Prologue: Prosaic Perlongher1
Christian Ferrer and Osvaldo Baigorria

Why would a poet's prose interest anyone? Writers are assigned a specific genre and their incursions into other areas are usually considered minor or occasional unfoldings. While it's true that Néstor Perlongher is remembered for innovating Argentine poetry, it's also true that he tapped other veins in his quarry of skills. For those who followed the intellectual debates of the 1980s or gleaned nourishment from the untrustworthy grapevine of the newspaper stand, where cultural supplements ripened and fell, Néstor Perlongher's name was a guarantee of risqué ideas, irreverent humour, partisan politics, linguistic sonority, ridicule for trite notions of democratic progressiveness, and insolent provocation. From the beginning to the end of his writing career, Perlongher displayed his talents as an essayist, and not only as a retreat or escape from his poetic work. 'Truncated paths' is how he classified his prose in an interview.

The nonfiction genre in Argentina is a duelling pistol in whose butt Perlongher managed to make a significant notch. In truth, the most enduring essays were written under the shadow of threat. Over five decades, academic trends, institutional structures and the deterioration of the reader's taste increasingly restricted the space allotted to nonfiction. Various movements aggravated the process, starting with the social sciences crisis in the 1960s, followed by the political urgencies of the 1970s and rounded out in the 1990s by the demands of academic theory and journalistic commentary, often one and the same. Taken as a given that each published essay had the last word, nonfiction in Argentina gradually became the precarious encampment of atypical thinking. And in this unusual style, Perlongher forged the works we're interested in recovering.

Perlongher's 'prosaic' work centres around his political leanings, his sociological studies, his formation in urban anthropology; the curious groping that leads authors to express themselves using 'the centaur of genres' - the essay. He does not deal with a huge variety of themes, but each reflects a passion, and daring, disquieting opinions: neo-baroque writing and its origins and offshoots, sexual politics, gay identity, Eva Perón (a leitmotif), a political stance on the Falklands War and the ecstatic rituals of the Santo Daime religion. Of the abundant essays Perlongher published between 1980 and 1992, we've selected some of the most significant, but also the ones in which his style transforms arguments into poetry. In each of the thematic sections, the reader will find not only facets of Perlongher's thinking, but also the evolution of his perspectives. In the section 'Miscellaneous' we have included some of the poems in which Argentine history or politics play a central role. Among them you will find 'Corpses', today considered one of the most important poems in Argentine literature.

The prehistory of Perlongher's best-known and most extensive essay, 'La prostitución masculina' [Male prostitution], taken from his doctoral thesis published in Brazil ('O negocio do michê: Prostitução viril em São Paulo' [Male prostitution in São Paulo]), begins on Lavalle Street, in the 'movie house' section of Buenos Aires's city centre. In the early 1970s, Néstor strolls, trots, swaggers, cruises and drifts down this de facto pedestrian street, among taxi boys, pimps and gay men in various degrees of overtness. The opportunity to present an exhibition in the Centre for Art and Communication allows him to dust off an old idea: a photographic exposé complete with recorded testimonies from the young men who offer themselves up as live bait on street corners and risk butchery in nearby interiors. Néstor enlists his friends and members of Política Sexual [Sexual Politics] and the Frente de Liberación Homosexual [FLH: Gay Liberation Front]. They go out, cameras in hand, timidly trying to pass unnoticed as they aim a lens at their targets. Néstor strolls, chats with various taxi boys, approaches a man he's interested in, sets aside his amateur investigation for the possibility of sexual encounter, gets lost in the city centre: it's no longer clear if anyone is taking photos, the exhibition never occurs. But this dress rehearsal, this mise-en-scène of bodies on street corners, inspires Perlongher's interest in gay prostitution as part of his array of intellectual interests.

After cruising Lavalle in Buenos Aires, Perlongher followed the trail to the Brazilian hub for the sex trade, a place called Marquis de Itú. The former militant Trotskyist, former sociologist, Master of social anthropology, fixed his gaze on the streets. The street was where he practised his leftist political activism, his pioneering participation in Argentina's first gay rights group (the FLH, active between 1971 and 1976). On the streets, he surveyed the gay districts of every city he visited and undertook explorations into the ritual experiences of an emerging Brazilian religion. Down these winding paths we search in vain for a fissure between the beginnings of the gay liberation movement and Perlongher's later solemn criticism of 'gay identity'. Desire - and not 'gayness' - was the anchor of his political perspective, in a period in which it was openly proclaimed that 'everything personal is political' but in which gays 'didn't exist'. Once, in the middle of a meeting of leftist activists, someone made a sarcastic comment about a young man with an ambiguous appearance: 'Is that a man, a woman, or what?' To which Perlongher was said to have responded: 'It's a what.' This 'who knows what' invokes the amorphous and mutant silhouette of the black beast, target of moralizing campaigns that rained down on the population by the Argentine state, of which the reader will find here a costumbrista and conceptual portrait. Argentina, Néstor often said, is a paradise for police in which the only possible sexuality is sad or simulated, or else sordid.

Identity, that ancient philosophical and governmental concern, has seen fissures form in its colonnade of unity, certainty, ego, sexualization, monotheism and hierarchy. The cracks, in the last hundred years, have begun to form around Nietzsche and Foucault and around anarchy and surrealism. But perhaps these days, the crusade against identity - or its analysis - is seen as suspicious, something 'too serious', even if liberationist or self-deprecating nuances are accepted. Academic and organizational agendas have managed to transform a political nuisance into a 'cultural' study, a flexible mould to fill with differences and tensions. It's true that identity was a main concern during Perlongher's lifetime. But the gay rights movement and its demand for social recognition seemed to him too comfortable and, in the end, suspicious. Like in a supermarket: every minority gets their own aisle. Perhaps Néstor was not immune to a belief, widespread in the 1970s, that there would be no individual salvation and no corporate immunity. The lease of an institutional space or ghetto was but a meagre consolation; the right to same-sex marriage, petitioned before the authorities, a whiny claudication. Néstor was acutely aware that the sexual politics brought to the forefront by the revolutionary pulsations were being hemmed in as an issue of human rights: one more instance of victimization, another plaque on the wall. He was of the belief that desire, whether hetero or homosexual, was not a tangible object but a force that could be used to break down the classificatory system of the reigning law - family-oriented and capitalist - used as the basis for social control: to Perlongher, desire was a crusade that aimed to penetrate the borders of conjugality, of sedentariness, of consanguinity.

His guide was not Freud, or Lacan, but Gilles Deleuze, whose concepts he spun into gold. It's through this appropriation - not simulation - that his investigation into male prostitution stands out as his personal nocturne. Perlongher read Deleuze - Anti-Oedipus - in a study group around 1975, a time in which he was gathering political knowledge. Non-academic reading; free from self-referential jargon, from expiry date. Deleuze and Guattari constituted an ideogram which conjured Eros in his death throes. But these books were not recipes: Perlongher read them with care and then he picked and chose items to carry with him as he explored the caverns of desire and the back alleys of the urban landscape. Beyond the polemics of methodology and theoretical ebbs and flows, we want to emphasize that Perlongher had a naturally radical temperament and that he was a keen observer of customs. In the end, the best polisher of a perspective is the sandpaper of experience and not the printed page.

Perlongher had no first-hand knowledge, however, of Eva Perón, about whom he wrote a few poems and a blasphemous story that still today inflames the emotional and political membranes of Argentine mythology. The compilers of this book are aware that Argentina is not a place where one can poke around in erogenous zones and open wounds without suffering the...