Elías
Nandino (April 19, 1900 – October 3, 1993) was a Mexican poet. Queer Places:
Biblioteca Elias Nandino Vallarta, 48500, Independencia 61, San Pedro, 48500 Cocula, Jal., Mexico
Elías
Nandino (April 19, 1900 – October 3, 1993) was a Mexican poet.
Nandino was born in Cocula, Jalisco. As a boy, he was brought up in the Catholic religion and served as an altar boy.[1] He also attended Catholic school.[1] Nandino's first homosexual encounters were apparently initiated by Catholic priests he knew.[1][2] Nandino was friends with boys who were able to express their homosexual desires secretly and discreetly at the schools.[2]
Nandino studied medicine in Cocula and Guadalajara and finally at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City where he "graduated as a surgeon in 1930."[1] From 1928 to 1934, he lived in Los Angeles, where he completed his medical internship.
In the 1930s in Mexico, physicians, teachers, accountants, journalists and other professionals stood to lose more than their clientele if exposed as homosexual in the press, as such exposure would result in banishment to the Islas Marıas Penal colony. Poet Salvador Novo and playwright Xavier Villaurrutia sought to join other Mexican sexiles in the United States or Europe, including artists José Mojica, Ramón Novarro, Roberto Montenegro, Agustın J. Fink and Enrique Asunsolo, or scientists studying abroad, like Elías Nandino and Raoul Fournier. Seeking ‘to avoid a fate as a cook, waiter, or dishwasher in New York’, Villaurrutia accepted a one-year fellowship at Yale in 1935–36, while a frantic Novo wrote to Federico García Lorca, asking him to procure him lodgings in Madrid.
Most young gay professionals abandoned boarding houses at graduation, sharing lodgings with roommates while they saved to purchase a home in the suburbs or a highrise condominium. Kin from the provinces, especially widowed mothers and siblings, could overrun young gay men’s apartments as these family members not infrequently used the bachelor as an urban anchor. This intrusive practice nonetheless afforded respectability to ‘confirmed’ bachelors as heads of household. After graduating from medical school in the early 1930s, Elıas Nandino rented a three-bedroom flat for himself, his mother, sister and a maid. Its layout afforded him privacy; his relatives ate in the kitchen while he and his guests used the dining room. With or without relatives, bachelors exercised domesticity assisted by servants, family members, neighbourhood purveyors and service providers who provided the services traditionally the preserve of the spouse. Domesticity restricted the sex life of the gay bachelor professional through its practices of consumption and display, since the bachelor pad developed as more than a space to host sex, becoming a residential showcase for his professional achievement where he hosted parties for which he cooked and prepared drinks while networking. As Steve Cohan has observed, while bachelor digs ‘may have epitomized sexual freedom’, such space also normed the single man as ‘the bachelor, who was now expected to locate his sexuality in the consumption of a whole repertoire of new products and technologies promoting masculine glamour’. Bachelors and gays are thus ambivalent figures, who, although marginalised from domestic ideology, similarly subverted and perpetuated it.
Successful upper-middle-class gay professionals purchased or custom built detached homes in the best residential neighbourhoods, too. This small elite consisted of actors, executives, upper-level government functionaries, artistic entrepreneurs and professionals – among them Elías Nandino, fashionista Henri de Châtillon, painter Roberto Montenegro and decorator Arturo Pani. Prominent physician and poet Elías Nandino’s three long-term relationships (each of which lasted three to five years) were successful thanks to his ability to compartmentalise his home life with his partners and to accommodate their disparate interests. While Nandino often practiced medicine in the ground floor of their home, his partner could easily paint or sculpt in the third-floor studio, leaving the first and second stories between them. On the first story, they housed the public areas of the home, spaces where they entertained friends and exhibited their artwork. The home’s features reproduced the dynamics of gay bars: long counters with many stools along one wall, allowing guests a panoramic view of the assembled company, and mirrored walls. On the second floor, they had their bedroom, the library and a living room where they spent time together. Despite being on the staff of various hospitals, Nandino also ran a clinic out of his home’s ground floor, a common practice during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1940s, decorator Henri de Châtillon organised his annual fashion show at his glamorous home on Paseo de la Reforma (where he also maintained his atelier), and in late 1946, Arturo Pani lived above his home decorating studio at the corner of Niza and Hamburgo. Artists often required isolation and silence to conduct their work. Roberto Montenegro’s downtown apartments in the 1950s and 1960s were studios where he often painted alone, yet he fled to his Cuernavaca retreat on weekends to host visitors or to concentrate on portrait commissions. By the late 1950s, Montenegro – a social man in his youth – grew increasingly isolated from his friends, with only Bly, his poodle, to keep him company. Understandably, he included his dog in two famous self-portraits.
The structure and design of homes answered gay households’ needs, such as a ‘modern residence for a family consisting of two persons’ advertised in 1937. Projected for an urban lot of 225 square metres, it featured a small front garden and carport, a dining room, a living room, a kitchen with butler’s pantry, a breakfast nook on the ground floor and a guest powder room. The main stairwell led to the bathroom, a small hall or den, two bedrooms, a library and a sewing room. A metal spiral staircase in the kitchen led to separate servants’ quarters on the second floor, but their rooms did not connect at all to those of the homeowners on the same floor, on the other side of the bathroom wall. Such designs guaranteed gay couples privacy – and a spare bedroom for visitors. The isolation of the master bedroom from the rest of the house, with an en-suite bathroom, facilitated pre- and post-coital hygiene. The library and sewing room offered couples separate home workspaces, or perhaps a studio for artists. Native and foreign designers decorated these modern residences. Sophisticated, natural, organic design elements incorporated elements of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairiestyle architecture – particularly in the homes society architect Jorge Rubio built – but also went well with Luis Barragán’s minimalist landscape projects. The furnishings of designers like Cuban-born Clara Porset and American expatriates Michael Van Beuren and Emmett Morley Webb allowed apartment owners to incorporate a modern aesthetic into their domestic spaces that rejected the ornate historicist aesthetics of Porfirian furnishings or the rough-hewn, quaint furniture of rural folk. Modern style thus represented the values and stability to which the middle class aspired, and offered clean lines and high-quality natural finishes. Gay interior designers such as Arturo Pani (with Jay de Laval) and Webb were also in great demand among the gay elite. Posh gays competed to outdo each other in their homes’ expressions of originality, taste and elegance. Composer Gabriel Ruiz and physician Elías Nandino constantly re-upholstered and reappointed their homes, fighting over the best tradesmen and decorators; Nandino’s one-upmanship went so far as to use fishbowls – with live fish – as lampshades.
Nandino was influenced to start writing poetry when he was seventeen, by Manuel M. Flores and writer, Manuel Acuña.[1] His was first published at age nineteen in Bohemia, in Guadalajara.[1] At UNAM, he created the journal, Allis Vivere, where students could publish their own poems and short writing.[1] Allis Vivere led to Nandino meeting Los Contemporáneos ("The Contemporaries" in Spanish), a Mexican modernist group of poets.[1] He was influenced early on by Xavier Villaurrutia and José Gorostiza.
Nandino worked as a surgeon at different hospitals during most of his life, during which he also wrote poetry.[1] He was also open about his homosexuality, but this did not affect his career as a surgeon.[1] His early poetry was rather sombre, focusing on topics like death, nighttime and dreams. From the 1950s his poetry became more personal, whereas his later poems combined eroticism and metaphysics.
In 1982, he met and had a strong influence on the Chicano poet, Francisco X. Alarcón who was impressed with Nandino's bravery in living his life as an openly gay man in Mexico City.[3] Nandino wished to support younger gay writers.[1] He became Alarcon's "role model and soul mate."[4][5]
He was editor of several publications and promoter of writing workshops. In the last years of his life he received numerous awards both for his career as a poet and for his support to literature in Mexico, such as the Aguascalientes National Poetry Prize (1979) and the National Prize for Literature (1982). He died in Guadalajara, Jalisco at the age of 93.
My published books:
