay publisher your mom warned you about.” They sell in off-the-beaten-path bookstores, but also offer their catalog through social media and Grindr. In Gualicho, as in The Comedy of ErrorsThe protagonist receives a package that wasn't meant for him, containing a macumba that inevitably leads him to insert things into his anus, in a plot that's no longer quite Shakespearean. The satisfaction of anal delirium emerges as the only way to calm the feverish and delirious states the curse produces. The sordid sequence escalates from timid fingers in the shower to teapots, fisting sessions, public gangbangs, and kilos of cocaine, in a book that feels more pornographic than erotic. The result is a highly recommended option for anyone looking to get aroused rather than be intellectually challenged. Published in December 2016, Blatt says: “For us, Gualicho has to be one of the novels of the summer. It takes place in a sweaty, sweltering Buenos Aires. A hot story with fresh writing. Heat is the best way to cool down.” And he couldn't be more right. The book's resolution is morally troubling. A dose of reality amidst all the fluff, the nonsense, the tenements, and the Buenos Aires affectations.

It's not my fault I was born so sexy – Eduardo Mendicutti

"On a dark night, with longing, inflamed with love, oh blessed fortune! I went out unnoticed, my house being now at peace." John of the Cross. Rebecca de Windsor, a transsexual who closely resembles Amande Lepore, discovers while removing her makeup that (although still far from the first signs of any kind of decadence) no woman, however female she may have been born, can be a femme fatale For the rest of her days. Accustomed to the excesses that characterize the world of transvestites, she sets herself the humble goal of leaving this world transformed into a saint. Surely the most successful and famous. Extremely worried about finding the right name (there's no room in heaven for two Saint Teresas), she embarks on a crazy journey through seven Spanish monasteries with Dani, a bodybuilder who plays the role of Sancho Panza, and who also seeks to atone for God knows what sin on this pilgrimage. Mendicutti is corrosive, he's hilarious. No one portrays like him the tension between the universality of the transvestite phenomenon and the local reality of a queer woman in a country where there are more cathedrals than gay saunas. A heavyweight to add to the scales denounced by the Australian critic Dennis Altman, where homosexuality is, even today, more Americanized than ever.

The war of the faggots – Copi

“If God is with us… who is with them?” Copi was a wonderful cartoonist, playwright, and novelist. The War of the Faggots is a masterpiece, but that's not saying much: Copi only wrote masterpieces. The translation of the original (The war of the feet, Something like the "War of the Faggots" or "War of the Queers" (as chosen by El Cuenco del Plata) even lends a friendly tone to a book that (although hilarious) still recounts a war. That the warring factions are cannibalistic hermaphrodites living on the moon, that they fight against sadomasochistic transvestites for the conquest of Paris, that the Wailing Wall is proposed as a giant teapot for Palestinians to suck one's dick, are all generations and degenerations that only a genius like Copito (the nickname his grandmother gave Raúl Damonte Botana) seemed capable of conceiving.

[READ ALSO: Evita the transvestite and the body as the center in two of Copi's works]

The mission (or perhaps a premonition?) of the 'Interspatiale Homosexuelle' is amusing, an organization dedicated to protecting homosexuals worldwide at a historical moment when what was longed for was nothing more than civic access to activism, a bit of humor, and transgression of every possible norm. Ultimately, it's moving that the underlying issue is, as always, the resolution of love in an 80s universe that was close to collapsing under the devastation that HIV would bring.

Tell Me About Love – Pedro Lemebel

"What hurts is not being homosexual, but having it thrown in your face as if it were a plague." Chavela Vargas Tell me about love It's practically the last work published by Pedro Lemebel. And if he ever toned down his unconventional style, that can no longer be expected from a celebrated, multi-translated, award-winning Lemebel, old and beginning to grapple with a brain tumor diagnosis. It's funny to imagine Pedro writing Tell me about love, Made up and wearing heels. Such irreverence has never been seen since he founded The Mares of the Apocalypse, He was never so baroque, so critical, and so voluptuous when relentlessly wielding his blessed typewriter. While the wealthy half of Chile was pondering the Chilean economic miracle in Santiago's bourgeois circles, the other half, embodied by Lemebel, tells us in this book about the poor, marginalized, transvestite, and queer Santiago that—as always—fights to avoid being left untold, in stories that move you, that shake you to your core, that make you laugh and cry, and that distill resentment and anger in every letter he types. A highly recommended story from his nineties Crazy Desire: Chronicles of Sidario.  Don't stop reading  The thousand names of Maria Camaleon. His family recounted after his death: “Pedro suffered for a long time from laryngeal cancer and fought a great battle against this terrible disease, which tried to silence him, but who could silence Lemebel? His voice exists and endures.” And indeed, without Lemebel, there would have been no Perlongher, the Aira we know would not have been the same, and Copi would not have laughed so much. Thank you for everything, dear Pedro!

[READ ALSO: “Your voice persists”: Lemebel as told by his loved ones]

(*) He's a political scientist by profession, but defines himself as a voracious reader of queer literature, a photographer, a busybody, and a voyeur. We went to find him to get his summer reading recommendations, although he believes any time of year is a good time to dive into a book.]]>