Amor Eterno e Inolvidable: Queer Diasporic Practices of Latinx Identification and Mourning

My dissertation, “Amor Eterno e Inolvidable: Queer Diasporic Practices of LatinxIdentification and Mourning” analyzes three case studies of queer diasporic subjectivity and the ways that gay Latinx men are grieved and memorialized in social media sites: 1) Mexican singer Juan Gabriel who never publicly articulated his homosexuality; 2) celebrity makeup artist Jacob Yebale who lived his out queer life as he lived in the United States and worked transnationally; and 3) the victims of the Pulse Orlando nightclub, a mass shooting incident at a gay night club during their themed “Latin Night.” Connecting the fields of Latinx studies, sexuality studies, religious studies, and migration and transnational community studies, this dissertation examines how sexuality and gender are performed and transformed in diasporic and transnational contexts for queer (non-normative and Gay, Bisexual, MSM) identified men, with special attention to how the public(ized) lives of queer men impart needed information and lessons on “how to be gay” (Halperin 2014) for diasporic Latinx boys and men. I argue that the primary subjects of each chapter (Juan Gabriel, Jacob Yebale, and victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting) negotiated their own disidentifications in public media. The primary intellectual and personal goal of this dissertation is to show how queer Latinx persons utilized social media to expand the counterstories left in the wake of death--to represent and archive queer diasporic identities in public forums