THE "PERUVIAN" PALANCAS: LOVERS AND DETRACTORS

Many people email me to congratulate on my drawings, but public is divided, there are some who like the first Palancas: more rough, "cartoonesque". Others prefer them more "academic", more "classic". There are some who like extra body hair and some others like them to be moderate. But there is a particular preference in those native-peruvians with their ethnic features and attitudes, and I was thinking that was (in a very beginning) the main reason for (re)creating my men, since gay illustrators were dominantly "anglo-esques".

I gotta say, as a common peruvian I am, that I absorbed the "europeist" standards of beauty, it can be viewed in my early erotic drawings, mostly due to my hometown's urban environmet, with many european-descent sportsmen who I used to see naked in a healthy club sauna. However, those healthy clubs with white customers always hired non-white workers, native peruvians coming from out of Lima, with strong "quechua" features, who easily befriended me because I have aimara features due to my paternal grandmother, so they took me as their "brother-in-blood". Even, they easily knew and accepted my homosexual preferences, and was with them that I experimented an open, frank, possessiveless, accomplice sex that I rarely or never had with an anglo or euro-like lover.

That distorted, retarded-like vision of a social/sexual embryo world changed when I went to Spain and enjoyed a crazy summer. That made me also think about a possible openly gay life in Peru, away of those standards of finding them only in gay ghettos: why not finding gay sex betwen workers in a workshop, a factory, a wholesale, between electric technicians, between trash recyclers, heavy bulk lifters in a pier, in overnighting security guards (guachimanes) and in the military and/or police schools (grumetes or cachacos)?

Of course, there are some people, including close friends who believe that true love will never be found in those outcast, "underrated" circles, even, they think the only way to get them is with some money to spare, they could be right or not, but some other people put peasants and hampons in the same sack (maybe due to their ridiculous fear of the non-white) to accuse these people who-are-not-like-them to be habitual blackmailers able to any atrocity or crime. Anyways fuck them, blackmailers exist all over the world, it's not my task of fingerpointing prostitution in Spain, where it's a sick habit to fingerpoint sex houses between themselves.

Back to the subject that actually concerns us, in the last years I kinda "left aside" those "vindictive" peruvian aesthetics because I simply wanted to return to my old hometown fetishes, just with the task of showing exotism in the non-exotic, to say it clearly: to show suggestive or in some way provokative non-white men nudity is kinda accepted in scientist circles of the National Geographics or art galleries/museums. If you try to do the same with white guys remarking their white features as fetishes, it might be taken as cheap or even offensive. My task is just to find the "why" on this, don't blame me. Men was, is and will always be my deepest subject of study...