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Richard Rodriguez, the postmodern Hispanic autobiographer, social commentator, and essayist, a sissy? Queer? Forbid the thought! Repress the (written) word(s). Little has been written explicitly addressing Richard Rodriguez, the man and writer, as a sissy, as queer. There are various possible reasons for this. His own unwillingness to identify himself in his early writings (beginning in the mid-1970s) as homosexual, gay, or queer, despite his recent statements that he has been open about his sexuality for over twenty years, would have made it ethically problematic for literary critics to out him in their reviews of his early work (if they were aware of his sexuality), especially Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.2 Also, the political and ideological demands of cultural nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Chicano movement, which prescribed primary loyalty to racial and ethnic identification, would have limited the interpretive imaginations of their radical literary-critical supporters. Of course, the more difficult, but straight, suggestion implicit in the above explanations, would be to argue that a suppressed homophobia, a masculine and heterosexual imperative, is expressed in many of the responses to Rodriguez's work; that is, it is easier to critique and reject his work for the denials of Mexican identity and identification with AngloAmerica than for his closeted homosexuality, his secrets.3 What I will argue in this paper is that a contextualized reading of Rodriguez, his writings, and their reception (by his critics), utilizing re-
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