ABSTRACT
When I moved from Santa Cruz to San Francisco in 1992, my boyfriend Gilberto and I agreed that he would follow as soon as a decent job presented itself. In December, 1993, Gilberto accepted an administrative position at a dance company in the city, and we began to make plans. When Gilberto drove up two weeks before Christmas, however, he arrived empty-handed. Instead of laying down the rugs and imagining furniture arrangements as we had discussed on the phone the night before, he came to tell me the relationship was over. He could no longer tolerate my emotional unavailability and the way my obsessive devotion to my work dominated all other aspects of our lives. Since that weekend, I have made it a priority to understand and overcome my workaholism. Ironically, writing the present essay occupies a middle ground—somewhere between part of the recovery process, and part of the resistance to that recovery, or at least part of the confusion I at times feel about where work stops and life begins. 1 I pose the following stories as questions as much as I offer them as explanations; my narratives neither presume nor will they propose an essential nature for any of the social identities they adumbrate. The personal history I venture here is thus also an interrogation of its own key terms, including “identity,” “race,” “gender,” and “class.” Although I do not attribute to any of these concepts a substantial “truth,” I insist upon the dynamic reality of their operations in all areas of personal and social life. I delineate this reality of effect most dramatically when I describe how Gilberto and I negotiated race, sexuality, class, and gender within our relationship, and how these terms conditioned that relationship and overdetermined its failure. Beyond the intellectual and political agendas that motivate and inform this experiment, I write this essay as a means of self-understanding, a reflective act within the very practice that occasioned my loss. I also believe both Gilberto and I deserve an analytical account of my emotional inertia that does not excuse it. This essay, then, is a critical inquiry traversed by a personal reassessment within the processes of mourning and healing; it is in places a recuperative commemoration of the joys and the victories within the relationship that its end should not efface; it is here and there an apology; perhaps a step toward self-forgiveness, and running throughout the text and sustaining its audacity, it is a love letter.
