There is something so delicious about being heartbroken in a tropical paradise. What better place to offer you perspective on your grief than the vast pitilessness of the ocean? Have you ever had the exquisite pleasure of bawling your eyes out while dancing to the joyous rhythms of a salsa song with the most tragic, brutal lyrics? Don’t believe me, take it from Simón—named after the protagonist of Willie Colon’s classic queer salsa song “El Gran Varón”—the narrator of Mario Elías’ deeply moving debut novel Beloved Disciples. The novel follows Simón as he navigates first love, grief, machismo, and his complex relationship with his mother while living in an unnamed coastal town by the sea. Elías takes readers from hidden beaches tucked far away from prying eyes to underground gay bars where queer folks “swirled and collided with debauched abandon.” The result is a richly evocative novel that, like the best of salsa songs, had me laughing, crying, and blushing all at the same time.
I devoured Beloved Disciples while travelling in Spain during Semana Santa, the holy week leading up to Easter Sunday. As I read about the characters in the book grapple with faith and spirituality (particularly in the scenes that take place during the book’s own Semana Santa), I was reminded of one of the first reasons I turned to literature as a young kid: reading about how other people made it through the world helped me figure out how to make it through mine. Touring places like The Cathedral of Seville and the crypt of Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia, clocking the occasional side-eye someone threw my way over my daily uniform of high-heeled boots and crop-tops, my mind kept returning to the queer people in Elías’ book: those learning to claim space for themselves where they were told they didn’t belong, never settling for less, instead finding their own ways to be in family, in community, to love, and to worship.
Over the course of Semana Santa, I corresponded over email with Elías, a multidisciplinary artist of Cuban and Syrian descent based in Chicago. We spoke about the role of faith in his character’s lives, mapping out queer landscapes in novels, crafting multidimensional Latin mothers and, Thank God, the life changing power of butts.
The Rumpus: Let’s start with the opening scene, when the narrator Simón meets his lover at a gay bar. Simón is 25, he’s very nervous to be in this queer space, at one point he considers running out. But he stays because he sees this sexy guy, Albi, on the dance floor. There’s more to their story. But the dominating magnetic pull, at first anyway, is attraction. I found this so endearing and relatable: Personally, I planned on staying in the closet forever until one day in high school, I saw a classmate’s butt and thought, “Damn, I guess I gotta do something about this gay thing now…” What are your thoughts on sexual attraction as an inciting incident?
Mario Elías: Butts have a way of forcing us to reconsider life choices! I get it. I’m a sucker for beefy forearms, too. What an underrated body part! I just love the toeing of innocence and lust in that brief moment of acknowledging what this specific section of anatomy is doing to you emotionally, psychologically, physically (wink wink). And I think there’s this voyeuristic quality to using sexual attraction in this way, as the inciting incident so early in the story. Simón invents intimacy with Albi from afar before the two exchange a single word because he has been trained by an entire life lived inside his head. He knows no other way to be intimate than through fantasy.
Rumpus: Totally. For so many queer people, our first forays into intimacy are through fantasy because, well, that’s safer. Fortunately in the book it doesn’t stay that way. Simón and Albi do get to have a relationship in the real world, full of romance and passion. Simón yearns with a burning intensity that is sometimes borderline codependent. Though I understand it because Albi is his first love, I also wanted to shake him because he is so dickmatized! But then the story takes a shift, there is a critique of Simón’s obsessive nature, and the book becomes more about learning to stand on your own. Why was it important for you to take the story in that direction?
Elías: While I was writing this novel, I experienced a long period of grief and loss in my personal life. The story sort of warped and changed with those experiences, and the writing forced me to process those emotions head on. I think the shift you noticed has a lot to do with that real-life in real-time influence.
Originally, I wanted to explore the phases of “first love” in a sort of scientific way. That sounds annoying, but stay with me. I’m a major people pleaser, and in my earlier experiences with love, I found myself constantly bending and morphing in ways to attract or accommodate the other person. La Fea Más Bella taught me that is what you needed to do to be loved! But like Lety, I too learned that people love and respect you more when you love and respect yourself. I wanted to relive that life lesson from a place of experience and see how Simón would navigate his sense of self while on this crash course of love and loss he is forced into.
Rumpus: I’m sorry for your loss. And I’m glad you had the novel to channel that grief into and help you process it. I have a feeling reading Simón’s story will also help readers with processing their own grief, particularly romantic grief. What are you hoping this book says about love and self-worth?
Elías: I’m hoping this book allows people to see that so much of how we love and how we view ourselves is often dependent on assumptions and expectations, artificial constructs that have no business being anywhere near us. I spent a long time being unhappy with how I looked or where I was in life, and it was all made up. I invented problems to put on myself for no reason besides being self-destructive.
Rumpus: I see a lot of that in Simón, how he gets stuck in his head. Throughout the book, the past is constantly crashing up against the present, memories are often layered. Some scenes are like three-in-one: we’re in a moment in time with Simón, and he’s envisioning his younger self doing something, and also separately Albi’s younger self, and all these memories are playing at once. It’s very cinematic. On the craft level, how was it for you managing these multiple simultaneous timelines as Simón navigates his grief?
Elías: Grief has a way of collapsing time. And memories rarely come to us chronologically, anyway, so I had to create a sort of system to accommodate how I wanted those devices to play their roles in this story. It’s a hectic confluence of everything Simón has been through pinging off of each other (and some things that never happened at all) yet somehow all those disparate things relate. Simón’s psychology is heavily informed by my own thinking, from his blinking tic to his obsessive over-analysing. The real struggle for me was filtering the normalized chaos into a form that would make sense to any reader.
At times it sort of felt like a gay Rube Goldberg machine of shifting timelines and necessary narrative fulcrums to redirect the reader’s attention back to the novel’s present day. While all of this is going on in the background, I wanted tense to be the only real flag used to signal timeline jumps, so that was extremely important to get right, especially in scenes that employ multiple characters seen from multiple angles and distortions.
Rumpus: Ha! I love that. A gay Rube Goldberg machine… very Everything Everywhere All at Once… and using tense to ground us in the present moment. Speaking of grief and loss, the church plays a major role in Albi’s storyline. I feel like the easy thing to do in a queer story, and understandably so, is to focus on the suffering the church has caused us. While you acknowledge the pain, there is also comfort and even community Albi finds in religion, gaining mentorship and a father figure, and also tending to a hidden garden. In a way, he is quite literally reclaiming a space that we are often excluded from. Am I interpreting that correctly?
Elías: Yes! You got it exactly right. As Latinx people, so many of our customs and traditions have centered around Catholicism, that it has become a sort of feature beyond the Church or theology. For many people it is the structure to their week, a way to remember those who have passed, an opportunity to socialize more so than the dogma or erasure we, as queer people, needed to escape from. Reconciling the cultural aspects of it with queer identity was really important for me.
The story itself is even paced using the Stations of the Cross. Simón imagines himself as martyred saints throughout. And Albi’s garden specifically holds several layers of meaning. It can be seen as a way for this gay man to create his own version of Eden. It is an opportunity for Albi to tend to and care for something grounded in the memory of his mother, somewhere he can still visit and share his life with her.
Rumpus: At the same time, you also point out how religion can deeply change someone. One of the most fraught relationships we follow is between Simón and his mother, Cuarenta, who has grown more religious and conservative with age. Though I don’t always share her point of view, she never comes across as one-dimensional, and I understand her motivations. What was it like to flesh her out as a character?
Elías: I love Cuarenta so much. I gave her bits and pieces from so many women in my life. She is just trying to do her best with the emotional tools she’s got. She is of a generation that wasn’t allowed to ask questions; she does what she believes is right, what she was taught by her parents, by the Church. And yes, she is very often wrong, but I think that is the realest way to paint someone. Then you factor in the emotional baggage Simón has with her, her temper or stubbornness competing with Simón’s. I wanted her journey to mirror her son’s in that they both discover these truer, fully realized versions of themselves by the end of the book through their interactions with each other, not in spite of each other.
Rumpus: Right. It’s beautiful to see them both growing together. One thing that can be tough about that in queer stories is that, simply in terms of practicalities, queer people are often forced to hide. Historically we’ve been pushed into spaces that are tucked away from public sight, and only there were we free to express ourselves. In the romantic storyline, I saw that reflected in the private beach where Simón and Albi share their first kiss, in Albi’s garden, and in the abandoned house turned gay bar where they meet. As you were mapping out the landscape of the book, were you thinking of these as queer spaces? Did you have to ask yourself, “Where could these two be alone? Where could they be free?”
Elías: We aren’t afforded many spaces that we can safely and confidently express ourselves, even today. As a kid, I remember watching straight couples holding hands and being washed over by this anger and envy, knowing I wouldn’t be able to do that. When my now husband and I started dating, marriage equality still wasn’t legalized. Thinking of all the times some idiot flung a slur out a car window. The list goes on. So in this story, I wanted to craft so many spaces for the boys to be alone and be themselves that it felt like they had access to some parallel dimension. El Palomar (the gay bar), the beach, the garden, Simón’s apartment, even the empty street long past midnight. They found so many ways to be together. El Palomar specifically offered this opportunity to show Coco Tazo taking this condemned, abandoned place and resurrecting it as a safe haven of her own creation, for people like her to find a new home without conditions.
Rumpus: Yes! Let’s talk about Coco Tazo. Can you speak to me a little more about the women in Simón life: How they show up for him, and on the other side, how he shows up for them?
Elías: I’ve always been surrounded by opinionated, unflappable women, and I wanted to build characters who embodied that: even the stubbornness of Cuarenta, the manic energy of Tía Cachita. These women have been the anchors that kept me from floating away, and Simón needed them too. Simón has a whole constellation of mother figures guiding him through the story. Coco Tazo embodies this in an important way. She lost her entire family for simply existing as a trans woman, and she took that rejection as an opportunity to build the life she was meant to live and help others do the same: selfless queer mothering.
A line from the story reads, “What do you do when the hands that made you belong to a woman, and then you’re told to be a man?” Simón knows the impact these women have had on him, and he’s reconciling his incapacity to be a macho machista, his inability to step up for himself, with his deep love for and dependence on them. I’m not sure he’s fully shown up for them by the end of the book. But he knows he owes them that. He knows he has to get better in order to provide that.
Rumpus: One culturally specific thing I loved about the novel were the names. You know Latinx people have a nickname for everybody, and half the time they’re about pointing out the flaws we don’t want others to be calling out. In this book, we meet a mix of characters who had names thrust upon them—Simón’s mother is named Cuarenta, his dad is El Puñal—and queer characters who chose their own: Coco Tazo, Isabel Panocha. And I also can’t think of the narrator’s name Simón without thinking of the classic queer salsa song by Willie Colon, “El Gran Varón,” about a young kid who moves away from home and transitions. What is the role names play in these characters’ lives?
Mario Elías: Edgar! I could cry! You found so much of what I tried to pack into this story. In Latinx tradition, like you mentioned, there is this legacy of using a name to be descriptive while also making a joke at someone’s expense; it’s harsh, but it’s also storytelling magic. Naming someone imbues a sort of magic, I feel. You can convey so much information about someone with a nickname. Imagine a mother with one arm named Tetera and her son with one ear named Tacito. Why are they missing those body parts, who knows! But the naming makes an instant visual impact.
And Simón actually is named after “El Gran Varón!” My dad played that song all the time, and I’ll never forget when he explained the story behind it to me, he even explained the AIDS epidemic, and at the end he said to me, “The song sounds happy, but it’s very sad, Mayito.” And I remember thinking he meant it was sad that Simón was different, not that Simón died alone and no one cried.
Rumpus: There is definitely magic in naming, it’s like invoking a spirit… and magic in language, period. I’m always interested in the language choices bilingual authors make. The book is peppered with Spanish words and jokes and expressions, not all of them defined to readers, which created a sense of intimacy for me as someone who is also bilingual in English and Spanish. The Spanish that shows up was very, “If you know, you know.” How do you decide when to switch between English and Spanish? What stylistic choices are you making along the way?
Elías: You have no idea how happy that makes me, Edgar! I hid so many references and Latino Easter eggs in here. I wanted to create an honest depiction of the world as I knew it growing up. I needed to be honest in how the food smelled, in how the music playing vibrated everything around it, in how the specific rhythm of chancletas slapping against tile could forecast whether you were gonna get some pastelitos or a slap to the back of your head. I didn’t really decide when and where to switch languages, I tried to hear what I was writing out loud and make decisions that felt right for the moment or character. I did make a conscious choice to not include in-line translations or footnotes, because I wanted those moments to hit for bilingual readers without the flow being disrupted.
Rumpus: Girl, not the rhythm of the chancletas… that is so true. So it sounds like there was a mix of intentional decisions, and decisions that came naturally. It’s nice to have a big picture destination, but not overly plan every step you take to get there. By the end of the book, did you have a takeaway you wanted readers to leave with?
Elías: I set out to make a queer Latinx story for queer Latinx people, but this book will also find its home with anyone who feels different or is experiencing grief or loss. The main takeaway I hope readers leave with is just recognizing that we are all on our individual journeys, every person is their own main character, and we need to give grace and space and love to every person just trying to figure it out.
