SOURCE: Montero, Oscar. “Julián del Casal and the Queers of Havana.” In ¿Entiendes?, edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith, pp. 92-112. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Montero places some of the erotic images in Casal's writings within the context of the homosexual subculture of Cuba.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the gentle reproaches of cultural patriarch Andrés Bello about the “melindrosa y femenil ternura,” [affected, feminine tenderness] and the “arrebatos eróticos,” [erotic raptures] of certain writers had paradoxically hardened into the ambiguous aesthetic of Modernismo, nurtured on the one hand by the decadent, and often implicitly homoerotic literatures of Europe and North America, and fueled on the other by the none too subtle homophobia of various discourses of national affirmation.¹ In the context of such discourses, founded and developed during the second half of the nineteenth century...