An Interview with Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco
by Greg Wharton

Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco, born in Santiago de Chile, migrated to Vancouver, B.C. in 1985, where he acquired his HIV in 1986, his Canadian citizenship in 1991, his doctorate in Education from Simon Fraser University in 1999, and a long drawn appetite for writing. His short stories "Hockey Night in Canada", "Chameleon", and Mountain Dew have appeared in Arts and Understanding, on-line in suspect thoughts: a journal of subversive writing, and in Velvet Mafia. "Hurt Me, Amor Mio", "Strictly Professional", and "Spunk" have been included in Contra/Diction (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998), Best Gay Erotica 2000 (Cleis Press), and Of the Flesh: Dangerous New Fiction (Suspect Thoughts Press). His first novel "Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers: The Cha-Cha Years" was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 2001.

Greg Wharton: You were born in Santiago, Chile. How did the journey from there to Vancouver, Canada, where you now live, happen?

Francisco Ibañez-Carrasco: Much of my journey is detailed in Flesh Wounds but I omitted many characters and prickly details that would have confused the reader. I had to make it more normal to make it more believable--I am not sure I achieved this.

Wharton:You have a doctorate in education and work in social research. What is your focus?

Ibañez-Carrasco: Like many people--not only gay men--I lead a bit of a double life. I have my closets and my dear skeletons hanging in there. What I do to make money is research for hire, too overeducated to get a job that gives me good money. The kind of research that truly interests me is about the well-entrenched contradictions of being a gay man, a Cyborg unit in a collective that thinks itself as young, healthy, potent and free. I'm interested in why us 'first world' gay men, can be conventional and reactionary; we want to marry and be equals at soldiering and making war as well as competing for muscles, loads of cum up one's raw ass, fists, and other physical feats. Our bodies, whether inebriated on cocktail drugs, crystal or sober, are a marvel of modern technology and medicine but our minds remain in Cyborg camps, ghettoized, insular, profoundly parochial in a very Anglo way. I want research that helps us dialogue to understand why. I might never get an institutional appointment to do this type of research, but I will die trying.

Wharton: With all the research and writing you do, is there time to read fiction? What work or authors do you enjoy?

Ibañez-Carrasco: I read fiction! Lots. It's called research, it's highly political and titillating, particularly if you scratch this veneer of conventionality and decency that research has to find courtesan machinations behind the curtains that make research happen. Most of the ideas for my stories come from the man I fuck with and the epidemiological and social scientific research I read. In my research I have found that queer scientists are indeed inspired by their petty and grand demons to carry out the kinds of research they do--take Kinsey as one basic example.

Wharton: Who were/are your influences in your growth as an author?

Ibañez-Carrasco: Never miss an opportunity to embarrass myself. Although I have read a shit load of the important, the 'canonical' authors in Spanish and English, I was deeply influenced by my mother's superstition, by midday radio theater in Santiago, low budget teary soaps on TV, and schmaltzy love songs, the lyrics, the delivery. I was influenced by the rosary of love promises that drips from the young lips of Latinos, such good liars, such lovely love con artists. These days I read Margaret Atwood to learn more Canadian English and Pedro Lemebel, a prominent Chilean out gay writer and performance artist, not in translation yet. I often reread a few poems from likes of Whitman, Neruda, Mistral, Dickinson, W.H. Auden, Lorca, and Benedetti.

Wharton: Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers (Arsenal Pulp Press) was released earlier this year in Canada and will be out this spring in the US. The story revolves around and told as memoir by Camilo, also from Chili. How did this character evolve? Where did he come from?

Ibañez-Carrasco: Camilo is very much a part of me. I wrote this when I thought I was going to die in 1994. I didn't have anything to leave, nothing I considered valuable so I started a long letter. It was much later that I started to lie and rearrange things.

Wharton: The novel is written in English with Spanish (Spanglish) throughout. You are fluent in both languages. Do you consider English your second language? And what challenges do you face writing in one language as opposed to the other?

Ibañez-Carrasco: I often get the feeling that as a Latino one should be either like Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the Quiche indigenist awarded with a Peace Nobel and speak for what is pure and oppressed or like J. Lo, hybrid, sexual and all American.

I often feel like La Malinche, a significant historical figure in the Americas. She is the companion figure of El Macho, the conquistador. La Malinche served Hernan Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, as a faithful interpreter, secretary, confidant, and mistress. I identify with La Malinche in various points. As a gay man, I am of an old-fashioned notion that I am a member of a sexual and cultural minority that bridges between genders, between the dominant fucker and the submissive receptacle. Passing as a woman does not seem so strange. As a Latino I grew up in contradictory awe and hatred of the gringo. I hated their evident and damaging involvement in our collective and individual lives, meddling in politics and economy and feeding us their potent and addictive popular culture through TV, advertising and industry. However, I have always been in awe of the gringos capacity to separate activities, now I fuck, now I socialize, now I walk my dog and switch on and off between them. I am attracted by the Anglo traits of calculating minds (and this is good not bad) and a deep seated mean streak for sadomasochist stuff. I have never seen anyone else do to their bodies what Anglos can--is that racist? Hope not. It's admirable. Take Anglo HIV+ barebackers as a measure of an extreme.

La Malinche translates between cultures, a strategist, ambassador, and intellectual. If one is entrenched in one cultural camp, La Malinche seems to crave and serve the enemy--not a new idea, if you consider how much saliva and adrenaline gay men produce when they see any, and I underline, any uniform, no matter what it signifies. I don't care what people say. Most immigrants at one time or another will always be accused of selling out a bit of one's soul and culture. I have, gladly. I am a 'sold out Canadian'. I have been given interesting power and respect in return.

At a visceral level, I love gringos, my partner is white as the west coast snow, blonde and blue-eyed and a working class man to boot. If that is not malinchismo and serving the stereotypical enemy of many Latinos, what is it then?

I fell in love with the English language--finally, this goes to partially answer your question--and I don't make any distinction as to which one I love most, Spanglish is like a son of La Malinche and the macho conquistador. True, I cannot produce academic writing in Spanish or poetry in English, but I deliver sexual script while I am fucking in both my tongues--it all depends on where the experience is rooted. Language is so important to me, it defines me, I breathe through it. I firmly believe that without it we would not be able to do things with our hands and bodies.

Wharton: You've had several events this year for the release of Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers--including a "high tilt Azucar Moreno" reading. What was the Azucar Moreno reading?

Ibañez-Carrasco: The Azucar Moreno [Brown Sugar] high tilt reading combined words from the book with some of the songs in the book sung by Michael Croteau from the Vancouver Rainy City Gay Men's Chorus in a 'reader's theatre' format directed by local director John Mason. It was seamless and bittersweet, fun and chilling at times. Michael sang Carpenters and Petula Clark without flinching. We found new intentions in each song and wove that with the words.

Wharton: Do you enjoy reading for an audience?

Ibañez-Carrasco: I love teaching, reading, and performing to an audience. I feel safe and in control. I am a bit of a coward to face people one-on-one sometimes, very shy--I know it doesn't seem like it. This is why I prefer bathhouses to bars, bang, wham, thank you Ma'am, none of this social pussyfooting.

Wharton: Your contribution to Of the Flesh: Dangerous New Fiction (Suspect Thoughts Press), Spunk, is about a professor and his obsessive dominant/submissive relationship with a man known as Spunk (the rest I'll leave a secret!). How much of your own life do you infuse in your characters and stories?

Ibañez-Carrasco: This character is not me, sure as hell! I have yet to get the cushy professor job. I get the stories from the men I have fucked before--isn't that a song? I love leather, over 30 men, bears, silent types, all stripes. They always have a story. I write about the things one is not allowed to do in everyday life because they are either illegal, suicidal, fattening, heretic, or merely too complex for my pea brain. I get very scared when I see the waves of censorship and intellectual Stalinism sweep our shores, particularly now, political correctness is only the dirty foam, the debris leftover in the sand, the real undertow is limiting our freedom of expression.

Wharton: What are you working on now? Is there another novel or a collection we can look forward to?

Ibañez-Carrasco: I am preparing something called "Erotic woes and slow cravings: tales of deliberate contagion" and looking for an editor/sugar daddy. These are twisted, yet not rotten, stories about regular characters we insist on regarding as marginal (like the squeegee boys, the weirdo who lives alone in a trailer park surrounded by technical gadgets, etc.) but they roam amongst us or one day one suddenly wakes up to realize that one has become one of them! We all live in the slippery slope, some with better grip than others, but that erodes in time--trust me.

An extravagant, tragicomic novel, Flesh Wounds & Purple Flowers takes us into the world of Latino machos and cha-cha divas of Santiago's gay underground, full of dreamers and schemers looking for salvation abroad. One of them is Camilo, a strong-willed queen who makes it out of Chile in the early '80s, but en route to New York lands in Vancouver, where he decides to stay. All the while he maintains contact with a starry network of machos and maricones in Chile, Cuba, and America: an exiled gringa with a mysterious past; a straight lover left behind in crumbling Havana; a transsexual confidante in Santiago. Told in the musical lilt of Spanglish, Camilo tells his story as he lays dying in his hospital bed, recalling a life of sequins, sex, disco, and a plague that is at the same time debilitating and liberating.

Fresh, funny, and full of colour and verve, Flesh Wounds & Purple Flowers reads like a gay Latino version of Valley of the Dolls.

Read Mountain Dew from Issue 1
Interview originally appeared in suspect thoughts