Items

• Adonis García : a picaresque novel
  Set in Mexico City’s Roma district, home to students, bohemians, the marginalised and impoverished, this radical experimental novel by Luis Zapata (1951-2020) follows Adonis García as he makes his “shameless and impudent” way through life, as José Joaquin Blanco puts it in the introduction to this edition. Refusing convention in both content and form, Zapata’s eponymous Adonis sets out his sexually adventurous story as if transcribed from a set of tapes, in a freewheeling, verbatim style which makes bold use of white space. The novel was first published in Mexico in 1979 by Editorial Grijalbo as ‘Las Aventuras, Desventuras y Sueños de Adonis García, El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma’. Translator E.A. Lacey (1938-1995) was also a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall generation.
• Bom-Crioulo : the Black man and the cabin boy
  Brazilian novelist Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897) wrote in the Romantic Naturalist tradition. His work, “polemic, provocative, misunderstood”, according to Raul de Sá Barbosa, who introduces this edition, was largely overlooked in conservative Brazil until it began to be revived in the early 1980s. ‘Bom-Crioulo’, which roughly translates as ‘the Good Black Man’, was first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1895, the same year as Oscar Wilde’s trial and just seven years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. It depicts, frankly and without moralising, the relationship between a formerly enslaved Black man and a fifteen-year-old white cabin boy. E.A. Lacey, a noted gay poet of the post-Stonewall era, who translated ‘Bom-Crioulo’ from Portuguese, also translated Luis Zapata’s ‘Adonis García’ (another seized book) from Spanish.
• My deep dark pain is love : a collection of Latin American gay fiction
  This anthology, edited by Winston Leyland (1940-), presents a selection of short stories, novellas and excerpts from longer works from a wide range of male Argentinian, Mexican, Cuban, Chilean and Brazilian authors. It is illustrated with graphic line-drawings by Argentian artist Jorge Gumier Maier and is a follow up to Gay Sunshine Press’s ‘Now the Volcano’ (1979) which focused on Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. Like the first anthology, Brazilian literature predominates in this collection. It is a collaboration between Leyland, who travelled extensively in Latin America, and frequent Gay Sunshine translator, E. A. Lacey (1938-1995). The two anthologies form part of a small body of books from Gay Sunshine Press with a Latin American focus, including Luis Zapata’s ‘Adonis García’ and Adolfo Caminha’s ‘Bom-Crioulo’, both of which were also seized in the ‘Operation Tiger’ raids.
• Now the volcano : an anthology of Latin American gay literature
  Edited by Winston Leyland (1940-) and published by his Gay Sunshine Press imprint, this book is an anthology of short stories, poems, novel excerpts and a memoir, interspersed with illustrations. The collection presents a snapshot of gay male writing from Latin America, with an emphasis on Brazilian literature, which Leyland notes is the richest, including ‘Bom-Crioulo’ which was first published in 1895 (and which was also seized during ‘Operation Tiger’ as a separate title). The book’s title refers to Malcolm Lowry’s Mexican-set novel ‘Under the Volcano’. Translator Erskine Lane’s own novel, ‘Game-Texts – a Guatemalan Journal’, was also published by Gay Sunshine Press and seized during the raids.