Queens in Manhattan
By Penny Pham
LAS BIUTY QUEENS
By Iván Monalisa Ojeda
Translated by Hannah Kauders
There is a narrative that pervades the New York City mythos: that, through the late 90s and into the 2000s, Rudolph Giuliani either cleaned the city of its grime (according to those of a more tough-on-crime persuasion) or sanitized it of its vibrancy. The latter opinion typically follows the model of Samuel Delaney’s cri de coeur against the rapid gentrification of Times Square from a seedy underbelly of pornographic theaters to an open-air shopping mall today. Writing in 1999, Delaney’s work in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue offered a foreboding warning: “in the midst of that spurious vision of a stable world, it first struck me that ‘major redevelopment’ of the Times Square area would mean a priori major demolition, destruction, and devastation.”
Delaney’s argument hinges on a sex culture—porn theaters and open sex in public, homosexual and otherwise—as the “burgeoning counterculture” laid to waste by an active restructuring of a community’s cultural and geographical footprint. But even this perspective espouses a sort of inevitability to the permanent transformation of New York. There is a before-and-after to Delaney’s writing that lays the groundwork for the obituary next. Nostalgists today echo those same sentiments to ask “isn’t it crazy?” how the city had so thoroughly completed its metamorphosis into a playground of the haut-bourgeois. Both these narratives, of progress or of erasure, bottle this culture of sex work, violence and joy into a diorama of the past, ignoring its ongoing existence into an ongoing present shared with the visible culture. And indeed this perception, the historicizing of sex work, can and often does pose many problems for its participants—sex workers, almost always gay, transgender, black, or Latinx—who must fight against a dual perception that they are simultaneously objects of litter, pollution to be sanitized, and somehow already disappeared.
Iván Monalisa Ojeda, in his/her (Ojeda uses both pronouns) debut short story collection Las Biuty Queens aims to challenge this presentist revisionism through 13 vignettes dating from the present, back to the mid-90s. Through the the lives of New York City sex workers, all trans or Latinx or immigrants, Ojeda reminds us that his/her New York, some place darker and grimier—and more joyous and vibrant, still—survives. Las Biuty Queens, spanning the course of over 20 years, is not a historical fiction but a decisively present one. Much of the collection draws from Ojeda’s personal history, having immigrated (undocumented, notably) to New York City from his/her native Chile in 1995. The stories of incarceration, lost loved ones, addictions, and bad boyfriends all circulate around a fictionalized “Monalisa,” who takes after Ojeda’s own experiences as a transgender sex worker living on the fringes (Monalisa, ungendered in the collection, will hereafter be referred to with he/she pronouns). The geography of the city should feel familiar—from Washington Heights down to 14th Street; but Ojeda’s cast of characters (many recurring throughout the stories) carry a very spectral quality: ghostly, as if floating in a parallel existence invisible to those unable or unwilling to see.
Ojeda’s strongest stories evoke a funereal tone, literally as in the case of “Ortiz Funeral Home” or more subtly in “Jennifer’s Carnations,” which features the anniversary of one. The former illustrates a community’s outpouring of grief for an old friend: “José Buchillon also known as Amalia, la cubana, room four.” Note the names throughout the collection: sobriquets, aliases, epithets—all important as they offer rare glimpses of an external gaze (“In the Bote” sees Monalisa’s aliases coming back to bite him/her: “Juan Cruz also known as Luis Rivera.” Something about the bureaucratic nonchalance to misgendering and dead-naming, paired with the characters’ casual acceptance, feels heartbreaking).
There in that funeral home, however, the community knows only their friend Amalia, lost to a presumed overdose in the arms of her loving boyfriend. But her friends don’t mourn, instead espousing a macabre sense of joy for the chance at a reunion of sorts; the loss of one becomes a means of bringing old friends together. They squabble, accuse each other of stealing a baggie of coke left for Amalia to take to the afterlife. An author without Ojeda’s total cultural grasp might very well caricaturize such voices into catty queer stereotypes. Instead, the cacophonic quality seeping through Ojeda’s ensemble pieces manages to infuse a sense of camaraderie into a group of often troubled personalities: addicts and locas, yes, but sisters nevertheless.
“Jennifer’s Carnations” allows Ojeda to flex his/her command over great scales of time: through the passage of decades rather than hours of the day. One subtle thematic thread throughout the collection observes how its characters, many recurring, all age; a new wrinkle appears one morning, the effects of experimental estrogen tablets start to wane, and the veneer of the Biuty Queen comes into question as youth and its beauty—the interminable companions—wear away into the decades. Only the dead remain untouched, immortalized in images and memories of loved ones increasingly fading away, themselves. The titular Jennifer isn’t someone Monalisa had known, but some acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance found strangled in 1997. The distance here feels crucial, offering one of the most sobering reflections in all the collection: “No one told us to be careful or to remember what had happened to Jennifer, as though it had been something normal, almost quotidian. As Angie Xtravaganza, the mother of Xtravaganza House, said, those murders were part of what it meant to be a transsexual woman in New York.”
People like Jennifer, like Monalisa, live on the razor’s edge on this side of New York City. The “street walkers” they are, their lives ultimately fall at the mercy of public space; this identity grants no medians, no privacy from neighbors, legislators and the cops. It follows that the disappearance of the sex shops on Christopher Street, the pornographic theaters in Times Square, would wipe those like Jennifer and Monalisa, an entire community, off the map—lost to the annals of celluloid. There would be no place to go, nothing to recover: a people effectively disappeared, should we accept this narrative of transience.
But 20 years on, encroaching on our own present, the memory of Jennifer strikes Monalisa: the injustice of the cold case against the image of her angelic beauty, fixed in her coffin. One day, Monalisa and his/her best friend La Manuel—a familiar face at this point in the collection—compare the transsexual experience then and now, lamenting the ease with which the youth have it today. Monalisa, too, is guilty of harboring revisionist tendencies, a nostalgia for the great and terrible past. The old friends are sharing their admiration for the great beauties across their years in New York when, unprompted, La Manuel leaves the room:
She came back with a big white envelope. She took out a photo the size of the envelope. It was of a trans girl posing nude, covering her breasts with her hands and gazing into the camera as though looking you straight in the eye.
“You won’t believe it,” said La Manuel, “but she was my girlfriend for a few months. She was murdered in a hotel back in ‘97. Her name was Jennifer.”
Without saying a word, I took the photo into my hands and thought of all my dead friends.
Thinking temporally, Ojeda tends to contain Monalisa’s exploits to the late-night hours between 10pm and 4am—somewhat unsurprising for stories of sex workers. But he/she largely avoids the sordid nightlife generally ascribed to the prostitutes and street walkers of mainstream depictions. There’s an almost banal quality to Monalisa’s work life; he/she posts ads then waits, orders fried chicken, and watches some DVDs borrowed from the library: an Oliver Twist musical, the first two seasons of Will and Grace. The seedy “street walker” goes for a stroll not just for sex and drugs (they’re there, for sure) but also avocados and whole bread (“for the munchies later”). Monalisa gets the same treatment, the same respect, as that of the literary flâneur, the traditionally male pedestrian sight-seeing the streets of Paris—male because very rarely are women granted the freedom to walk the streets: invisible and unopposed. Even less often do the gender non-conforming get this same privilege, the promise of objectivity in the spaces between private and public life.
Of course, there remain constant reminders that Monalisa does not get to live in such a fantasy, un-harassed. One of the standout shorts “In the Bote” depicts Monalisa’s arrest by a cop posing as a john and his/her subsequent imprisonment at Rikers Island for previous infractions. The latent horrors of being a transgender person in a men’s prison sets up a lingering tension in the background on top of the systemic failures endemic to incarceration: confusing bureaucratic nonsense as a non-native English speaker, the shocking conditions of the prison, itself. But Ojeda forgoes the cliché tropes of sexual violence, the easy narrative bait—trans-trauma—to which a cis author for a cis audience might give in. In lieu of the facile male menaces, Monalisa meets fellow Chilean, Vladimir, and forges a tender bond; he ensures that he/she makes it through his/her (illegal) sentence unharmed and, in fact, respected by fellow inmates. The real tragedy in the story is two-fold: the unjust incarceration, and the fact that he/she wakes up one day to discover he/she has finally been tracked down and bailed out—and is forced to leave without the chance to say goodbye.
The weaker entries appear toward the end of the collection, when Ojeda indulges in the repetitious motifs: walking the streets of Manhattan in search of more food, clients, and drugs—scenes that could hold up in a novel but feel tedious in a short story collection. “Little Miss Lightning Bolt” or “Lorena the Chilena” also suffer from the habit of dropping a series of names ad nauseum. These missteps nevertheless evoke the great undertaking by Ojeda at his/her best: where an entire universe swirls through Monalisa’s breath, the words from his/her mouth bringing life to the unending tableau of boyfriends, girlfriends, their mothers and the sisters down the street. Rarely are they well defined. This cosmos of nebulous characters renders the tired identity markers—of gender and sexuality—into something prosaic, a waste of words.
Those unfamiliar with the vocabulary of a queer literature might struggle initially with the incoherence of identity. Monalisa and his/her community of transgender Latinx immigrants almost all refer to each other in the feminine, whether explicitly “women” or not; this is a community of transsexual women, crossdressing travestis with straight boyfriends. Many have girlfriends who identify as crossdressing men. Ojeda doesn’t bother with any categorical logic out of sheer apathy for the limitations imposed by labels; too often they delineate rather than unify disparate peoples with an already-tenuous bond. The function of this rejection does not exclude a cis-heteronormative readership—rather the opposite. A myopic framing of Monalisa’s community allows universalities to emerge quite freely, and space opens for those who can ever relate to the loss of a loved one, to hijinks with the girls, addiction and heartbreak to a beautiful Boricuan boy. This work can be understood as a rejection of representation politics in its refusal to give a name to the kinds of people depicted; only an actual reading of the book can discern a specific identification with its characters.
This engenders a kind of closeness to an otherwise peripheral community, made accessible by the Ojeda’s blend of vernacular and quite moving prose. He/she invites readers to look into this highly personal window the way of “Dubliners,” as Joyce does, by weaving the unremarkable into the social fabric of a city. This is not a collection about “otherness.” Readers hoping for an enlightening take on transphobia or homophobia or racism or sexism might be disappointed by Ojeda’s largely inward portrait of a community and his/her disinterest in the conventional narratives of traumas. He/she rarely utilizes gender and sexuality as a point of difference, communicating instead the need for a shared geography, where questions of sex in public—the private in the public sphere—are allowed to exist in the open. Crucially, Ojeda tells us, these publics have not yet died.
LAS BIUTY QUEENS
By Iván Monalisa Ojeda
Translated by Hannah Kauders
Astra House. 163 pp. $21.