Nelson Edwin Rodriguez: Love, Loss, Memory

I understand this familial and cultural inheritance as something ephemeral and not always conscious. It exists as a sustained and potentially haunted drive to revisit, rework, and revise the gaps in this inheritance, trying to find that touch across time even if it’s through what remains.¹

Emily Colucci

I am struck with a quick onset of emotions every time that I look at one of Nelson Edwin Rodriguez’s photographs.²

I can’t deny that I feel a strong sense of hot, visceral rage, right in the middle of my guts. It twists and churns, until it begins to radiate throughout my lower torso, probably until I move on to looking at something else. Rage for a young queer life lost amid systemic negligence and inaccessible health care, at a time when antiretroviral cocktails were beginning to become available, but with a prohibitively steep price tag.

But I am also amazed by the timeless appeal of these photographs, their garbo, sensuality. They have an irreducible sense of elegance that is not derived from material opulence―although Nelson Rodriguez was quite the campy artist, interested more so in the exuberance of gender found in drag queens and in New York city nightlife than in “real” luxury. His tools appear to be very austere: a single-lens reflex camera and black and white film stock that is relatively easy to develop oneself at the community photo lab. But when combined with the simple lines of Nelson’s intuitive composition, they provide a brutal sense of realism, oddly perfumed with the quintessence of old-Hollywood glamor. All of these features play off the bare corpulence of the naked queer bodies, the wigs, the heels, the raw and honest portraits, of friends, of fellow artists, of queens and hunks, imbuing his entire oeuvre with an ironic wink at the silver screen sirens of yesterday.

As the weeks and months have passed since I first started cohabiting with the work and the archive of Nelson, I also feel another type of longing. This could be described as the longing of a tía, of an abuela, or even an amiga, a sort of femme, sissy, or matriarchal urge for embracing and protecting a fragile member of the community, that―at the risk of sounding condescending, or excessively sensitive to the point of gaucheness―I believe might be a useful tool when unpacking the latinx³ experiences surrounding Nelson’s short and yet stellar career.

As an advocate, researcher, and as a human being: I cling to my rage, to seduction, and to tenderness, seeking to detangle these brown-tinted affects and histories of art as a means to make something new, to tell a story. To tell a story meant to be told, retold, repeated, plagiarized, trafficked from many mouths belonging to many different bodies. Possibly even our own story, whatever “our own” might mean here.

Queer Youth Services and Coming of Age in New York in the 90’s

They are boxes that we fill up little by little with printed pages, flyers, and memories inherited from disappeared people, with the intention of conserving the graphic signs of an affective memory, of sharing it with others and making them known. In summary, acknowledging, in other words, to make some objects, too evanescent, too light, too insignificant and miniscule, count.⁴

Élisabeth Lebovici

One of the most striking features of Nelson’s oeuvre is the simple yet elegant potency of his photography. Always imbued with an everyday that magically evokes an otherworldliness; rather another-worldliness, or (better yet) a profound sense of the then and there of queer futurity.⁵ With this, I mean that these images―although highly charged by their context of production―carry a sort of newness and nowness that is built from a specific queer yearning. Yes, under scrutiny we can easily deduce the crevices, the unpolished decor that signals Nelson’s apartment in the Bronx at a specific moment in time. But something else is operating here: a sensitive machine carefully revealing and concealing the multiple areas of desire aroused by a young queer latinx artist, questioning gender and its myriad signifiers.

Nelson picked up photography at the Hetrick-Martin Institute (founded in 1979), a LGBTQIA+ support center once located right in front of the West Side Piers and the first non-governmental organization in the United States to provide youth services⁶ and shelter⁷ for queer⁸ youth⁹. The Piers were notorious as a spot for gay cruising and hooking as well as transgender sex work, a meeting ground for many marginalized communities. It was an iconic relic of New York’s grimey underbelly before the Giuliani/Bloomberg crackdown against so called “sexual deviancy” in the public sphere. Amongst the queer havens such as Greenwich Village and the Piers, different institutions and community centers targeting queer youth sought to provide shelter and to educate. This was the case of the Hetrick-Martin, located back then on West Street, quite close to the Greenwich Village Youth Council's drop-in center, the Neutral Zone (founded in 1991), which also provided shelter, counseling, and various programs for young queers in precarious situations.

Nelson’s family is Boricua, and he was born in Puerto Rico in 1972.¹⁰ Like many others before them, the Rodriguezes moved to New York―probably while Nelson was still very young―looking for better opportunities, and ended up settling in the Bronx. According to the creatives Boris Torres and Ira Sachs,¹¹

Nelson’s relation to his own queerness as well as the larger queer community was tinted by his ethnic and territorial background, in which the larger sexist and homophobic tendencies in American society became conjugated with the hyper-policing of masculinity that often occurs in latinx machismo culture, deeply rooted in Catholicism and other factors. It is no surprise that, coming to his individual and sexual maturation in his late teens at the end of the 80’s, Nelson would reach out to New York’s queer havens such as the East Village and the Piers, seeking acceptance and wider possibilities for gender expression in young people similar to him.

Nelson was part of the first generation to enroll in a photography course taught at the Hetrick-Martin by photographer and advocate Lisa Ross.¹² The course began in 1990, after the Institute received a donation that had the sole purpose of stimulating photography amongst queer youth. With a shoestring budget of about $500, Lisa was tasked with adapting a closet previously used to store condoms for free distribution and turn it into a DIY photographic darkroom. Going into the closet in order to come out, if you will. Lisa would receive camera donations in order to lend the equipment to the young photographers in training, most of them people of color; apart from Nelson, others such as Bruce Burgos from the House of Pendavis and Junior Vargas―better known as Chleo―from the House of Infinity, participated in that first class.

In 1991, the photography course expanded from a summer program to an ongoing class hosted two days a week thanks to a donation by the Ryan White Foundation¹³ as well as the Rockefeller Foundation. Lisa taught students the basic science of the camera: f-stop and shutter speed, as well as the chemistry of developing and printing, and even the framing and mounting of their own works, which they exhibited in countless collective exhibitions. Lisa encouraged their students to use photography as a means of introspection, to explore their own voices as people coming from marginalized communities. In Lisa’s own words, to “Look inside with the camera.” The course continued until around the year 2007, when digital technology started taking over the analog.

In the second year of this photo program, Luna Luis Ortiz¹⁴, a young community educator and fellow Boricua from the house of Khan, also started learning photography, right after Nelson had taken part in the course. Contracting HIV from his first sexual encounter with a much older man at the age of 14 in 1986, Luna took the Minolta SRT 200 gifted to him for his 13th birthday and started documenting his world and himself. Photography became a way to cope with the existential dread of the two-year life expectancy that his doctor predicted. Luna went on to become an amazing creative in his own right, and he deserves a separate chapter all of his own. In 1999, Luna began teaching the Hetrick-Martin’s photography course until circa 2007. During this time he found and saved some of Nelson’s prints that were wasting away in the Institute’s storage. Other photographs by Nelson were kept by Barbara Bickhart, an artist and theater and performance educator who taught Nelson, and later became the executor of his estate.¹⁵

As Director of Youth Enrichment Services (YES) at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center―or simply “the Center”―Barbara Bickhart founded the Alternate Visions Theatre Troupe of Lesbian and Gay Youth in the year 1989. Nelson was an active member of the troupe, probably since its inception. This was a socially engaged project, in which Barbara and her partner Bridget Hughes would direct a group of young talents who would collaboratively write and perform original pieces that involved autobiographical exploration, comedy, and dance. For instance, an issue of the Center’s news publication from late 1991 describes how the Alternate Visions Troupe presented excerpts from their original piece Divided by “Normal” at the Fourth Annual Youth Force Conference in New York on November 23rd of that year.¹⁴ On December 9th, 1991, the Troupe presented the full piece at the La MaMa’s Club space at 74A East 4th Street. The playbill from the La MaMa performance notes that the Center’s YES program was funded by the New York State Division of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, suggesting that theater practice was used as a means for sobriety for the young queers involved. Another playbill in Nelson’s archive advertises a 1992 performance by Alternate Visions, It’s Not the Shoes …That Dance Themselves to Pieces―A Queer Fairy Tale at the WOW Cafe (59 East 4th Street). The performers were asked to contribute a blurb about themselves for the brochure, and Nelson’s reads humorously:

In another brochure, we find evidence of a second performance from the trope at the WOW Cafe in 1993, this time titled Sweet Lemon Juice, Broken Glass. Nelson’s new blurb reads:

This same pamphlet explains that: “All events are at the Center and are Alcohol and Drug-free. All events are FREE for young people 22 and Under,” reinforcing the sobriety-focused mission of the youth program.¹⁶

It was among the other young folks of color that frequented the Piers, as well as the Hetrick-Martin and the Neutral Zone, where Nelson found his queer community. When they were not out in the Central Park Ramble cruising or dancing, they were at the Piers voguing to the music coming out of someone’s boombox. Although not really a voguer himself, Nelson was a lover of drag and a huge trekkie, which is the endearing term used to describe the fans of the television series Star Trek and its contingent fictional universe. Nelson was such a huge trekkie that he was nicknamed “The Counselor” by his friends, inspired by the female character of Deanna Troi, half human and half of the Betazed people: known for their telepathic powers that allow them to empathize with the emotions of others.¹⁷ He even named his drag persona Morgana Troi after the aforementioned science fiction series. Nelson and his trekkie friend group even started what today would be known as a “kiki house” called the House of Enterprise around 1993, which is another reference to Star Trek.

If not out in Greenwich Village or at The Piers, Nelson and his contemporaries would hang out at the Hetrick-Martin while participating in their different creative programs until about 6:00 PM, when the Institute would usually close operations for the day. Then, many of them would go to the Neutral Zone (better known amongst attendees as “Brats”), which would open at around 3:00 PM, where a lot of homeless and queer youths would gather until it would close at midnight. Nelson and his friends would kiki, vogue, practice runway and other categories of Ballroom, or simply hang out and avoid the adversities of New York weather during the colder seasons. In the early 90’s, Luna Ortiz began hosting his Luna’s Follies drag shows at the Neutral Zone, where Nelson performed the songs of Bette Midler. A VHS tape kept by Luna shows fellow Boricua Milton Garcia¹⁸ from the House of Ninja voguing in the Old Way at Brats. Milton Garcia developed as an incredible artist himself, not only as a vogue performer but also as an illustrator, documenting in countless drawings his own experience and those of other queer people of color: celebrating their explorations of gender as well as mourning the loss of many close ones due to HIV/AIDS.

Nelson passed away suddenly on November 14th, 1995 due to AIDS-related complications at the early age of twenty three. Being able to interview some of the people that knew and interacted with Nelson in his lifetime, I got the sense that he struggled immensely with his HIV status, and would generally keep this information to himself or to a very limited group of people. Luna Ortiz only found out about Nelson's diagnosis because he also lived in the Bronx and he happened to run into Nelson in 1993 or 1994 at the Montefiore Medical Center in their neighborhood, where they were both obtaining treatment for their HIV. In a memorial text, Luna wrote about Nelson’s struggles with his diagnosis, probably trying to make sense of the loss as a young positive man himself:

What I remember most about my friend Nelson Rodriguez was his fear of AIDS and his fear of disclosure. He was terrified with what AIDS did to so many of our friends and he was terrified of his friends knowing his status. I think he felt that if we knew he had AIDS then we would not love him just the same. He must have witnessed our other friends being shunned by friends and family. […]

We both hung out at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, where we both embarked on developing our talents as all round artists. We did everything. We were actors, photographers and part-time drag queens. His drag name was Morgana Troy. He loved “Star Trek” and the movie “Beaches” with Bette Midler. Our friendship was based on our love for art. He was one hell of a performer and he expressed it all in his work.

He had already known my HIV status, but we didn’t talk about it. As time got older I noticed he pushed me and his other friends away. He started to show signs that he had AIDS but he never talked about it. I later learned he couldn’t stand it that I was so open and free regarding my HIV status.

One day I had an appointment at an adolescent clinic in the Bronx. There he was sitting in the doctor’s office. When he saw me he was shocked. He acted as if he had seen a ghost. I was shocked that he hadn’t told me anything. I wondered why. [...] Later our doctor came over to me to talk to me about confidentiality. Nelson didn’t want me to know. Here my own sister didn’t trust me. Much more time went by and Nelson got weaker and weaker. He found the strength to be in a movie, “The Incredible Adventure of Two Girls in Love,” and a PBS special for World AIDS Day and a few drag shows with the Luna Follies at the Neutral Zone.¹⁹

Milton Garcia described Nelson’s passing as one of the first AIDS-related deaths among the friends he had met at Brats, the Hetrick-Martin, and YES youth services, and recalled that the entire community had been left with a deep sense of loss and mourning.

After Nelson’s passing, a series of two exhibitions titled Voices From the Ribbon hosted by the Youth Enrichment Services (YES) of the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center brought together the photography of the late Nelson with the drawings of Milton Garcia. The first of these exhibitions took place in 1997 at the Center itself, and in 1998 at the Dance Theater Workshop on 219 West 19th Street.²⁰ In a newly digitized videotape kept by Milton, one can see a recording and guided tour from the closing day of the 1998 exhibition. Around 18 of Nelson’s photographic prints were shown, shot in 1993 and processed at Hetrick-Martin. In the video, Milton describes the photographs as either self-explorations or personas developed by Nelson as a means to cope with his HIV diagnosis. Milton exhibited 23 different drawings, including a commemorative piece titled Red Ribbons in the Sky (1997) remembering Nelson and other friends who had passed away due to AIDS related complications . Two other works were also exhibited: a digital commemorative poster created by Andres Alberto Montoya-Montes, and Nelson’s AIDS memorial quilt panel created by David Moschel. This memorial quilt―composed of a background of intersecting red over black fabric panels―included the name “NELSON EDWIN RODRIGUEZ” in bedazzled gold lettering, five fabric transfers of black and white photographs stitched onto the quilt, with the text “from his eyes to ours” on the top of the quilt and “self portraits” on the bottom, this last segment referring to the five transfers of Nelson’s photographs as the main components of the quilt’s composition. The quilt was donated to the National AIDS Memorial Quilt project to be displayed in Washington, and it is currently part of block number 5339.²¹

Autobiographical Photography in the Open Field of Gender

Gay men’s “obsession” with sex, far from being denied, should be celebrated―not because of its communal virtues, not because of its subversive potential for parodies of machismo, not because it offers a model of genuine pluralism to a society that at once celebrates and punishes pluralism, but rather because it never stops re-presenting the internalized phallic male as an infinitely loved object of sacrifice. Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents [ecstasy] as a mode of [praxis].²²

Leo Bersani

The first works of Nelson’s oeuvre that captivated my attention were his many self-portraits taken at his own apartment in the Bronx. In one shot he allows us to peer into the intimacy of his bed, reclining on his right side and facing the camera in a three-quarter position. The expression is sly and coquettish with his natural beauty marks, his eyes boldly locked into the camera’s lens over a five o’clock shadow and under a darling platinum bob wig matched with a contrasting set of bushy dark-eyebrows. The attitude is daring, yet genuinely somewhat vulnerable. His left leg projects out of the light-colored sheets in a high diagonal like that of a Rockette showgirl, while his other leg delicately curves inward so as to support the pose. The dark pilosity of his legs is accented by the black colored underwear peeking underneath the sheets. The remaining surface area of the sheet carefully conceals his left breast, while his right nipple remains exposed. This photograph can easily represent the canon of Nelson’s visionary queerness: equal parts deliberate and naive, a rigorous photographic study that benefits from a high sense of intuition and precariousness. With a radical openness to move between seemingly disparate signifiers of gender―the thick dark hair under the armpits, on the legs, or peeking through the unshaven face that “betray” the general poise of the blonde diva―Nelson takes a low-fi approach to a simple set of materials that in turn project over-the-top fantasies of glamorous desire.

As easily as Nelson would jump into femme drag, he would weaponize the same humor to unpack Western icons of masculinity. I adore Nelson’s hilarious series on Batman, where he explores (again, in the privacy of his home) the recognizable icon of the superhero in the bat-shaped mask and jagged black cape. Counterpoint to the idealized masculine traits of the superhero, the naked latinx body and the reemergence of the black thong (seen as well in the previous photo here discussed) make evident the subtextual homoeroticism of the hero, and its veneration of patriarchal strength and financial dominance over the Othered nemeses of Gotham City.²³ There is a marvelous solitude in many of Nelson’s works, especially in those captured in his own place. In another text, I reckoned with the importance of the care and solace of private space in the life of queer creatives under the axiom a room of one’s own with wifi.²⁴ Even at the dawn of the democratization of the internet, there is a point to be made in the analysis of Nelson’s body of work about the correlation between the self-exploration and containment gained inside of private space and its potential to generate repercussions on a wider marginalized community through the use of a medium such as photography. Nelson’s photos are a vitrine into queer private space and their blossoming fantasies, much like the disco or the Ball are semi-clandestine territories that titillate between the public’s visibility and the private’s invisibility.

A second point is to be made in regards to the beautification of queer private space in Nelson’s oeuvre. The self portrait of Nelson sitting in his wooden armchair lined in velvet is breathtaking, his head looking down while his open palms stretch out behind his nape. This is part of a series of self-portraits in which Nelson poses wearing a white t-shirt printed with the logo of the Center and a pleated flannel skirt, later removing the skirt and remaining in a pair of tighty-whities. Behind him, the flower curtains that are found in so many of his shots―an ever-present prop in his limited set of tools―as well as the radiator, beat-up vinyl floor, and the neoclassic boiserie moldings on the wall.

Even amidst material precarity, us queers will always find ways to beautify our surroundings, creating fantasies strung over temporary rentals with textures and fabrics that generate a sense of acceptance; where even our innermost turmoil can find a placid environment in which to nestle and be.²⁵ For instance, Luna’s favorite shot of Nelson is his minimalist interior of the velvet armchair with the remote on the left arm, with the sunlight bleeding through the window sill. There is something so magical to be found in even the most banal of situations, in the interaction of light with the everyday objects that are given a second life through a decentered photographic gaze. Or in the tongue and cheek photo of the fake Oscar statuette, with the infamous flower curtains backlit in the background and an opportune sparkle of light bouncing from the middle of the artificial award. Nelson’s acting career was reaching new heights after his first supporting role in an independent feature film, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love directed by Maria Maggenti and released in 1995, but was cut short due to systemic negligence and the inaccessibility of antiretroviral cocktails. Who knows, without the given time and resources, if Nelson couldn’t have obtained an impressive award.

In researching and writing this essay, the least of my intentions would be to paint Nelson’s story as that of a victim. This is, while clearly denouncing the systems and institutions that failed Nelson―and generation after generation of queer folks―by ignoring and weaponizing the AIDS epidemic. I want to remember Nelson first and foremost as an artist and as a performer, who freely transitioned amongst mediums and genres in order to find his own voice as a young queer latinx individual. Who generously allowed us to peer through his artwork onto his own psychological landscape, navigating identity and oppressive patriarchal gender roles through kitschy humor and photography. Who bravely used art as a therapeutic means by which to understand, document, and testify to his own experience as a person living with HIV. Whose artwork also left us insight into his wider circle: a community of young, mostly brown and black queer creators, the challenges they faced, and also the wonderful joy of embodying their multifaceted and polyphonic²⁶ gender expressions. In representing his own ass in the way that he did, Nelson could have been struggling with his own sexuality, facing the stigmas surrounding queerness inside latinx machismo culture, as well as the real possibility of death in a world where medical institutions and pharmaceutical companies could have saved thousands by making antiretroviral drugs widely available. However, I think that in this picture Nelson was also reminding us that the rectum has provided pleasure, containment, and self-actualization for the lives of many queer individuals of different identity coordinates. Our sexuality as queer people has been a cause for interior fear and contradictions, but it is our desires that will liberate our undying art and selfhood. This here is my loving reckoning with the queer anus of color as emancipatory politics.

About the Author

aliwen (they/she) is a trans* non-binary latinx artist and curator from Chile. Their main fields of interest are artistic and curatorial practices, performance theory, politics of dissent, new ecologies, and queer experiences intersected by race. Their first book, Barricade Criticism I. Body, Writing, & Visuality, was published by Brooklyn/Santiago based publisher Sangría Legibilities in 2021. They use artivism, exhibition-making, teaching, screenings, and writing to advocate against the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS and queer experiences. They are currently enrolled in the Masters Program in Art Studies and Curatorial Practices at Tokyo University of the Arts and work as a Teaching Assistant at the Yuko Hasegawa Graduate Laboratory of that same institution. They hold a Bachelor with Honors in Art Theory and History from The University of Chile.