“Aristotle & Dante” is groundbreaking in a world that lacks queer Hispanic role models

Gay Mexican author Benjamin Alire Sáenz recently had his frequently banned 2012 young adult novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, adapted into a feature-length film.

The book and film follow two queer 15-year-old Mexican boys who develop a deep relationship in 1987 El Paso, Texas. It’s groundbreaking, considering the lack of gay films focused on Hispanic teens, and it’s exactly the sort of film that could have made me (and many other Hispanic queers) feel more normal and less alone growing up.

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As a gay Mexican youth in Texas during the 1980s and ’90s, I didn’t have any role models of my own race and sexuality to look up to. I didn’t speak Spanish, which limited my understanding of Hispanic media. I was also afraid to ask for gay books and films for fear of being outed. My straight and machismo father seemed to dislike gay people, I couldn’t communicate with my mother’s Spanish-speaking family, and my Mexican-American classmates sometimes teased me for “always trying to act white.”

At the time, most gay films were tragic flicks about men dying of AIDS or being gay-bashed. Many of them featured effeminate older men whom I didn’t relate to. So all I had for gay role models in media were the white cross-dressing sexual misfits in The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Tom Hanks’ Hispanic lover in Philadelphia, Angel the HIV-positive drag queen in the musical Rent, and the nude Hispanic models in Latino Inches magazine — I didn’t really want to become like any of them.

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Like me, the titular heroes of Sáenz’s book don’t feel Mexican enough for other Mexicans and feel too Mexican to be accepted by other white Americans. They don’t fit in: surrounded by other boys who drool over girls, parents who largely keep their hard feelings to themselves, and a world that seems hostile to gay people’s existence. Aristotle — who is guarded, self-deprecating, and from a working-class family — doesn’t want to be defined solely by his family or sexual orientation. But he eventually has his world and self-perception expanded when he befriends Dante, an outspoken and eccentric son of an English professor.

The same thing happens when we see art that reflects our own lives. In fact, Sáenz — who came out after a 15-year marriage at the age of 54 — said that writing the book helped him heal and make peace with his own closeted life and abuse growing up.

Similarly, the film’s director, a transgender Cuban-American woman named Aitch Alberto, underwent her own gender transition while making the film. She said the book mirrored her own journey coming to terms with her identity — reading it “unlocked” something in her that made her realize that she wanted to tell stories like these to others.

“[The] world … has very strong narratives about what being a man is,” Sáenz told Publisher’s Weekly. “To be a man is often treated as more important than being good, being decent, and being respectful. Men aren’t expected to be kind. Men are always proving to each other that they’re ‘real’ men, not good but real. Gay men were, and still are, out of that picture.”

“We form our identities by looking at people we identify with or people our own age that we admire,” he continued. “My friends gave me a different perspective on myself, and they taught me how to be generous, taught me that kindness mattered, taught me how to forgive, and also taught me how to ask for forgiveness. My friends expanded my universe, taught me words, gave me a sense of self-worth…. My friends are not like my family — they are my family. It isn’t just parents who give you your values. Our friends do that too. Learning how to be a friend is one of the most important lessons I have ever learned.”

While conservatives were busy banning Aristotle and Dante for its rather mild depictions of gay teen sexuality, drug use, and violence, the book was busy winning awards: The Pura Belpré Author Award for excellence in depicting the Latino cultural experience, the Stonewall Book Award for excellence in depicting the LGBTQ+ experience, and a Michael L. Printz Honor for excellence in teen literature.

“I wanted my audience to know that there is a wide variety of Mexican-American experience in this country,” Sáenz said. “I wanted to represent two very different Mexican-American families… There are working-class families like Ari’s, and professional Mexican-American families… and they’re never portrayed; there’s lots of anti-Mexican rhetoric that says we’re all illegals, all recent immigrants. None of this is true.”

In 2021, Sáenz wrote a sequel, entitled Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, which became a New York Times best seller. Unlike the original, the sequel dives deeper into the HIV epidemic which wasn’t mentioned in the first book and only briefly referenced in the film. Sáenz said he regretted omitting the epidemic from his original novel, but he wanted to use the sequel to show what it means to keep loving someone in this difficult world.

“Young people should know about that era and what it meant for queer people because it ushered in the modern-day movement for gay liberation,” the author said. “Love stories do not happen in a cultural or societal vacuum. And the young members of the LGBTQ+ community deserve to know their history.”

“I write to give young people hope,” Sáenz said. “Because I think the world conspires to take their hope away. And I also understand that, as a writer, I’m also an educator. These young people of the world are my children. And I think we should all think that way. They are our children, we are responsible to educate them, to love them, and take care of them. And that’s our job.”