A Gentle Combat: An Interview with Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco by Patrick Califia

Reading Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco’s new short-story collection, Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando, was a haunting experience. It’s been a long time since I read stories this intense: mordant dialogue and perfectly flawed characters and fateful narratives that stayed with me long after I had shut the book’s edgy and frightening cover. Interviewing the author via email was a pleasure, if only because I hope that these mysterious and seditious hints about the author’s personality and intentions will encourage potential readers of Killing Me Softly to become intrigued enough to pick up the book. I will warn you, however, that this Suspect Thoughts Press book is not a passive object. In other words, Ibáñez-Carrasco’s fluid and eerie tales will read you. An intelligent peruser’s response to the lush queer sexuality, stubborn and enlivening perversity, and reverent mockery of the sacred that infuses these pages will be so rich and telling that you will find yourself cast into a state of wonder about the peculiarities of your own soul, as well as a pleasurable sense of wonder at the author’s virtuosity. And all of this takes place in the microscopic place between one page and another; between a questing tongue and the tip of a knife; between your eyes and the tears that you shed.

Patrick Califia: Francisco, your first novel, Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers, was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize. Do you have another novel on the drawing board? Was it a relief to write short stories instead of adhering to the continuity of a novel? Or do you find it more difficult to pack plot, character, and dialogue into fewer pages with a short story?

Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco: I am trying to write a novel about yoga, a murder attempt, overbearing mothers, and love. But I am addicted to the short story format because I am promiscuous and have a short attention span, all the ailments of the new millennium. I cannot sustain the voice and the tempo of a novel or a trick for a long time, and Viagra gives me a blue headache. At times the characters exist as real people and I reveal them, at times they are composites, and some other times it is only after some readers have read a story that I get to know the characters and hear the more complete story. I used to think that stories wrote themselves. Now I think the readers write them. Writing is a luxury and a privilege, like having silence and room to move. We take them for granted in rich countries, and they are dwindling intangible resources. The less rich one is, the less time one has to retreat in silence and recollect. I cheat, I hide, I write as compulsively as I jack off to be able to squirt from my quill, here and there; one must cheat to be able to sow wild words all over the continent.

Califia: Americans don’t usually think of Canada as being the Great Melting Pot that America claims to be. But your writing makes it clear that Vancouver is as multicultural (oh, what a deeply flawed and smug term that is!) as any other North American city. Are people surprised when they find out that you are Canadian? Do you feel that your work is taken less seriously given your place of residence? If you could live anywhere, what location would best support your creativity?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: So far I enjoy great anonymity in Vancouver, in Canada, really, and I salivate at the thought of Americans, women and men, reading some of my stories. I was born to live nervously amongst strangers; I would not have it otherwise. Nadie es profeta en su propia tierra, we say in Spanish. I am mesmerized by dark rooms, high population orgies, and traffic. I see America as such, the Melting Pot. I love living in North America. In Canada, as Ivan Coyote points out, I scratch the Maple Leaf to see what lies just beneath the surface of such pristine settings, such cold environs: there is life under there. When I am in the U.S., not in mixed company, I pass as French Canadian, not of my own doing; Americans determine that I am French Canadian. French Canadians often decide that I am “not Canadian” but a Latino immigrant—go figure. Latinos never forgive the fact that I am Chileno. I let people take me as they want. In answer to your question, I have no idea if my work is taken seriously anywhere. Time will tell that, and I expect to live to hear something about it. On the other hand, what is it to be “taken seriously”? I want some people to squirm and I want others to excrete when reading my stories. Those are some serious bodily reactions.

Califia: In “Strictly Professional,” the main character or narrator has AIDS, and I think what you refused to do with that character is almost as interesting as the story itself. You don’t make him into an angel, and there doesn’t seem to be any uplifting political message here. Early in the epidemic, I got very tired of these predictable portraits of noble, white, middle-class lovers, struggling to take care of their equally noble and white and artistic or financially successful, deathly ill partners, which spelled out in words of one syllable, give us our fucking civil rights, already! I’m grateful for any progress that’s made in society’s treatment of queer people, but I didn’t see why we had to be dying to be treated like human beings. And the real stories about people who died were so much more interesting. The stories about leathermen, about gay men with Spanish last names, or straight junkies, these stories never made it into the gay canon of Lavender Literature. Were you deliberately playing off of those stereotypical narratives, to critique them or show them up?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: Innocent people bore me and annoy me. There are many persons who have lived and died of AIDS who are angels—how tremendously boring. I pray and cry for them because I am a lapsed Catholic and I was raised to bear guilt for heinous and catastrophic acts I have not brought about. I write about the “others,” the ones who struggle valiantly and insolently with life because they are mercenaries, assholes, misguided lovers, and sluts—impatient, contradictory, savage, indulgent, and tremendously human.

Califia: Do publishers, agents, or readers ever react negatively to your mortuary-cold humor?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: I am really bad at writing humor. I am too bitter for that, and I think this is what might make some readers laugh, some of my strange second-language-speaker sentences that become the caustic droplets searing their pupils. Some of the stories in Killing Me Softly needed to be about people in precarious places such as physicians, authority figures, professors, drug users, supple college jocks, opportunistic assholes, and AIDS activists. Political? Maybe. Humorous? Yes. In that they might be tragicomic.

Califia: “Strictly Professional” is in fact quite political. I loved this character’s bitter rants about being so alone. People ran off to AIDS fundraisers and left him without the comfort of human touch or the thrill of sex, even if they were sick as well. Do you want to comment on that? I’m also interested in the way this character takes charge. Rather than passively submitting to medical treatment, he’s stalking the doctor, redefining their relationship so that it glows with erotic energy, and giving himself a very perverse reason to live. The story is simultaneously funny, bitter, and sexy. How did you feel when you were writing it?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: I love physicians because they are daddies with too much power and arrogance. They are torturers with erect instruments. They have afforded me the worst times in my life that I have transformed into exquisite sessions of bodily pain. It is thanks to them and the medical industry that I have reached great orgasms—may Foucault in hell or heaven read these words. The bottom is often at the top of the game, even when they are “patients.” (A political/sexual role reversal is in full swing, sparked by women’s rights, queer politics, and AIDS activism.) Aside from that, “Strictly Professional” is about how one always falls in love with one’s subjugator. There is something intrinsically sadomasochistic about love, I think. We leave our poor, disfigured, and infirm out in the cold to starve. But in spite of the current totalitarianism of a rabidly gorgeous (should I say engorged?) and potent generation and its publicity, there is an undercurrent of liberation for those of us who are “not pretty.” Take, for example, the gay men with HIV who are morphing into spectacular gargoyles, pumped with anti-retrovirals, party drugs, and steroids. Is it liberation or mere revenge of the nerds? In any case, we have not seen such apocalyptic creatures before; the products of accelerated drug technology, they are spread-eagle in circus-like feats, tensing muscles in postmodern slings, diving kamikaze into the mesmerized crowds. Sleaze has become “in,” and “desperation” is now a virtue. In these many ways, the hierarchical relationships are unrecognizable, even S/M needs to be practiced in surprising and subversive ways.

Califia: Do you use the people around you as raw material in your fiction? How do you deal with any backlash you might get from that?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: The “use” of people for various purposes is quite mutual, if not always consensual. I portray those I see and rob people of quirky ideas crossing their lips as much as I am drained everyday of whatever it is I have to offer. Dog eats dog, dog scratches dog, dog sniffs dog, bites, and shits in no-unleashed zones. I try to be at the intersection of this traffic and scoop up material to use. Some of the owners of those dogs come to me and complain that their dogs are in my stories, unauthorized. Other owners complain because I don’t portray their dogs—it is all sounding like a Eurythmics song by now.

Califia: “Chameleon” reminds me of early stream-of-consciousness fiction, like some of the experimental efforts of William Faulkner. It’s initially pretty confusing. Who is this creature who is talking? Then we realize it is indeed a creature! You’ve done a seamless job of introducing an inhuman character, with its own physiology and feelings, and in doing so, you’ve given us a new flavor of loneliness to savor. Why is loneliness such a persistent theme in your work? Were you worried about writing a story that had an element of fantasy in it? I don’t think this piece can be dismissed as yet another horror story about aliens; it is too richly detailed for that.

Your Chameleon also seems to personify the anger of pre-operative tranny girls whose johns don’t know about their ambiguous gender status. The desire to turn on such a stupid person and ravage him is intense. Why do the quandaries of gender-ambivalent people interest you? These themes have virtually disappeared from gay male literature, and I think that is a shame. Gay men have their own gender variations that are not necessarily recognizable in the paradigms of transsexuality. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: I like “Chameleon” and other stories about creatures with quirks, kinks and bents; I think of them as developed, intriguingbeings, who have inhabited their bodies and flogged their flesh across the spiritual vastness of the world. They deserve to be written about, they possess experience, wisdom, evil, and compassion. I don’t want to deal with someone innocent who has never been to an orgy of something: hatred, crystal, bodily fluids, or shopping. Innocence is dangerous. Dangerous times call for high-risk takers who get confused and intentionally confuse their boundaries, make mistakes and fuck the wrong dog and get fucked sweetly but fatally. However, I also think that when one gets to know oneself, one is destined to be alone in one’s body, that house of bones and thin skin. Loneliness is a theme in my stories because it is romantic, sad, and difficult to achieve; it is a desirable state.

Califia: “Emilia’s Dial-Up” also touches on themes of female vengeance. It’s delicious that you have the Chinese mail-order bride triumphing over her closeted, jock husband. Do you have any personal history with closeted “straight” men that you’d like to share? Do you believe in bisexuality? If a man is bisexual, can we say he is closeted if he has both a wife and a male lover?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: Women are resourceful, interesting, and compassionate. Even if they do not accept or tolerate something, they have a great capacity to understand perversion and other human conditions. As a young man growing up in a machista Chile I acted as straight as I could (not successfully), but in private the society taught me to fashion myself as a Latin Geisha for men, a boy cunt with a girl’s soul. To understand those poor fumbling patriarchal wannabes from behind the mask of such a persona—what a strange place to be in history. Almost three years later, I am not sure this has changed a lot, but it surely has been covered by an American patina of hypermasculinity It looks American, it walks American, but I am not sure whether it behaves in Anglo Protestant ways, or is it still rabidly Catholic? But that is too heady, neither here nor there. It was as a “girl” that I learned most about men, not as a Hot Latin Leather Daddy (such a stilted role). As a young Latin Geisha, I learned about souls and engines and motivations, strange fuels and duplicitous arrangements. Men are men, no matter where they are sticking their compass—a holy lamb’s butthole, or a supermodel’s thunderpuss. People fuck, people love—this is what makes me believe in them and this is all there is to believe—didn’t Cher say this already?

Califia: In your fiction, the ostensibly butch boys are not always (or even often) tops. It’s so true-to-life; the muscle-bound idiots who like to torment sissies expect to be able to drop their trousers and get plowed by the same people who they hate for being effeminate. How do you feel about femininity? Is it empowering or disempowering for gay men?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: Although I hate “metrosexuals” (and the concept itself), I think we as society might be slowly losing the tender seasons of the heart. The variations of gender are being blurred by velocity and being irrevocably changed by global warming and commercial globalization. I try to depict this speed and metamorphosis. I love muscle boys (like Miss Diana Ross did at one point) and gruff butch leather daddies. Given the diet and the gene pools in North America, muscle boys are enormous, towering like the skyscrapers in Chicago. Their cocks are gargantuan, their tongues, like the tongue on the cover of Killing Me Softly, can lap a mile. I am made incandescent by their arrogance, their futility, their privilege; they do not know what they have. I go to a gym to emulate them and to dream that I can be like them. I want steroids, and to die young but plucked, stretched, and inflated. But it is all mostly in vain. I cannot compete. This is when I wake up and I see that the “boys” want to be had (as 40-something as well as 20-somethings seem to want to remain younger than young, almost infantile—this is for a Freudian to decipher). They want to be (ab)used in their abs and calves, their delightfully thin calves, their shelf-like chests, their uncut obelisks. They all want to be mighty high and fucked, wanted, and held in some stronger arms. It seems to be the only time in which they can break the solitude of postmodern life.

If you are a gargoyle, like me, affected by lipodystrophy and other side effects of modern living, all you have to do is wait (praying that you do not die in the interval) and the boys’ level of desperation will escalate. The drugs will kick in, their egos will want to explode, and they will come crawling in demureness and obedience—sheathed in their expensive second-skin leather—and then they will do amazing things they never imagined. Once the drug- and ego-haze burns away in the morning light, they will go back to the Olympic stand and I will go back to the Cathedral, to my gargoyle perch from whence I invigilate the dance floor. The “boys” are a postmodern little tribe, much like gargoyles. We all are long-term survivors of HIV and stigma and minority neurosis, and as such we deserve protection as much as any other person in the world, even when we are silly and whiny and self-indulgent or predatory and neurotic.

Califia: I have to admit that “Moody Beauty: Queer Incident on Westbound Red-Eye” left me completely stumped. I loved each of the voices that you introduced; the hilarious interplay of self-righteous voices reacting to a shocking incident on an airplane. But what the hell happened? Did you intend to leave the reader to fill in the blanks with his or her own imagination, or am I a sloppy reader?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: In some ways, “Moody Beauty” is more of a real story than any of the others in “Killing Me Softly” because we read different incomplete versions of one critical incident in someone’s life from people who write letters about it. The readers must fill in the blanks and imagine what really happened, align with one truth or the other, and read between the lines. “Moody Beauty” is the story that requires the most homework from the reader.

Califia: “Adam’s Index” contains one of the most stirring and irreverent descriptions of a city I’ve ever read. You call Vancouver, “a nice piece of ass … a damsel in a little distress.” What do you most love and most hate about Vancouver?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: This could be long, but let me try to be brief. Cities like Vancouver have a great deal of unacknowledged privilege, complacency, arrogance, and selfishness. Their inhabitants have a stake in keeping it this way, in keeping our silent happy tyranny. It only exists because we exploit others, we eat what others can’t, enjoy cleanliness, health, silence, and order. Think about this, even HIV-poz men in cities like Vancouver have the privilege of barebacking; that certainly is a rich country man’s privilege given by accessible treatments and care.

Vancouver, when I arrived here 20 years ago, was yawning, stretching, and rousing. She was a little girl who was about to be introduced to the brothel of capitalism and postmodernity to parade her young wares and unsophisticated charms. She has grown now, her beauty and hooters are still marketable, and she has learned some of the tricks of the trade. By now Vancouver hides her own collection of Gothic spirited skeletons in a closet. In the process of growing up, Vancouver had to kill and stash a few peccadilloes away. I go to that closet from time to time and find material to write about. It is ironic that apprehension and a bit of shame are necessary to give a dull, pretty, young city some character.

Califia: Isn’t it ironic that a society that mutilates us psychically in such extreme ways finds physical mutilation shocking and socially unacceptable? Does oppression become harder to defeat when it is invisible? Do you see your work as making some of that pain more visible, harder to ignore?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: What an odd question. None of what I write is “work.” It is harder to try to explain these stories than writing them. When I write about sordid, sleazy, and unfortunate events and peoples, I am engaging in a sadomasochistic trade. I would pay to see readers’ alchemy of disgust and the tinge of pleasure that may, hopefully, cross their eyes, like apparitions in a looking glass. If anything, I write to spark those specters in the mirror. It is so hard to surprise others or myself these days. As I wrote in a nonfiction essay for Greg Wharton’s collection, The Love that Dare not Speak its Name, we are so deeply infected with indifference. No mutilation, torture, or gore is enough to jolt us. What we need is to own the shame, the disgust, the criminal sentiment; this is very Catholic thing to say: that one has to live it in the flesh in order to really awaken from indifference and understand. I think that straight men who will never be penetrated will never understand queers; you have to live it in the flesh.

Califia: You’ve got such a foul and clever mouth. I have to ask: Do you like men who talk dirty?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: I hate the expression “talk dirty”—sorry—but it seems so repressed. I like straight-acting, straight-looking men (and I mean sober, tense, demurely dressed out in the urban rush) who turn to their obscure objects of desire in private. You must have seen a man or two come out of the street in full corporate regalia, clean as an Aryan poster boy wanting get soiled, get high, to beg and flail and accept and cry. Ah! There is nothing like mindfucking coupled with body work. We see it on TV all the time. But I am a discreet whore, I like to see the staunch men “talk dirty” in private, nowhere to escape, those stolen moments.

Califia: I have no idea what you are talking about.

“Atonement” is easily as horrifying as anything that Carson McCullers ever wrote. Since homosexuality and incest are both hidden but very common forms of sexual behavior, it makes sense to me that writers who explore one also often explore the other. In the 1970s, homosexuals were always being accused of being narcissists by Freudian psychologists; so the theme of brother-to-brother lovemaking or rape has to be looked at, I believe, by anyone who wants to understand all of the nooks and crannies of gay male psychology and desire. Do we deserve to be punished if we fall in love with what we see in the mirror? To what extent is man-to-man desire narcissistic? Should we apologize for that, or revel in it?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: We are all narcissistic, aren’t we? It seems to be a résumé requirement. They call it healthy “self-esteem” or they call it looking in the mirror and speaking about one’s “critical self,” or critical thinking. “Atonement” was written to seek revenge. I think the essential character is Laura, the mother, and she will be the understudy for the mother character in my new novel. Mothers are magnificent and terrifying characters, good and evil. In “Atonement”, I wasn’t even thinking about incest. Maybe because I never had brothers or sisters I take it for granted that it often happens. Whether it is physically consummated or not, it is one of the visceral limits of love. I admit I have little firsthand experience with brotherly love (unless you count the roles one plays in undisclosed locations), but I love straight men intensely. The story is about straight men. And I think I know quite a bit about them and about overbearing mothers.

Califia: Speaking of straight-acting and straight-appearing men—Bruce, the lead character in “Mountain Dew,” has to be one of the most neurotic people I’ve ever encountered in literature. He’s so clearly drawn here that I feel like I had sex with him and got one of his crummy Sex Addicts Anonymous pamphlets for a brush-off. He’s a textbook example of projection: seeing his own sins personified in other people. Is Bruce an asshole because he is white, or because he is so neurotic and self-centered? To what extent is being Caucasian a pathology? How do you feel about 12-step programs?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: I loved your question! Is White a pathology? No. I am La Malinche as I wrote in the academic book Public Acts and Desires: Disruptive Readings on Making Knowledge Public, which I co-edited last year. I hate and worship Anglo men; they make me alive with anger and joy. For me, Bruce in “Mountain Dew” is one of the most true-to-life characters I have depicted. I could not live with him, but I had a great time beating some of his neurosis off of him even when his demons left him temporarily for a night or two and came running back to inhabit him.

Califia: In “Simón Says,” you take a big risk by writing about antigay violence, an actual murder, in fact, without demonizing the killer or idealizing the victim. When I’ve done public education about antigay violence, it seems to me that young Latino men feel that any gay man on the street is a threat to their manhood. By his very existence, a faggot is coming on to him, and has to be demolished. Where does this come from? Catholicism? An understanding in the culture about what a man should be, and what will happen to you if you are no longer perceived as a man? You paint such a contradictory picture of ethnic cultures in which men have lots of sex with one another, but faggots are despised and violence against them is common. I believe it’s actually almost normal for men to want one another. It’s just one of those things that testosterone does to your body. It takes an enormous amount of effort to keep men away from one another, to prevent the expression of same-sex desire. Do you think this is true, or is homosexuality a rare condition, a genetic aberration? Can we do anything to alleviate the suffering of young men who are afraid and full of hate when they want another man? “Hockey Night in Canada” continues to explore some of these themes. Although I’m not sure Americans can comprehend what hockey means in Canada. It inspires more fanaticism than football here, I believe, maybe because it is associated with Canada so exclusively. It’s the sport that Canadian men use to prop up a sense of their masculinity being overshadowed by that stupid country down south. Despite queerbashing and homophobia, many gay men remain attracted to straight men; often to the exclusion of other gay men. What’s going on with that?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: Without trying to be too flippant about this, I think homosexuality is a God-sent abnormality to make our lives uneasy and interesting (and not decorative as the vapid Queer Eye TV show try to sell us as). I shudder at the thought of us becoming normal. Growing up in Chile, I often saw the threat that flamboyant or not-passing fags posed to machos, a threat based on incontinent desire. We all want holes and fluids, we want them now, and seeing someone wearing desire like a scarlet letter must be both frightening and enticing. I have no advice to give about violence for the young and the flamboyant; I am not a counselor—far from it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t get hard every time I hear about violence committed on anyone, but my fingers get erect and my eyesight sharpens because behind every story, every Matthew Shepard, every Aaron Webster gaybashed in Vancouver, there are several versions and lenses to read them through. I dedicated “Moody Beauty” to Svend Robinson, our disgraced Member of Parliament, because there may be several versions about the $64,000 purloined ring he allegedly pocketed at a private jewelry sale, in front of the security cameras, that were not told by the stupid media. And, yes, behind all these deeds, there always seem to be a stereotypical. shaved-headed, bewildered young man foaming at the mouth, gripping a bat, blood on his fists, and I resist that stereotype too. I remain attracted but not married to patriarchal stereotypes (leather figures flogging in the night) and to my heterosexual boyfriends, but it is—I am very aware of this—like wall-climbing or any other extreme sport, dangerous physically and psychologically. Some people use crystal, some smoke, I indulge in writing about straight men once in a while.

Califia: “Killing Me Softly” ends the book the way a bullet ends a life. Do you ever feel that you are demanding too much from your readers, that you wring their heartstrings so hard they might break?

Ibáñez-Carrasco: I never saw “Killing Me Softly,” the last story in the collection and the last one I wrote chronologically, as a story to pull heartstrings. I wanted it to be a love story. It got a bit convoluted with history, horror, and drug use, but it was always motivated by love— misplaced, misdirected, mistaken love, but love nonetheless.

 

Read Shorts previously published in Velvet Mafia
> "Mountain Dew"
> "Mr. Deluxe and the Mid-Life Crisis of Others"

For more information about Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, or Killing Me Softly: Morir Amando, visit Suspect Thoughts Press

Patrick Califia is the author of Macho Sluts and a few other collections of disreputable, queer, perverted short fiction as well as a novel, Doc and Fluff, which is full of gratuitous violence. His latest work includes the collection Hard Men and the novel Mortal Companion. He is also a transman, a therapist, and a parent. Patrick lives in San Francisco where he can pursue his hobbies: quilting, play piercing, genderfuck, Japanese bondage, fisting, and spoiling his cat rotten.