Gender impersonators and trans gender-nonconforming people have long been a source of fascination within the visual arts. Nevertheless, illustrators and photographers alike have perpetually instrumentalized the image of the queer subject as a visual shorthand for criminality, freakishness, and deception. Beginning with the broadside illustrations of José Guadalupe Posada, this article examines how visual representations of Latinx queerness and gender nonconformity shifted across the Americas and throughout the late nineteenth century into the late twentieth century. Ultimately, I contend that Reynaldo Rivera’s photography of late-twentieth-century ballroom culture provides a substantial departure from these speculatory conventions by visually legitimizing the lived authenticity of the queer Latinx people who populate his work.
Reynaldo Rivera began taking photographs in 1987, focusing on portraits of his neighbors throughout downtown Los Angeles (Kraus 2020, p. 16). Because Los Angeles was predominantly composed of Latino, low-income, and working-class people at this time, his subjects were frequently domestic workers, people in the service industry, and the homeless population with which Reynaldo often committed petty thefts (Kraus 2020, p. 17). By the time Rivera was eighteen, he was not only deeply immersed within the local queer community, but it also figured heavily in his photographs because, as Kraus explains, across his body of work, River depicts people enmeshed in their own private worlds who completely transcend their surroundings through the force of imagination and their inner lives (Kraus 2020, p. 22). While Riveras body of work spans nearly four decades, it was only with the publication of Reynaldo Rivera: Provisional Notes for a Disappeared City in 2020 that his portfolio was organized into a
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His titular book comprises nearly two hundred photographs taken at the turn of the twentieth century,
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8 of 15 Arts 2024, 13, 54 9 of 15 which showcase members of Reynaldos queer community, trans women, and drag queens performing across a network of underground gay Latino clubs.
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In one such photograph, Gaby, Reynaldo, and Angela, La Plaza (1993), (Rivera 2020, pp. 3637) (Figure 3) a woman places her hand squarely on her hip as she offers the camera a confident smile. To the left, another figure looks over her shoulder. Though she is in a similar state of undress, she radiates none of the placidity of Arbus unnamed female impersonatorher face partly obscured, Rivera captures Gaby either in the act of disrobing or, inversely, clothing herself. Regardless, she is too preoccupied with making her selfimage to spare the audience a pose or direct glance. The photograph does little to bring emphasis to the supposed artifice that either of these figures are performing. Though they are surrounded by the resources they undoubtedly use to fashion themselves before a performance, Rivera provides little to no context about their lives or identities outside of the ballroom and stage. In the title of the photograph, he offers their names as directly as he offers his own. Th
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