There was a time, not too long ago, when trans people were represented as fallen angels: poor, marginalized, beaten, prowling the night trails, almost always dedicated to sex work. The stereotype is changing, but those broken, kind and suffering beings are the ones Alana S. Portero knew in her youth in the working-class neighborhood of San Blas and in the hidden streets of central Madrid. "For me they were always an example of dignity," explains the author, born in the capital in 1978. Her novel La mala costumbre (Seix Barral), which has already contracted 11 translations (there was a lot of talk about it at the last Frankfurt Fair), is about discovering oneself trans and not knowing very well what to do and what to feel about it, what to do with the heart in that case, but also about the peripheral and shrinking working class. And about that beautiful and horrendous city that is Madrid.
"Those trans women that I met during my life, and who were references for me, were always marginalized, almost always dedicated to sex work. They were always the worst treated, for example, in the Law of Social Dangerousness [a Francoist law that was not completely repealed until 1995]. When the amnesty of the Transition came, the political prisoners went out to the street, but they stayed inside," says Portero. In her novel, braided with some wickers of autobiographical reality, although not only, a string of characters appear that guide the path of the protagonist, someone who, from her childhood in the sad periphery of the workers, is discovering her identity as a trans woman in a world that is not prepared to receive her. All wrapped in an atmosphere of magical costumbrismo that transforms everyday reality into something poetic. The finding that arises in the smallest.
Another image of Alana S. Portero, on May 4 in Madrid. MOEH ATITAR
The story is structured around elements of the hero's journey theorized by the mythologist Joseph Campbell and through which the heroes of the stories from Gilgamesh to Luke Skywalker have traveled, also with elements of the Greek epic (it consists of 27 songs): when difficulties arise, an oracular figure appears, a revelation is given and the journey continues. As in the path of every hero, although here we should talk about heroine, there is a return home, after undergoing a transformation. It will never be the same again. The road is not easy, and the aforementioned referents, thrown on the shoulder of existence, do not present a very promising future to those who decide to follow it. "It's frivolous and ridiculous to say that people transition on a whim," explains Portero, "who says those things is that he has not spoken to a trans person for ten minutes."
The novel shows, as in his previous poetic work, his taste for the Gothic, the romantic, the legendary and the mythological, also his training as a medievalist. "Someone who does not find references can end up pulling for magic and myths. In addition, that world is full of elements of transformation, of characters who change their appearance and become animals or demigoddesses... That, of course, appealed to me," he explains. These mists attracted her as a child, and as a young woman, after reading the romantic poets, she integrated into the Gothic subculture, its music, costumes, literatures and nightclubs, which were then bustling in Madrid, and which are described in the text. It was there, in that languid, sensitive and dark side, where the author (and the character) could best unfold her ambiguity: it is common in that social context, both in relation to the physical aspect and with the sexual or, let's say, spiritual facets. It's another way of being in the world.
"It is not uncommon for trans people to take refuge in the Gothic," confirms the author. At that time it was the perfect place for gender experiments, there were allowed things that anywhere else were doomed." Not only that, woven into the text is also a rich guide to pop culture associated with LGTBI, from Madonna to David Bowie, from Boy George to Terenci Moix. "For me, pop culture was a saint, figures to whom I entrusted myself in some way, and that spurred my desire to create," says Portero, "it was also to make my own contemporary mythology."
Trans in the working-class neighborhood
When the heroine of this story returns transformed to San Blas, San Blas ("that place that Francoism built to stable the working class") has also changed. "This working-class neighborhood was a hard place to live, but there was a neighborhood fabric that was reflected in the political: neighborhood associations in the 70s and 80s were very powerful. For better or worse, the neighbors knew each other and kept an eye on each other. That has been completely lost with new ways of life," says the author. In recent times, there have also been debates within the left about whether workers' roots and the struggle for material conditions are compatible with the new struggles, called identity, where the trans question is included.
In Portero's work there seems to be no dilemma or contradiction between identities, between the worker and the trans, or between worrying about the challenges of being each of these things. "These controversies are imported from the American evangelical church and here they have been bought by a left party," says Portero. "It is thought to be a threat to the figure of the blue-winged, fat-stained overalls worker, but one can be a worker in many ways. That controversy seems to me an imbecility, but it has managed to displace the framework and now we are seeing how the extreme right has come very high. They even spread absurd theories like chemtrails."
Sectors of traditional feminism have also risen up against certain aspects of the Trans Law, such as gender self-determination, and the most extreme have challenged trans in general. They are current, says Portero, which have existed since the 70s and have been appearing and disappearing, resurfacing with conservative waves. "I can understand that there are doubts, and I think you can talk about everything, but the violence that has been used in this sense is very unfair," says the novelist, "I can even understand that from intolerance they do not want to know anything about us ... But violence is intolerable. You can't eradicate a group of people." The author observes a regression in many aspects in which a certain consensus and acceptance had been achieved, a setback to worse times, although not so much in her personal life, in the environment that surrounds her, in her neighborhood, in bars, in the market, as in social networks and in public debate. "Social media is not a faithful portrait of what happens outside, I think the world is a better place than that warped portrait."
And Madrid? "I have tried to tell Madrid, this city without the grandiloquence of other capitals, the most beautiful thing I could tell. I am very Madrilenian, and I am very proud, it makes me very sad what the city is becoming, what it has already become: a gentrified city in which they encourage you to consume all the time and that excludes people all the time, "concludes the author.
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