Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies)

Jaime Manrique's slim Eminent Maricones starts off with some disjunctive memories of his childhood in Colombia, but truly begins to pick up steam when Manrique recounts his friendship with fellow writer Manuel Puig (best known as the author of Kiss of the Spider Woman), who, despite his "drag queen mannerisms" was "one of the most tough-minded people I've ever met." After a short chapter portraying an encounter with Reinaldo Arenas two days before Arenas, his body ravaged by the effects of HIV, committed suicide, Manrique launches an in-depth consideration of the shifts in attitude toward homosexuality in the writings of Federico García Lorca. Reading Lorca after the deaths of Puig and Arenas, Manrique explains, helped him come to terms with his own internalized homophobia; it also creates a loose canon of gay Latino writers who fought against tyranny--though any influence this canon may have had on Manrique's own writing is left undiscussed. Although its intimate portraits will be appreciated by those with an interest in gay or Latino literature, or both, other readers may find Eminent Maricones too brief to hold their interest.