Querido Gil, I’d like to think you and I had twin moments in our LA adolescences, albeit decades apart. LA’s endless web nurtures self-understanding, lets you gather a self, bit by bit. I have lingered in photobooths, cheek-to-cheek with others as we wait to see our love materialized in a chain of our own faces. Waiting for the moment of recognition, as if the image were a map that located us somewhere in time and space we could point to and say, Look, there’s you and me.
When I Google your name, Gil Cuadros, almost every image that comes up was taken by Laura Aguilar, your friend and fellow artist. Laura, who led me to you. In scouring the web for nodes of her life, I find you in her gaze, you so often in front of her lens. Your loved ones tell me you met in an art class at Schurr High School. I like thinking of you, two East LA baby queers, assessing each other over the split ends of paint brushes and worn plastic trays, trading images under the red light of the dark room. Together, you trekked across freeway interchanges to a bookstore in Pasadena or exhibitions on the Westside, inscribing your interests, your art, yourselves on the asphalt.
In 2018, Laura Aguilar’s official Instagram account posted an untitled 1992 photo of the two of you. I was struck by the intimacy of the image: Laura’s hands webbed over your shoulder; she peeks over it shyly. Both of you wearing black T-shirts that meld you together, both peering at some outside point, Laura with trepidation and you with a calm curiosity. You seem relaxed, your hands dangling out of your pockets, weight centered and chest puffed out. I am amused by the unabashed way you stare out into the world, your irreverence for whatever or whoever is beyond the frame. It’s a simple but powerful gesture, an act of both defiance and self-definition.
In my mind, I write this from my family home, where one of my parents still lives. It’s a crumbling 1950s build cut into the side of the San Rafael hills. When I stand outside, I can see the pulse of the 110 and Dodger Stadium popping up from the smog-smudged palm trees. A child of Montebello, you’d probably laugh me out of any claim to Los Angeles. I grew up between Glassell Park and Glendale. I am born from wandering artists, one from Colombia and the other from Europe; I am an Angelino by accident.
But you too knew the joys and struggles of being many things at once. You came of age in the ‘70s, amidst the Chicano Movement. You wrote through the 1980s and 1990s, watching friends and lovers fade in front of you before contracting AIDS yourself. You were twenty-five.
In searching for you, I speak to your beloved Kevin, your ex-lover and friend. He tells me about the first time he saw you at A Different Light Bookstore — handsome, reserved, black leather–clad. He told me you carried a timer in your pocket and when it went off you gulped down a mix of pills. He knew then what you were living with. But that existential threat only fueled your creative ambitions. You signed up for Terry Wolverton’s writing class at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, and along with the other men living with HIV, forged a space of mutual creativity and care. You had been given six months, but you would live to be thirty-four.
When I read City of God, your multi-genre ode to queer love and Chicanx identity amidst the AIDS crisis in LA, I thought of the mustard yellow pawn shops along Alvarado, the white iron grills of Thai restaurants yet to open, a panadería on Figueroa roughly painted lavender with its doors flung open, the imposing trapezoids of ads and motel signs dotting the horizon. I thought of the ever-changing face of West Hollywood and how you might not recognize it now. You’d moved there in the ‘90s out of necessity, to be closer to your doctors and the food bank while disease rippled through your body.
Your life bled into the pages of City of God and you left it there, not even attempting to clean it up. Blood, sweat, shit, and cum stain those pages. You put a frame around them, draw us closer, dare us to see them as holy. You understood that LA is that mess, that so much of what is beautiful about our ciudad de Dios is the same as what makes it grotesque — the chunky, concrete curls of our freeways, the metal jaws of constant construction, the squeaky-clean high rises that puncture the skyline and signal the blind wealth of those who will never know how to love Los Angeles.
For many years I hated this city. Can you blame me? We both know LA can be hard to love. Its very landscape — the dusty sierras, brittle chaparrals, and parched Mediterranean climate — warns one to proceed with caution. For centuries folks have been figuring out how to live here. It’s the home of movie stars and influencers, yet without water pumped in from the Owens Valley, we wouldn’t know how to survive. After the Spanish seized the land in 1781, LA residents endured the “second conquest” of the automobile industry, as writer Helena María Viramontes put it — the iron and concrete that paved over so much of LA’s green space. It separates Los Angelinos from ourselves and each other.
But now, I can’t seem to write about anything else.
In City of God you move from story to poem, finding textures on Rosemead streets, in the dusty attic of a childhood home, in the dank, erotic corners of the Egyptian Theatre in the middle of the afternoon, calibrating the tender menace that is LA, rendering with wit and beauty the mangled love this city gives and receives. We are there in the room when your protagonist’s boyfriend gets sick, when he experiences a spiritual awakening with a lover through caretaking, when he communes with the ghost of his queer grandfather’s lover, when he fucks someone in the bathroom of the dilapidated Egyptian Theatre.
In your poem “Conquering Immortality,” you locate the Egyptian Theatre and your own body as sites of grief and desire. Using Egyptian mythology and the exquisite diligence of your words, by the end of the poem, you’ve made yourself a myth. Even as death sinks its claws into you, you stake an eternal claim to this city, this body, this community, this life. You don’t let us look away from the blood and spit and ecstasy. We sit with you, smiling through the abject and through the divine.
Despite all of its vibrant language, its trance-like tenor, City of God takes me back to the preverbal, to my Los Angeles circa the early 2000s, when I was a teenager dressed in black in the heat of summer. As teenagers, we didn’t need language. We sought refuge in downtown LA basement venues or alongside Sunset Boulevard’s winding strip of concrete. We trekked to shitty house parties in Pomona, to places where we could slip the knot of familial expectations and cultural norms, where our divergent desires need not be spoken, where I could touch and be touched. In those cavernous spaces, I clung to the moist necks of my friends, their hair in my mouth, our limbs beating against each other so that I stopped being able to tell where I began and they ended. Over the synthetic whine of new wave, experimental hip-hop, temple-beating punk, I could operate in gesture, codes of movement accumulated into a statement I didn’t have to utter, it was simply felt. This was before we read Anzaldúa or Halberstam, before we began to understand how society imposed its language on our bodies and its wants, and how capitalism and patriarchy aided the script.
At seventeen, I moved to a new city, separated from an adolescence punctuated by ducking elbows at The Smell or swaying to some heart-sick indie band at The Echo. For a long time, I didn’t know that those sparks in my stomach were love and lust. Once I recognized it, I buried it. You were braver than me: You were unapologetic about your desire, your disease, your anger. You weren’t stingy with your skepticism; you were vocal about AIDS organizations who supported white queers while turning a blind eye to communities of color. I feel the quiet rage behind your poem “My Aztlán: White Place,” in which a white man solicits you at a bar by asking where you are from, then is disappointed to find you are a local.
I have often wrestled with how to love cruel ancestors. I have tried to understand that their cruelty comes from the pain they have endured and their fear that one day, if I’m not careful, I’ll have to endure it too. That fear follows them like a cloak, always just above their shoulders, threatening to settle. City of God gives us places to pause with our complicated kin, places to negotiate our ways of loving. In “Reynaldo,” a boy communes with the ghost of his grandfather’s lover to come to a place of self-acceptance amidst familial fracturing and rejection. Despite his family’s homophobia, the protagonist still sees his loved ones as human, as worthy of love. Through this story, you forged a meeting place between subjectivities — queer, brown, sick.
Gil, I should come clean here. By mythologizing you I am also mythologizing myself: the sludge of my own body, the bodies I love, and my city at large. Your words collapse the difference between self and myth, between the radiance and the ravaged inside all of us. I am not the only one who sees themselves in the mythic light of your stories. Did you know that you’ve saved many lives, helped people come to terms with themselves? Over the past year I’ve been in touch with your chosen family, with people who loved you in life and who fell in love with you after your death. People who burn candles for you, who call your spirit forth in the darkness. People who hear you speaking to them. City of God is read in Latinx Studies classrooms across the country now. Acclaimed author Justin Torres has called you a “brilliant literary voice.”
I think of you when I return to LA. The skyline looks more and more like Blade Runner by the day, a blur of smog and skyscrapers. At night, the city becomes all angles, the San Gabriel Mountains receding into darkness. From afar it resembles a fancy calculator, dulling human movement in favor of blinking hotel lights and billboards. There’s still so much gesture, though, so much movement, so much of the divine that you could have written a hundred more books about the grotesque and the holy here.
The French scholar Michel de Certeau once wrote that in order for a city to be known, it must be walked. You’d probably have launched multiple rebuttals to his myopic understanding of what constitutes a city. Walking, you might tell him, is not the only space of enunciation or legibility. There is a particular kind of knowing that happens, crouching low in the blue dusk, driving slowly down Whittier, smoking cigarettes out of a car window. In Los Angeles, my forty-minute commute to my friend’s couch is a labor of love; the moment I text “omw” is a contract of intimacy between us that I’ve just signed. As teenagers, when there was nowhere to go, we made the back of our beat-up Toyotas our living rooms, concert arenas, bedrooms, spaces of care. For many Los Angelinos, autopia can be home — the three-hour traffic jam is a badge of pride, an emotional exorcism, a social project, locking eyes with the driver to your left head-banging to Metallica while the one to your right cries to Cat Power. We didn’t need to talk to prove we belonged to each other, we simply took the shape of whatever vessel we called home.
Gil, if you can believe it, you’d see people walking their designer dogs around downtown now. It’s hard to find a cup of coffee for less than $5.
LA will look different but it won’t ever change. Here, beauty will always exist alongside the loom of freeways, the silvery cityscape like gnashing teeth on the horizon, ready to swallow you between its metal jaws. Alongside pink, tangerine, and crimson sunsets. I think of you in all of LA’s prideful transgression, the erotic abject — that blend of shit and sex and steel — that comprises this city that ejects and enfolds us at the same time.
