![]() Nelson’s family is Boricua, and he was born in Puerto Rico in 1972. This was the case of the Hetrick-Martin, located back then on West Street, quite close to the Greenwich Village Youth Council's drop-in center, the Neutral Zone (founded in 1991), which also provided shelter, counseling, and various programs for young queers in precarious situations. Amongst the queer havens such as Greenwich Village and the Piers, different institutions and community centers targeting queer youth sought to provide shelter and to educate. It was an iconic relic of New York’s grimey underbelly before the Giuliani/Bloomberg crackdown against so called “sexual deviancy” in the public sphere. 7 The Piers were notorious as a spot for gay cruising and hooking as well as transgender sex work, a meeting ground for many marginalized communities. Nelson picked up photography at the Hetrick-Martin Institute (founded in 1979), a LGBTQIA+ support center once located right in front of the West Side Piers and the first non-governmental organization in the United States to provide youth services 6 and shelter for queer youth. But something else is operating here: a sensitive machine carefully revealing and concealing the multiple areas of desire aroused by a young queer latinx artist, questioning gender and its myriad signifiers. Yes, under scrutiny we can easily deduce the crevices, the unpolished decor that signals Nelson’s apartment in the Bronx at a specific moment in time. 5 With this, I mean that these images―although highly charged by their context of production―carry a sort of newness and nowness that is built from a specific queer yearning. Always imbued with an everyday that magically evokes an otherworldliness rather another-worldliness, or (better yet) a profound sense of the then and there of queer futurity. ![]() One of the most striking features of Nelson’s oeuvre is the simple yet elegant potency of his photography. Possibly even our own story, whatever “our own” might mean here. To tell a story meant to be told, retold, repeated, plagiarized, trafficked from many mouths belonging to many different bodies. ![]() This could be described as the longing of a tía, of an abuela, or even an amiga, a sort of femme, sissy, or matriarchal urge for embracing and protecting a fragile member of the community, that―at the risk of sounding condescending, or excessively sensitive to the point of gaucheness―I believe might be a useful tool when unpacking the latinx 3 experiences surrounding Nelson’s short and yet stellar career.Īs an advocate, researcher, and as a human being: I cling to my rage, to seduction, and to tenderness, seeking to detangle these brown-tinted affects and histories of art as a means to make something new, to tell a story. All of these features play off the bare corpulence of the naked queer bodies, the wigs, the heels, the raw and honest portraits, of friends, of fellow artists, of queens and hunks, imbuing his entire oeuvre with an ironic wink at the silver screen sirens of yesterday.Īs the weeks and months have passed since I first started cohabiting with the work and the archive of Nelson, I also feel another type of longing. But when combined with the simple lines of Nelson’s intuitive composition, they provide a brutal sense of realism, oddly perfumed with the quintessence of old-Hollywood glamor. His tools appear to be very austere: a single-lens reflex camera and black and white film stock that is relatively easy to develop oneself at the community photo lab. They have an irreducible sense of elegance that is not derived from material opulence―although Nelson Rodriguez was quite the campy artist, interested more so in the exuberance of gender found in drag queens and in New York city nightlife than in “real” luxury. Rage for a young queer life lost amid systemic negligence and inaccessible health care, at a time when antiretroviral cocktails were beginning to become available, but with a prohibitively steep price tag.īut I am also amazed by the timeless appeal of these photographs, their garbo, sensuality. It twists and churns, until it begins to radiate throughout my lower torso, probably until I move on to looking at something else. I can’t deny that I feel a strong sense of hot, visceral rage, right in the middle of my guts. I am struck with a quick onset of emotions every time that I look at one of Nelson Edwin Rodriguez’s photographs.
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