Hilton Als: Junot—reviewers, who are generally hemmed in by political correctness, tend to avoid the pato. I’m a pato, and I don’t feel demeaned or criticized by this epithet in your works, since I come from the same world. Can you talk to us a bit about the machismo?

Junot Diaz: This is a foundational question, really interesting. When I think about the political unconsciousness of masculinity, it’s queerness. So the first book I ever wrote was an essay, a first pass at a specific kind of masculinity, and I thought I’d name the book after the queerest story in the collection. But from everything I’ve seen, I don’t think a single critic mentioned it. It was weird, such an obvious lacuna.

Anyway, it’s something that I’m deeply interested in, and the project continued in Oscar Wao. You don’t need to be a scholar to see this character as a very queer subject. But I can’t imagine masculinity without this sort of tissue that is used to prevent any thought about its own queerness. Masculinity comes with a beard attached, so it can pretend that everything is really, really straight. As an artist, I was really interested in that, and how it plays itself out in the kind of culture where I grew up. My Dominican background is no one else’s, guys. I grew up in a tiny, granularly particular place and time, with a particular set of people. There is no universal claim, and I hope you get that. This was such a present discussion when I was growing up, that later I had to jump into it.

HA: When we were having Chinese food around Christmas time, you showed me pictures of a trip to the Dominican Republic. There was a table of queens, and I pointed out that they looked really nice and asked if they were your friends. You said they were kind of your only friends down there, because they could do sensitivity, and at the same time they could also play into the culture. That was a great discussion we had about masculinity as a kind of drag.

JD: Without any question. In Santo Domingo, there are these kind of performative, hyper-masculine spaces where you can’t have an openly gay friend. That’s the rule. Of course, the point is, you’re supposed to break all that shit. If people see you’re hanging out with a queen, they’re going to be like, “You’re gay.” It’s a way to actively patrol this. Where I grew up in New Jersey, the homo-social was okay, as long as we called it straight. It was okay that you got naked and wrestled with your boys, but that was called a sport.