Everyone Thinks is Queer Except You and Me - Second Series - Multi-Awarded New Yorker Daniel Loedel’s Debut Novel ‘Hades, Argentina’ is a Brave Journey Into the Black Holes of his Own Family’s Past to Find that Ghosts are Memories and Could Help Us Heal

Multi-Awarded New Yorker Daniel Loedel’s Debut Novel ‘Hades, Argentina’ is a Brave Journey Into the Black Holes of his Own Family’s Past to Find that Ghosts are Memories and Could Help Us Heal

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01/15/23 • 90 min

Everyone Thinks is Queer Except You and Me - Second Series

DI noticed Daniel Loedel’s Hades Argentina by chance in the books published by Penguin Random House global but I couldnt find much of it in Argentina with the exception of one of those insipid Infobae reviews. The New York Times however added Loebel to a canon in the making of contemporary Argentine fiction has been to take the country’s dark recent history — the state terrorism of the ’70s and ’80s, the subsequent economic crises that brutalized the poor — and channel it into ghost stories. In Mariana Enriquez’s short story “The Inn,” for instance, a tourist-town hotel that served as an army barracks during the dictatorship is haunted by spirits from the bad old days; in César Aira’s novel “Ghosts,” a gang of naked shades haunts a Buenos Aires construction site, visible to the workers and their families, invisible to the rich people set to move into the building once it’s finished. Those tales are part of a tradition critics have called “Argentine Gothic,” one founded by names like Silvina Ocampo, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges. “Hades, Argentina” is the first novel by Daniel Loedel, an American book editor. It is the kind of reflection on our past that I have been waiting for a long time because of its simple complexity and its modest wisdom but also because of its smart aesthetic choices. Immediately, the distances dissolved and this New Yorker was closer to me than any self proclaimed activist today. I hope you enjoy it.

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East London Queer Icon, Lewis Burton - The Dance Floor as a Place of Material Community Building

I had to stop and think how to frame this podcast under the right light. I faced my interview with Lewis Burton, a person I had known for more than a decade as a friendly opportunity to oppose two views of being gay: the more celebratory (Lewis’s) and the more melancholic (mine). By this I mean that to me, being gay entails a trauma that is not innate but socially constructed throught rejection and these days by a celebration of the excetional which is another form of insult. To me, having dedicated my last three years to becoming familiar with queer debates and literature, my eyes opened and I saw in horror the homofobia entrenched everywhere: academia, friends, family, other gay people. And by homophobia I dont mean a mere unpleasant feeling but the potential for proper disaster when a crisis of The Heterosexual Couple in times of recession or war is confronted with the projective spectre of inherited fantasies about paedophilia and family destruction which to my horror, some gay subcultures are cultivating as fetish. Although this does not necesarily mean that they are paedophilic but instead they chose to flirt with the self destructive feeling of saying out loud among themselves something so obscene that a needed release is felt. In other words, something is going on and it is time that gays and queers stop playing as if they were what they are not: silly narcissistic hedonists. It is also time for straight people to and also, it is time that straight people start revising their own beliefs if they are really committed to end with homophobia.
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Decolonising Pedro Lemebel, The Man that Everybody Feared

This week we pay hommage to Pedro Lemebel, a performer and writer that changed my life and that of many queers who thought in the Pride Revolution that came after the StoneWall riots, the hope of integration with 'normal' society through gay marriage and conspicuous consumption. But with normalisation came AIDS that equated an actualisation of the colonial bonds between the Global North and the Global South through bio politics and Pharma. I decided to do this in two parts. One is for the Spanish speaking world, in particular, for a Chilean and Argentine audience already acquainted with his work. This is in my YouTube Chanel. I wanted however, to evangelise people from the Global North on what Pedro Lemebel's performative turn even though is not his invention, it pushes forward a type of art tightly linked to activism that has become currency these days. His constant deconstruction of hegemonic discourse was by definition decolonial.
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