The Savage Detectives

by Roberto Bolaño

I came to suspect he was a queer. He might have been. He was married (to a Mexican, incidentally), but you never know. What kind of queer? A platonic, starry-eyed queer who got his kicks, shall we say, on a purely literary level? Or did he have a Mr. Right among the poets he published in the magazine? I don’t know. To each his own. I don’t have anything against queers. There are more of them every day, though. In the forties, the number of queers in Mexican literature was at an all-time high, and I thought that was as far as things could go. But today there are more of them than ever. I suppose the fault lies with the education system, the increasingly common tendency of Mexicans to make a spectacle of themselves, the movies, music, who knows what. Even Salvador Novo himself once mentioned to me that he was taken aback by the behavior and language of some of the young people who visited him. And Salvador Novo knew what he was talking about.