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With the 2014 publication of Uruguayan journalist Leonardo Haberkorn's book, _Liberaij: La verdadera historia del caso_ Plata quemada, scholars and critics must take another look at Piglia's extraordinary 1997 novel in light of Haberkorn's intention to reveal "the truth" of the details behind the novel's story. This study explores the implications of Piglia's fictionalization of the historical events, focusing specifically on the author's decision to invent a homoerotic relationship between the two main characters —a decision that provides a key to understanding his highly complex and artistically daring version of "fake news" inspired by the events that took place in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1965. The invention of a queer relationship serves a powerful structural purpose in the novel. By means of this relationship, Piglia is able to join together two principle themes: his politically revolutionary message, as illustrated by the robbery and the spectacular scene when the characters burn the stolen money, and his socially revolutionary message that the love between two men can be imagined as equally emotionally intense and spiritually meaningful as the love between a man and a woman. And while the title of the novel may highlight the climactic act of rebellious socio-economic nihilism, the entire novel demands a conclusion that culminates in the radically subversive, emotionally charged image of Dorda cradling the dying Brignone, Piglia's queer pietà.

Renato Pellegrini's second novel, Asfalto, was published in 1964 and created a firestorm of controversy. It is one of the few novels ever banned in Argentina for reasons of "obscenity" (rather than politics) and the censorship case for this novel went all the way to the Argentine Supreme Court. As a result of the devastating legal procedures, Pellegrini stopped writing and has been relegated to the periphery of the Argentine and Spanish-American literary canon, his work remaining relatively unknown and undervalued. In this presentation, I will demonstrate why this novel and its author demand greater critical attention from researchers on the literatures of Spanish America, particularly those interested in issues of gender and sexuality and the Latin American literary canon. Although Manuel Puig's El beso de la mujer araña (1976) is often popularly cited as the first Argentine novel to treat issues of homosexuality openly from a relatively positive and affirming perspective, Pellegrini's Asfalto, pre-dating Puig's novel by twelve years, is much more revolutionary in terms of content and attitude. The novel narrates a young man's process of discovery of same-sex attraction as he leaves the provinces and enters the homosexual "underworld" of Buenos Aires in the early 1960s. Unlike earlier works that present homoerotic desire in disastrous or shameful terms, Asfalto provides the reader with perhaps the first case in Hispanic literature in which the fictional world is made up of characters who are able to express their homosexuality freely and without guilt. Further, it is also interesting to note that Puig's now infamous use of informational footnotes in El beso de la mujer araña is foreshadowed by Pellegrini's inclusion in his novel of several explanations of the nature of homosexual desire with references to scientific theory and research into the field, as well as a listing of famous homosexuals throughout history. Pellegrini's Asfalto is a groundbreaking novel that reveals the youthful promise of a literary talent that was, sadly, silenced by prejudice and fear. In addition to its literary merit, this novel also serves as a vitally important cultural document for understanding the nature of homosexual subjectivity in a specific Hispanic context, providing historical insight into the relationship between center and periphery and the power structures that have maintained and still maintain marginalized social groups in positions of inferiority.

Presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association Convention, Montréal, Canada, April 18-20, 1996 ; In this paper, I compare Borges' story "La intrusa" with Christensen's 1981 film version to note the way in which a homoerotic element in Borges' fictional world has been perceived and translated from subtle suggestivity in the written text to a more explicit visual depiction. I will then analyze Borges' subsequent horrified reaction to the more direct rendering. In the story and the film, the Nilsen brothers make use of a communal woman for the purpose of connecting physically and emotionally with each other. Christensen's reading of Borges' text shows that the erotic desire of the two men is plainly not directed towards a female, but rather towards each other, with the female as the intermediary focal point at/in which the two men may coincide. The film seems to imply that Borges has substituted an intervening female body between the men as a way to permit the men to connect physically without transgressing hetero-patriarchal prohibitions. The question in this story of fraternal love that has crossed the homosocial-homosexual continuum to the homosexual side has been an issue since the story first appeared. For that reason, Borges' intensely negative reaction to Christensen's film is all the more fascinating for what it suggests about the Argentine writer. As Balderston, Altamiranda and Silvestri have noted, Borges was so disturbed by the depiction of the Nilsen brothers as homosexual, that he penned an article in which he broke with his long-standing opposition to government censorship of media by suddenly advocating it in the case of this particular film. As I will show, I believe that Christensen's adaptation hits the target when it visually portrays a subtext that simultaneously attracted and repulsed Borges and his reaction is a clear case of "homosexual panic."