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It’s been painfully obvious for awhile that the large publishing companies are not particularly concerned with marginalized voices beyond tokenism. One of the many results of this profit-only view of literature has been the necessity of the small press. Unfortunately, the hierarchical view sweeps even into small press consideration, and there are teensy presses fighting against university-funded presses for readership, and sometimes just for pure status. The reader is left to happenstance, or to reading in genre and the wise small press will posit a title within a genre or topic. Within the topic of written works on LGBTQ considerations are histories and memoirs, poetry and fiction, and sometimes works of a more intersectional nature. Strange Perfume by Wilson Loria ( Breaking Rules, 2018) is such an intersectional work, as the first-person, memoir-toned narrative concerning the life of a gay man is augmented by five letters that speak of a separate topic, of the Cuban revolution and life under Castro.
Told as the matter-of-fact recollections of the protagonist, Nelson, we first encounter a teenage boy listening to opera in Havana, Cuba in 1960, who then escapes to live life as a gay man in New York. The book’s opening chapters alter in structure between this narrative and letters which detail life back home: “Our people wish to live in peace and all this week, they celebrated Fidel and his guerrillas entering La Habana in the first days of 1959. That was when he took hold of the city, changing radically everybody’s life on the island. Forever ( 25).” Further letters detail civil changes that usurp individual rights: “Do you remember the Castillo del Morro built by the Spaniards to defend themselves against the pirates at the port of La Habana? That’s where all political prisoners, mentally ill and homosexuals have been taken, and eventually sent to either the camps of the fields (59)”. By positioning these letters against the narrative of gay life in New York, the reader is brought to greater sympathy for Nelson, who can never go home again.
The narrative structure of this work is fast-paced, and a mere few pages after the horror that has become Cuba, the reader and the protagonist discover one lover who had “ on his left shoulder, a bluish bruise, magically in the shape of a rose(64)”. A paragraph later, “the little bluish rose had, like an amoeba, divided and given birth to lots of them, taking over Dino’s back.(65)” until “Dino’s blue roses had taken over his whole body. It was as if the stems of his blue roses had gotten tangled up in such way[sic] on his back that there was no space left, clogging up his weakened lungs (66)’. Loria never names the disease itself, referring to it as “the most-talked-about-four-letter word plague in this century (154)”, and the work’s structure tends to emphasize the protagonist and his doings—a visit to Rio for Carnival , partnership is a drag bar and the protagonist’s relationships.
In the thirty-year period covered in the work, the reader experiences one life lived, yet this is not a strict memoir, it is posed as one: the author is not the protagonist, he is choosing to posit the work as if he were. Thus, we have a historical document written with a conversational style, the confession of a friend. The intimate style of this book, the unfamous protagonist and author, would not make this text one that looks profitable to global publishing corporations, and so such works become the realm of small presses. History from thirty years ago is both necessary for today’s readers and for special collections on LGBTQ topics. Because small presses often do not have reach, the inclusion of such work as this into special collections (private and otherwise) is the work of the bibliographic connoisseur. Let us hope that as we celebrate the loud voices of celebrities from marginalized cultures, that we honor these quiet ones as well.
