Gay Shame

Gay Shame / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, Translator: Unstated

Gay Pride Day in Cuba should be celebrated as the Gay Murmur Day. Among
thousands and thousands of magnificent queers and dazzling lesbians,
among thousands and thousands of plurisexual people, very free in
private, not even three manage to come out in the streets. Not even to
kiss in the sad backyard of MININT, surrounded by old spies, perhaps
already retired of who knows what military organization, plus the bored
foreign press that assumes (from naivete or ignorance) that in Cuba they
are still possible news.

It is not the fault of the LGBT movements on the Island, it is the
parody sponsored by the Hetero-State or the underground micro-factions
who wriggle their hips in contradiction to their totalitarian vocation.
It's not the fault of each one of your tense bodies hiding to escape the
disgust of authority. It is not the fault of our orgasms outside any
organization. It is not the fault of anyone. And it is the fault of
everyone, that we don't know how to narrate it with the beauty it
deserves. That we dare not speak from the debacle and encourage the
debate (perhaps as performance) in the prison air of our capital.

What rights can a country without heroes boast of? Who are our
minorities? What are their faces or their masks? How to they look or
walk or presume or court or touch their genitals with an infamous or
naive gesture? Where do they talk, to whom, with what language of
caution or cauterization? What have they lived in such a supposed
succession of generations and communities? Nothing. We are strangled
little atoms of obsolete socialism, incapable of chanting a
controversial slogan, of raising a fist in public, of paralyzing traffic
for a few minutes to take on the most significant institution.

We are nothing. Inertial statistics of a castrating, tired, military
dynasty. We are living in an unlikely vacuum of someone else's
biography, where every every every thing is marked by the annexationist
paranoia of a perennial paleolithic Premier, of a Vice-nobody who will
not survive it, and of a mean bunch of mercenary ministers who, when
they're alone in their offices, without the protection of political
death in the name of the Revolution, will come out stampeding to save
themselves over our dead bodies, over the tainted memory of those who
never left us, the pathetic pariahs of the patria. And then we will be
all alone with the invisible iniquitous intelligence that will
North-Koreanize Cuba as long as they have all the objects and movements
of this country.

There was no Revolution, there will be no Transition. Only whispers. A
citizen's theater without a guild. The first to raise his voice will be
putting his neck on the gallows. We are going to kill generously, it's
the only industry that's ever prospered in Cuba: the legal lynching of
the other.

They are right, the thousands and thousands of undefiled gays and
lesbians without pedigree of yesterday afternoon. The only Stonewall
there will be in Cuba will be stoned. Not go out in the street. Beware.
Hide behind your books, as you have up to now and until the end of the
históricos, the ancient leaders coming to the end of their days. Get
your travel permits and cut-and-pate genitals from CENESEX. But watch
the old and green in the Catholiccommunist mass for the centenary of the
Revolution on the morning of January 1, 2059.

Each people has the pedestrian poverty it deserves.

Kiss each other alone. Kiss your illegible lips in the bathroom mirror.
Come out of the closet but not into the street. Don't forget to quote
the representatives of the press accredited in Havana.

If it's not too much trouble, don't involve me. We angels also are a
minority, even though we don't have sex. And I demand, at least in
writing, my right not to get into bed with ghosts.

June 29 2012

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