This panel turns to poetry and poetics to explore the multiple affective and aesthetic valences of the old, the elder, the ill, and the declining in Spanish-language queer studies. We must recognize that age for queer subjects is always relative: who counts as an elder among populations that may not live past their 30s? We turn to a range of queer voices for insight, who invite us to consider how experiences of duration and decline are unevenly distributed for queers through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And so, this panel departs from a series of questions that the old queens might help us respond: how does aging signify for the queer poet; how do the affective cadences of the obsolete, the decrepit, or the dogged appear in poetry; and how do knowledges of duration and survival transfer through poetic circuits of queer memory.
With this context in mind, César Cañedo analyzes the transitions into old age in the poetic self-perception of two fundamental figures in the Mexican queer poetic tradition: Salvador Novo (1904-1974) and Abigael Bohórquez (1936-1995). Cañedo examines poetic space, the construction of an aging ‘self,’ and the emotional tonalities of growing old, for Novo, ironic and corrosive, and for Bohórquez sick, loving and nostalgic. He proposes a reading of queer aging based on the poetic self-image, allowing for an understanding of the transitions and becomings of queer old age in Mexican poetry as a testament to their own journeys.
Next, Ian Russell offers an interpretation of readers and translators of Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) during and after the HIV/AIDS crisis. The curmudgeon Cernuda lived several decades in exile in the USA and Mexico after the Spanish Civil War and often wrote in letters about his dismay around getting old. His late poetry takes up this dismay formally and thematically and, for this paper, Russell describes how Cernuda’s poetics subsequently influence following generations of queer writers affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis. By reading for poetic dialogues across generations of queer poets, we can begin to locate alternative temporal practices of resistance and survival that might have been available to the afflicted.
Finally, Alejandro Castro examines the imbrication of homosexuality and madness in the work of Venezuelan poet Armando Rojas Guardia (1949–2020). In Rojas Guardia, madness operates as a lived correlate of homosexuality and one of the centrifugal forces structuring his subjectivity. The paper analyzes the poem “La desnudez del loco” alongside the short film Recuerdo de mi loquera (2010), in which Rojas Guardia revisits his experiences of institutionalization. Castro argues that the figures of the loca (a derogatory term for a gay man) and the loco (the psychiatric patient) become increasingly indistinguishable within the poet’s work and, ultimately, that queer desire and psychiatric vulnerability become legible as overlapping regimes of abjection.
Taken together, this panel proposes that queer aging in Spanish-language poetry must be approached as a set of historically situated negotiations with precarity, illness, and survival. We trace how the figure of the queer elder emerges as a fragile achievement—one shaped by exile, disease, institutionalization, and marginalization across the Americas. What becomes visible is that poetry is a privileged site for both registering temporal discontinuities and staging forms of affective and aesthetic persistence. The “old queen,” the exile, and the patient actively reconfigure what aging can mean under conditions where longevity remains uncertain. We hope the panel and follow-up discussion will probe the limits of neoliberal ‘progress,’ the problem of inheritance, and the role of poetry in mediating memory, loss, and the ongoing struggle for queer survival.