Art's Forgotten Widow

Juan Rivera and Keith Haring around the time they met in 1986 at the Paradise Garage

When the internationally famous pop artist Keith Haring died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, he left behind a complicated legacy of collaborative work with street artists, graffiti-inspired murals, world-renowned homoerotic icons that straddle the line between art and commerce, and a multimillion-dollar foundation that would promote his work. He also left his partner of his later years, Juan Rivera, with whom he lived until shortly before his death, out of his will. Rivera had arrived in New York from a poor inner-city Connecticut neighborhood toward the end of the 1970s as a runaway. After Haring’s death, Rivera would return to a small apartment in Spanish Harlem, where he now lives, struggling to survive and keep his HIV status in check.

In his most recent book, Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails (Palgrave 2007), Fordham University professor Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé revisits their relationship as a metaphor for the turbulent and complex 1980s. Hard Tails is a mold-breaking testimonial of the life and times of Juanito (Xtravaganza) Rivera.

I first met Professor Cruz-Malavé in June 2008 at a bilingual reading for Los Otros Cuerpos, the first anthology of queer Puerto Rican writing, organized at the Clemente Soto-Vélez Cultural Center in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and was awed by the power of his word. When I read Hard Tails, I was entranced by its revolutionary character, organization, and ability to capture what I had so vividly witnessed as a Cuban–Puerto Rican kid growing up in the Bronx: the evolution of hip-hop from an inner-city, war-zone cultural expression to a global force. I sat down with Cruz-Malavé at a Colombian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he lives with his spouse, dancer Greg de Silva. Over hearty bowls of Colombian sancocho we discussed his exceptional Hard Tails. 

Advocate.com:HardTailsillustrates the joys and dilemmas of Juanito (Xtravaganza) Rivera in an unorthodox yet fascinating format. Could Juanito’s story have been written as a traditional biography, or would that have been too limiting?
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé:Hard Tails is a book that grew organically out of my relationship with Juan Rivera, the Juanito Xtravanganza of the title, though I reflected long and hard about the book’s structure and think now that it is one of its most important accomplishments. I could have written it as a biography, as some publishers wanted me to do, but it would have flattened out the book’s dialogic character -- that is, not only the dialogue between Juan and me, or between Juan’s and Keith Haring’s lives, but also the dialogue among the multiple voices and genres contained in the book.

Hard Tails is a sort of queer testimonio, the well-known Latin American testimonial novel or memoir, which became so popular and almost canonical in American colleges throughout the 1990s, or a queering of testimonio as a genre. In conventional testimonio, you know, the author or “editor” erases the traces of the multiple interviews with a socially marginalized character that produced the text in order to give the impression that one is, as it were, seamlessly peering into a life and world one would never have access to by reducing all dialogue to a first-person account. With Hard Tails I wanted to do the opposite. I wanted the reader to be self-consciously aware of the text’s production, to engage with it, to stop and listen before rushing to judgment, to interpret and reconstruct, not merely as an experimental flourish but as an ethical act, as a way of giving back.