Subject: Re: Gays in Argentina

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 1995 21:07:39 -0400

"Like Paris, Buenos Aires is a city of grand avenues, of train stations built
to resemble palaces, of cafes and confiterias on every corner. Like Paris,
too, it is a city of lights, from the gleaming Obelisk, meant to recall the
Place de la Concorde, to the sea of neon down the Avenida Corrientes, with
its theaters and restaurants and book and record stores ... After our stroll
downtown, Osvaldo went home, and Chris and I headed to a gay bar named Teleny
(after a story attributed to Oscar Wilde). It was a small place, just off the
Avenida Santa Fe, the middle-class shopping boulevard that is the heart of
the gay Buenos Aires. In contrast to the bars and restaurants in the downtown
area, the place was brightly lit and the tables were crowded with young men,
their hair slicked back in the manner of thirties tango idols; they were all
dressed in sweaters and blue jeans and matching jean jackets. Decor consisted
of framed photos of the usual gay icons - Garbo, Lauren Bacall, Montgomery
Clift, and Marlon Brando. Chris and I ordered anise, which was brought in
large tumblers. We stood on the fringes, crushed between other customers,
most of whom were smoking cigarettes and drinking wine spritzers ... On a
small stage towards the front, drag queens in blond wigs and ruffled dresses
were singing tangos. One queen, her hairy shoulders just visible above her
dress, sang one of the most famous - and melancholy - of the genre:

Veras que todo es mentira,
Veras que nada es amor,
Que al mundo nada le importa ...
Yira! ... Yira! ...
Aunque te quiebre la vida,
Aunque te muerda el dolor,
No esperes nunca una ayuda,
Ni una mano, ni un favor.

(You will see that everything is a lie,
You will see that love is nothing,
That in the world, nothing matters ...
Wander! ... Wander! ...
Even if life breaks you,
Even though pain eats away at you,
Don't expect any help,
Neither a hand, nor a favor.)

The song's refrain meant "Wander! Wander!", but it also signified wandering
in the sense of "cruising" the Avenida Santa Fe just down the block - and the
double meaning was lost on no one at Teleny. It was an anthem of gay misery
that could have come directly out of "The Boys in the Band". Yet despite the
pre-liberation atmosphere, Teleny didn't really seem gloomy. Perhaps it was
that everyone was too young to really feel the disillusionment of the tango,
that they were just playing at being "all the sad young men." Or maybe it was
just that Argentina, where pessimism and fatalism were the prevailing
worldview - the lights could go out, the government or the economy could
topple in an instant, but you ate and drank and stayed up till dawn,
nonetheless. Shortly after three a.m. one of the drag queens did a climactic
tango with an older man, and the customers began to drift out, no doubt to
"wander" the streets of Buenos Aires, in search of the lover who, the tango
warned, could only disappoint."

(from Neil Miller's "Out in the World", 1992, Random House)