Charlie Vázquez
Encyclopedia
Charlie Vázquez is a Bronx born-and-raised, self-identified queer
American artist, writer, and musician of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. He is also the editor of Fireking Press, where he has published a novel and a book of short stories. His fiction, erotica
and essays have appeared in a number of anthologies, magazines, and websites. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner, poet John Williams.
, New York
, on May 14, 1971, to a Cuban-Puerto Rican mother and Puerto Rican father. His earliest years were spent in the turbulent, disinvested East Tremont
neighborhood of the Bronx, where his parents befriended several members of the Reapers, a notorious South Bronx street gang. His family then moved north, to the Fordham
neighborhood, where he became fascinated by a small white house in a nearby park. That old cottage would turn out to be Edgar Allan Poe
’s final home. Vázquez feels that Poe’s prose had a strong impact on him as a young reader. Before divorcing in 1981, his parents moved the family east, to Allerton Avenue and White Plains Road, where Vázquez attended the Richard Rodgers School (PS 96
), Whalen Junior High School and Christopher Columbus High School
, where he served as a key trumpet player in orchestras and jazz bands.
, where he began exploring underground clubs (such as the infamous City Nightclub), bisexuality, drugs and music. He also appeared in two experimental underground films. These years culminated with earning the exclusive position of nightclub photographer for Portland’s largest gay nightclub, the legendary Panorama disco. In 1989 he bought an electric guitar and joined his first experimental music project, Euthanasia, which included the prolific musician Kaitlyn ni Donovan
, whom he would collaborate again with later. Euthanasia disintegrated and regrouped as the more electronically-inclined quartet, Factor Red. This new band, for which he played electric guitar, keyboards and wrote songs, built a loyal Portland following and supported touring acts such as Sex Gang Children
, Front Line Assembly
and Clan of Xymox
on their Portland dates. Factor Red disbanded in 1992, after releasing their Prophecy/Atrophy 12” single.
Vázquez, along with two other members of Factor Red, joined a performance art electronica super-group called Soulmaggot, which he immediately abandoned, in order to collaborate with Baroque pop
singer-songwriter Kaitlyn ni Donovan. Abandoning electronic music altogether, he followed a mostly acoustic route over the next few years, contributing accordion, dumbek
, glockenspiel
and guitar to ni Donovan’s Cannibal Spirit and Dinner with Bosch recordings. He performed, recorded and toured with her until 1997, under the moniker Zumo. The duo often played the infamous 1201 bar in downtown Portland, where acts such as The Dandy Warhols
and Pink Martini
first attracted local fans. Kaitlyn ni Donovan and Zumo continued playing the Portland café and nightclub circuit, opening for acts as diverse as Elliott Smith
and Jane Siberry. The duo evolved into a five-piece rock band, The Kaitlyn ni Donovan Band, which Vázquez left in 1997. He then collaborated with a few short-lived punk and noise bands for several months, but none developed enough to record or perform. Charlie recorded a solo demo, Hidden Facets, that same year. He recorded a second demo, Stark Street Business Journal, in 1998. He quit music for good in 1998, focusing instead on 35mm photography and writing.
In 1999, he landed the position of nightclub photographer for the gay Portland nightclub, Panorama, where he experimented with slow shutter speeds and erratic lighting conditions, producing a corpus of hallucinogenic and warped color photographs that playfully capture the trance music
period of the time. In addition to capturing landscape photographs in various cities and natural surroundings, Charlie photographed his many and unusual queer punk friends (in the years 1999-2003), posing them with assorted bottles of beer and liquor covering their genitals.
In 1999, Vázquez began writing exclusively, combining a series of interconnected short stories that would become his first novel, Buzz and Israel, which he began in 1997 and published in late 2004. Earlier that same year, he moved to Baja California
for six months, where he explored the Mexican peninsula, Southern California
and attended the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival
in New Orleans. He returned to Portland for a year. In 2006 he relocated to his native New York City, where he finished editing his second book Business as Unusual and was introduced to avant-garde composer and performance artist Diamanda Galás
, for whom he has worked as an assistant.
and William S. Burroughs
, the novel follows their passionate and dysfunctional relationship from Portland, Oregon, where they meet, to New York City, where the story ends, by way of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles
, the Mojave Desert
and Phoenix, Arizona
. The author claims that this “intoxicated work of transient fiction” was inspired by his youthful years on the West Coast, where he experimented with drugs, sexuality, recorded experimental music and traveled throughout the Western United States
and Vancouver
, British Columbia. Buzz and Israel explores the twilight worlds of transsexual shamans, heroin addicts, Santería
priestesses and queer criminals. Its third-person voice examines the unique experiences of a New York Latino (Israel) immersed in a mostly-white American subculture
.
Buzz and Israel was followed by Business as Unusual in 2007, also published by Fireking Press. Business as Unusual is a fiction collection composed of two novellas and three short stories that were written in Southern California, Baja California, Oregon, and New York City. This collection of fiction explores themes of transsexuality, fortune-telling
, reincarnation
, mesmerism and fetishism
, as told through the first-person narratives of strange and revealing narrators.
His second novel, Contraband, was published in 2010 by Rebel Satori Press. It superimposes a 1959 Cuban Revolution
-styled technological overhaul of government onto the United States of the near future, where intellectuals, queers and artists are sought and executed by a faceless dictatorship
.
Vázquez's fiction, erotica and essays have been published in a number of anthologies, including Best Gay Love Stories: New York City (2006), Best Gay Erotica 2008 and Queer and Catholic (2008). His short stories, articles and interviews have also appeared in print and online publications such as Advocate.com, NYpress.com, Tanglefoot, Dreck Magazine, BigFib.com, and Mensbook Journal. He is also a former contributor to the Village Voice
blog
Naked City.
Vázquez hosts a monthly reading series called PANIC! at Nowhere in the East Village, Manhattan
, where he first witnessed punk rock
, Gothic rock
and queer culture in the 1980s. The series features both published and unpublished queer, female and transsexual writers of erotica, horror and unusual fiction and poetry. Vázquez cites Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin
, Serge Gainsbourg
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Celia Cruz
, Arsenio Rodríguez
, Celina y Reutilio, Diamanda Galás and Joy Division
as cultural influences.
Queer
Queer is an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT ...
American artist, writer, and musician of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. He is also the editor of Fireking Press, where he has published a novel and a book of short stories. His fiction, erotica
Erotica
Erotica are works of art, including literature, photography, film, sculpture and painting, that deal substantively with erotically stimulating or sexually arousing descriptions...
and essays have appeared in a number of anthologies, magazines, and websites. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his partner, poet John Williams.
Early years
Vázquez was born at Fordham Hospital in the BronxThe Bronx
The Bronx is the northernmost of the five boroughs of New York City. It is also known as Bronx County, the last of the 62 counties of New York State to be incorporated...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, on May 14, 1971, to a Cuban-Puerto Rican mother and Puerto Rican father. His earliest years were spent in the turbulent, disinvested East Tremont
East Tremont, Bronx
East Tremont is a low income residential neighborhood geographically located in the west Bronx, New York City. The neighborhood is part of Bronx Community Board 6. Its boundaries, starting from the north and moving clockwise are: East 183rd Street to the north, Crotona Avenue to the east, the...
neighborhood of the Bronx, where his parents befriended several members of the Reapers, a notorious South Bronx street gang. His family then moved north, to the Fordham
Fordham, Bronx
Fordham is a neighborhood of New York City, United States, located in the West Bronx. The neighborhood is part of Bronx Community Board 5. It is bordered by Fordham Road to the north, Webster Avenue to the east, East 183rd Street to the south, and Jerome Avenue to the west...
neighborhood, where he became fascinated by a small white house in a nearby park. That old cottage would turn out to be Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
’s final home. Vázquez feels that Poe’s prose had a strong impact on him as a young reader. Before divorcing in 1981, his parents moved the family east, to Allerton Avenue and White Plains Road, where Vázquez attended the Richard Rodgers School (PS 96
PS 96 Bronx
PS 96 is a public elementary school in the Bronx. It is part of New York City Public Schools, which is the largest system of its kind in the United States of America....
), Whalen Junior High School and Christopher Columbus High School
Christopher Columbus High School (Bronx, New York)
Christopher Columbus High School is a public secondary school located in the Pelham Parkway, northeast section of the Bronx, New York. It is within walking distance from the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden....
, where he served as a key trumpet player in orchestras and jazz bands.
The West Coast
In 1988, at the age of seventeen, Vázquez moved to Portland, OregonPortland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, where he began exploring underground clubs (such as the infamous City Nightclub), bisexuality, drugs and music. He also appeared in two experimental underground films. These years culminated with earning the exclusive position of nightclub photographer for Portland’s largest gay nightclub, the legendary Panorama disco. In 1989 he bought an electric guitar and joined his first experimental music project, Euthanasia, which included the prolific musician Kaitlyn ni Donovan
Kaitlyn Ni Donovan
Kaitlyn ni Donovan is from Portland, Oregon and is a classically trained violinist and Composer of Experimental Music, Dream Pop, and Film scores. She is self taught on a multitude of instruments and is known for unorthodox chord changes and lyrics peppered with dense language and romantic imagery...
, whom he would collaborate again with later. Euthanasia disintegrated and regrouped as the more electronically-inclined quartet, Factor Red. This new band, for which he played electric guitar, keyboards and wrote songs, built a loyal Portland following and supported touring acts such as Sex Gang Children
Sex Gang Children
The Sex Gang Children are a positive punk group that formed in the early 1980s in England. Although the original group only released one official studio album, they remain one of the more well-known bands out of the early Batcave scene and have reformed for new albums and touring various times...
, Front Line Assembly
Front Line Assembly
Front Line Assembly is a Canadian electro-industrial band formed by Bill Leeb in 1986 after leaving Skinny Puppy. Influenced by early Industrial acts such as Cabaret Voltaire, Portion Control, D.A.F., Test Dept, SPK, and Severed Heads, FLA has developed its own unique sound while combining...
and Clan of Xymox
Clan of Xymox
The band Clan of Xymox, also known as Xymox, formed in the Netherlands in 1981. Clan Of Xymox featured a trio of songwriters - Pieter Nooten, Ronny Moorings and Anke [also Anka] Wolbert - and gained success in the 1980s, releasing their first two albums on a prestigious independent UK label, a...
on their Portland dates. Factor Red disbanded in 1992, after releasing their Prophecy/Atrophy 12” single.
Vázquez, along with two other members of Factor Red, joined a performance art electronica super-group called Soulmaggot, which he immediately abandoned, in order to collaborate with Baroque pop
Baroque pop
Baroque pop, Baroque rock, or English baroque, often used interchangeably with chamber pop/rock, is a pop and rock music subgenre which originated in the mid-1960s in the United Kingdom and United States...
singer-songwriter Kaitlyn ni Donovan. Abandoning electronic music altogether, he followed a mostly acoustic route over the next few years, contributing accordion, dumbek
Goblet drum
The goblet drum is a hand drum with a goblet shape used mostly in the Middle East, North Africa, and Eastern Europe....
, glockenspiel
Glockenspiel
A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...
and guitar to ni Donovan’s Cannibal Spirit and Dinner with Bosch recordings. He performed, recorded and toured with her until 1997, under the moniker Zumo. The duo often played the infamous 1201 bar in downtown Portland, where acts such as The Dandy Warhols
The Dandy Warhols
The Dandy Warhols are an American alternative rock band formed in Portland, Oregon in 1994. The band was founded by singer-guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor and guitarist Peter Holmström, with keyboardist Zia McCabe and drummer Eric Hedford later joining. Hedford left in 1998 and was replaced by...
and Pink Martini
Pink Martini
Pink Martini is a 13-member "little orchestra" from Portland, Oregon, formed in 1994 by pianist Thomas M. Lauderdale. They draw inspiration from music from all over the world – crossing genres of classical, jazz and old-fashioned pop.-History:...
first attracted local fans. Kaitlyn ni Donovan and Zumo continued playing the Portland café and nightclub circuit, opening for acts as diverse as Elliott Smith
Elliott Smith
Steven Paul "Elliott" Smith was an American singer-songwriter and musician. Smith was born in Omaha, Nebraska, raised primarily in Texas, and resided for a significant portion of his life in Portland, Oregon, where he first gained popularity...
and Jane Siberry. The duo evolved into a five-piece rock band, The Kaitlyn ni Donovan Band, which Vázquez left in 1997. He then collaborated with a few short-lived punk and noise bands for several months, but none developed enough to record or perform. Charlie recorded a solo demo, Hidden Facets, that same year. He recorded a second demo, Stark Street Business Journal, in 1998. He quit music for good in 1998, focusing instead on 35mm photography and writing.
In 1999, he landed the position of nightclub photographer for the gay Portland nightclub, Panorama, where he experimented with slow shutter speeds and erratic lighting conditions, producing a corpus of hallucinogenic and warped color photographs that playfully capture the trance music
Trance music
Trance is a genre of electronic dance music that developed in the 1990s.:251 It is generally characterized by a tempo of between 125 and 150 bpm,:252 repeating melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and breaks down throughout a track...
period of the time. In addition to capturing landscape photographs in various cities and natural surroundings, Charlie photographed his many and unusual queer punk friends (in the years 1999-2003), posing them with assorted bottles of beer and liquor covering their genitals.
In 1999, Vázquez began writing exclusively, combining a series of interconnected short stories that would become his first novel, Buzz and Israel, which he began in 1997 and published in late 2004. Earlier that same year, he moved to Baja California
Baja California
Baja California officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Baja California is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is both the northernmost and westernmost state of Mexico. Before becoming a state in 1953, the area was known as the North...
for six months, where he explored the Mexican peninsula, Southern California
Southern California
Southern California is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of California. Large urban areas include Greater Los Angeles and Greater San Diego. The urban area stretches along the coast from Ventura through the Southland and Inland Empire to San Diego...
and attended the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival
Saints and Sinners Literary Festival
Saints and Sinners is an alternative literary festival specializing in LGBT literature, held in various locations around the world-famous French Quarter neighborhood in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana each May.-Overview:Founded by Paul J...
in New Orleans. He returned to Portland for a year. In 2006 he relocated to his native New York City, where he finished editing his second book Business as Unusual and was introduced to avant-garde composer and performance artist Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás is an American avant-garde composer, vocalist, pianist, organist, performance artist and painter.Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", with her three and a half octave vocal range. She often screams, hisses and growls...
, for whom he has worked as an assistant.
Writing
Vázquez’s first novel, Buzz and Israel (Fireking Press, 2004), details the complicated relationship between Israel, a closeted Puerto Rican actor, and Buzz, a junkie and jewelry store thief. Inspired by the writings of Jean GenetJean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
and William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, the novel follows their passionate and dysfunctional relationship from Portland, Oregon, where they meet, to New York City, where the story ends, by way of Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
, the Mojave Desert
Mojave Desert
The Mojave Desert occupies a significant portion of southeastern California and smaller parts of central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, in the United States...
and Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix, Arizona
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...
. The author claims that this “intoxicated work of transient fiction” was inspired by his youthful years on the West Coast, where he experimented with drugs, sexuality, recorded experimental music and traveled throughout the Western United States
Western United States
.The Western United States, commonly referred to as the American West or simply "the West," traditionally refers to the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. Because the U.S. expanded westward after its founding, the meaning of the West has evolved over time...
and Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, British Columbia. Buzz and Israel explores the twilight worlds of transsexual shamans, heroin addicts, Santería
Santería
Santería is a syncretic religion of West African and Caribbean origin influenced by Roman Catholic Christianity, also known as Regla de Ocha, La Regla Lucumi, or Lukumi. Its liturgical language, a dialect of Yoruba, is also known as Lucumi....
priestesses and queer criminals. Its third-person voice examines the unique experiences of a New York Latino (Israel) immersed in a mostly-white American subculture
Subculture
In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...
.
Buzz and Israel was followed by Business as Unusual in 2007, also published by Fireking Press. Business as Unusual is a fiction collection composed of two novellas and three short stories that were written in Southern California, Baja California, Oregon, and New York City. This collection of fiction explores themes of transsexuality, fortune-telling
Fortune-telling
Fortune-telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life. The scope of fortune-telling is in principle identical with the practice of divination...
, reincarnation
Reincarnation
Reincarnation best describes the concept where the soul or spirit, after the death of the body, is believed to return to live in a new human body, or, in some traditions, either as a human being, animal or plant...
, mesmerism and fetishism
Fetishism
A fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others...
, as told through the first-person narratives of strange and revealing narrators.
His second novel, Contraband, was published in 2010 by Rebel Satori Press. It superimposes a 1959 Cuban Revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
-styled technological overhaul of government onto the United States of the near future, where intellectuals, queers and artists are sought and executed by a faceless dictatorship
Dictatorship
A dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
.
Vázquez's fiction, erotica and essays have been published in a number of anthologies, including Best Gay Love Stories: New York City (2006), Best Gay Erotica 2008 and Queer and Catholic (2008). His short stories, articles and interviews have also appeared in print and online publications such as Advocate.com, NYpress.com, Tanglefoot, Dreck Magazine, BigFib.com, and Mensbook Journal. He is also a former contributor to the Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
Naked City.
Vázquez hosts a monthly reading series called PANIC! at Nowhere in the East Village, Manhattan
East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, lying east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side...
, where he first witnessed punk rock
Punk rock
Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock...
, Gothic rock
Gothic rock
Gothic rock is a musical subgenre of post-punk and alternative rock that formed during the late 1970s. Gothic rock bands grew from the strong ties they had to the English punk rock and emerging post-punk scenes...
and queer culture in the 1980s. The series features both published and unpublished queer, female and transsexual writers of erotica, horror and unusual fiction and poetry. Vázquez cites Edgar Allan Poe, James Baldwin
James Baldwin (writer)
James Arthur Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic.Baldwin's essays, for instance "Notes of a Native Son" , explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th century America,...
, Serge Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg, born Lucien Ginsburg was a French singer-songwriter, actor and director. Gainsbourg's extremely varied musical style and individuality make him difficult to categorize...
, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz
Celia Cruz was a Cuban-American salsa singer, and was one of the most successful Salsa performers of the 20th century, having earned twenty-three gold albums...
, Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez
Arsenio Rodríguez was a Cuban musician who played the tres , reorganized the conjunto and developed the son montuno, and other Afro-Cuban rhythms in the 1940s and 50s...
, Celina y Reutilio, Diamanda Galás and Joy Division
Joy Division
Joy Division were an English rock band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester. Originally named Warsaw, the band primarily consisted of Ian Curtis , Bernard Sumner , Peter Hook and Stephen Morris .Joy Division rapidly evolved from their initial punk rock influences...
as cultural influences.
External links
See also
- List of Cuban American writers
- LGBT literatureLGBT literatureGay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the LGBT community, or which involves characters, plot lines or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.-Subgenres:...
- List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people
- List of LGBT writers
- List of Puerto Rican writers
- Puerto Rican literature