For Young, Queer Mexicans Like Me, Juan Gabriel Changed Everything Yezmin Villarreal - LA Weekly
go to original September 3, 2016

Update: Juan Gabriel's Ashes Taken to Mexico City for Tribute (EFE)

Juan Gabriel is (and will be remembered as) Mexico’s greatest performer, singer and songwriter.

But there’s one part of El Divo de Juarez's legacy that remains an asterisk in his history — Mexico’s greatest performer was also a gay man.

I was introduced to Juan Gabriel’s music through my mother. His romantic love songs like “Querida” and “Abrázame Muy Fuerte” were the soundtrack to my childhood, the songs my mom played on the stereo as we cleaned the house on weekend mornings. To this day I know the lyrics to most of El Divo's songs — not only because they were played often, but because his songs were also played at family weddings and birthday parties.

When I was 12 years old, I saved up my birthday and Christmas money to surprise my mother with tickets to a JuanGa concert. It was a special moment for my mother, who stood the entire time, singing along to every song, and dancing to the beat of Juan Gabriel’s lead in Phoenix that night.

It's a moment I have looked back on often, particularly while I was in college, when I wrote a poem about it that I had forgotten about until JuanGa’s recent passing. I have since come out to my mother, but it's easy to forget, now that I’ve been out of college for five years, how much I struggled with when, how, or even if I could come out to my family.

The poem I wrote then was less about the concert itself than what Juan Gabriel’s life represented as I tried to make sense of how I could exist in the world as a queer Mexican woman.

No, Juan Gabriel was never a publicly out gay man — but through him, I saw a channel. At the time, I was using him as a metaphor in a poem for my own desire to want to live out and openly, and Juan Gabriel was a language that I knew my mother would understand.

Read the rest at LA Weekly

Photo: Julio Enriquez/Wikimedia

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