Luis Zapata
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by Philip Gambone

My weekly column in Lokkal doesn't have an official title, but if it did, I'd call it "The Writer in Mexico." What I'm up to in these pieces is to tell the story of how various writers—Mexican and foreign—have responded to this country in novels, stories, plays, poems, travel pieces and other forms of creative writing.

Until now, I've largely concentrated on non-Mexican writers like D. H. Lawrence, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jack Kerouac, John Dos Passos, Sybille Bedford, and others. This week, I want to focus on a native Mexican writer. His name was Luis Zapata.  In addition to his many novels, Zapata also wrote plays and short stories and was an important cultural journalist. He was a specialist in medieval French literature, producing translations of, among other works, the twelfth-century poem Tristan and Yseut.

These literary achievements notwithstanding, Zapata is best known and appreciated in Mexico as the author of an early gay novel, Adonis García—or to give it its original Spanish title, Las Aventuras, Desaventuras y Sueños de Adonis García, El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma, which was published in 1979, when the author was 28. Upon his death in 2020, Zapata was saluted—"with pain and affection"—by Mexico's culture secretary, Alejandra Frausto, as "a pioneer of LGBT+ literature in Mexico."

Spanish-language edition of Adonis Garcia
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Adonis García was a pioneering novel. Written as a series of transcribed tape recordings for an unidentified interlocutor, it's the story of a Mexican street hustler told in colorful, urban vernacular. The 200-page monologue, divided into seven tape recordings or cintas, gives us a picture of Adonis's life in the limbos and underworlds of Mexico City, "the raunchiest city" (la ciudad más cachonda) in the world, he says. "I mean, the one that was most favorable to, uh, sexual relations."

Adonis is savvy, streetwise, funny, reckless, honest, always ready to straighten out his life, and always in desperate need to survive. His philosophy is that "life is only worth living for the pleasure it can give ya, that everything else is bullshit (pendejadas)." To that end, he pursues every kind of pleasure open to a male street hustler: sex, of course, but also grass, pills, parties, and lots of booze.

As a literary character, Adonis comes right out of the picaresque tradition in Hispanic literature. Like every picaro, he's a rogue adventurer, always pushing the envelope of what's proper and acceptable yet somehow winning us over with his wit and daring-do.

English-language version
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Zapata prefaced his novel with a quotation from Part Two of the great picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. "The life of the picaro is the real life, and other ways of life don't even deserve the name. The philosophers scorned possessions in order to study the natural and divine world … with the least impediment to their contemplation; the picaro scorns them in order to roam freely the world of his appetites."

Adonis does just that, indulging all his appetites, the healthy ones and unhealthy ones. He has a strong survival instinct, one that helps him overcome every kind of scrape he gets himself into: getting kicked out of various crash pads, multiple arrests (including once for wearing his hair too long), venereal disease, rivalries and jealousies among his acquaintances, romances and breakups.

He knows he drinks too much and this depresses him. "After all, it's something y're doing to hurt yourself, right? Y'realize how much y'depend on alcohol and y'realize too that y'dunno the reasons that're making ya drink so much and anyhow it's like so complicated that y'd rather keep on drinking and forget everything."

In passing, we learn that Adonis is the son of a businessman, grew up in a bourgeois milieu, was the editor of his high school newspaper—advantages that should have set him up for a life other than the life of a con man hustler and "urban vampire." Once, when he was very depressed, he made up a little lament: "I don't know why my life is only this because I want it to be something more, but I can't do it because something's wrong." Zapata goes easy on explicating what that "something wrong" is, but it's clear that Adonis is a casualty of the many flaws in Mexican society, especially discrimination and the lack of opportunity available to Mexican homosexuals.

Luis Zapata in 2004
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The novel is populated with colorful, funny, scatological portraits of the people—johns and tricks, lovers, sugar daddies, housemates, straight buddies—that constitute Adonis' menagerie of acquaintances. One such person is Zabaleta, a man who lives in a house "with about three thousand floors with elevators and rotating satellites" and enjoys a variety of sexual peculiarities, which I will refrain from detailing here. Needless to say, Adonis' life with Zabaleta ends up not working out. He grabs a couple of shirts, two pairs of pants and his toothbrush and goes to live in Veracruz for a while.

When Adonis imagines moving away from the hustling life, he says to himself, "Move on but where to? Where could I go that'd be different? Wherever y'go y're gonna find the same people with the same hang-ups, aren't ya. Unless the men from Mars came along and made contact with me and I went with them." (I should note here that, for clarity's sake, my quotations include capitalization and punctuation that are not in the original translation.)

"The novel arrived at the fringes of La Onda, a post-magical realist 'wave' of countercultural urban art and expression," wrote Daniel Hernández in The Los Angeles Times two weeks after Zapata's death. "It displayed for the first time in modern Mexican literature a gay figure assuredly inhabiting their sexuality, a notion incompatible with Mexico's perennially macho view of itself."

Translator E. A. Lacey
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So far, the only English translation, which was published by Gay Sunshine Press in 1981, has been one by Edward A. Lacey, a Canadian poet and translator, who had taught English as a second language in Mexico among other countries. It has been criticized for reverting to "a kind of late '70s New York wise-guy voice, which simply doesn't work."

"I really appreciate the effort that [Lacey] gave it, under very difficult circumstances," writes Clary Loisel, who has translated another of Zapata's novels into English. "But there's so much slang and so many Mexicanisms, so many references to specific areas in Mexico City and the Colonia Roma, you have to have a real cultural insight to even place the language. You have to be almost bicultural to get it."

Until another translation comes along, English-language readers will have to make do with Lacey's, which, alas, is now only available in libraries and through used book outlets for a lot of money.

Over the years, Zapata won several prizes for his work. In 1976 he was awarded the Quetzalcóatl Prize for his novel Even in the Best Families (Hasta en las mejores familias) and the following year won First Prize in the 1977 French Short Story Contest for "Deuxieme Pont" ("Second Bridge"). Other awards included the Premio Estatal al Mérito Literario Juan Ruiz de Alarcón in 1992 and the Reconocimiento de las IX Jornadas Alarconianas in 1997.

Juan Gribaljo
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A word should also be said about Zapata's Spanish-language publisher, Grijalbo. It was founded in 1975 by Juan Grijalbo Serres (1911-2002). In his youth in Spain, Grijalbo became affiliated with the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, the Unified Socialist Party of Cataluña, and during the Spanish Civil War served as a representative in the General Union of Workers (UGT), a Spanish labor union. In 1939, Grijalbo went into exile in Mexico, where he helped to set up a publishing house that featured Marxist works, Russian literature, Spanish poetry, and other works.  He eventually bought out the company and gave it his own name, Editorial Grijalbo. The house continued to publish Marxist books and added American best seller titles like The Godfather. Grijalbo was, writes Mexican publisher Diego Echeverria, "part of a generation of Spaniards that revolutionized the Hispanic-American publisher industry." 

While LGBTQ literature in Mexico has not, as yet, developed as prolific, robust, and diverse a body of work as in the United States, Mexico is hardly without its important queer authors. Almost 45 years ago, Luis Zapata and Editorial Grijalbo paved the way for the gay Mexican authors who have followed.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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