González.
Ricardo Pérez González describes himself “a queer Latinx writer with bacalao on his lips and salsa on his hips.” His first play, In Fields Where They Lay, got a rave from The New York Times. He has written a drag ball musical, Neon Baby, and a transgender family drama, La casa de Ocaso. He just finished writing for the third season of Netflix’s Designated Survivor. And his latest play, On the Grounds of Belonging, is enjoying its world premiere this week — at Long Wharf Theatre.
González is no stranger to New Haven; he and his partner bought a house in Newhallville when his partner taught at the Yale School of Drama for five years, and González made frequent visits. (They still own the house, which they rent out now that González spends much of his time in Los Angeles.) He was born in a trailer park in Ames, Iowa, to Puerto Rican parents. “And I’ve lived in Nebraska, Virginia, California, but always a place that was a consistent touchstone in my upbringing was Puerto Rico,” he said, on a recent episode of “Kica’s Corner” on WNHH FM. He visited family there during the summer. “That’s always been a piece of who I am.”
González started off as an actor, but noticed a “real dearth of stories for brown folk — Puerto Ricans, Latinx folk, people of color in general, and also queer folk,” he said. “I decided there needed to be more stories for us out there … more stories that represented us in all our complexities, and from our point of view. And also, I love history, and voices that have disappeared in history, voices that have been silenced in history, because black and brown folk have been here forever, and when you go to a history class in the U.S., it’s as if the world was created by Europeans.”
“We have been here since the start, and we have built so much of this country, so much if its history, so much of culture. Africa has been a seed for that. Indigenous people have been a source, a fuente, for that. Why don’t we hear those stories?”
On the Grounds of Belonging is about a biracial gay couple in Texas in the 1950s. Laws barring same-sex activity in that state were firmly in place until fairly recently; a law prohibiting sodomy, for example, wasn’t struck down until 2003. It sprang from González’s experience hearing the stories, from a former lover, of “elder queers” who crossed racial lines a generation before. “When I heard the story from my lover at the time, my first thought was ‘oh, there were racially segregated gay bars. Hm. Well, that makes sense — queer people are not immune to racism and the oppressive structures society has built.” When he thought more about it, he realized that many gay bars still felt racially segregated. “You only need go to Grindr to see ‘whites only’ signs still very much alive.”
He learned then of activists who had pushed to desegregate queer spaces. “I was just really compelled to write this story,” he said. Though he also said, with a chuckle, that when he was done, he stepped back and said, “oh, it’s Romeo and Juliet.” Though “it has a basis in history and the reality of the stories I heard.”
On the Grounds of Belonging is also part of a trilogy that follows queer love through the ages — from the 1950s, to the 1980s, to the present day. “What was death when it was done to us? What was death when it was the waters in which we swam? What is death when it’s something we choose for ourselves?”
“Is it hard to get these stories on stage?” Matos asked.
“Oh yeah,” González said. “It really takes a visionary like Jacob Padrón,” Long Wharf’s artistic director, “and a wonderful director, somebody like David Mendizábal,” which whom González has worked in the past, “to really advocate for you. Because, first off, there is a real hunger … for authentic and raw storytelling. There is a greater demand for stories of color, queer stories. But the margin is very narrow. I still think theaters often think they can have the one every five years.”
Then, in many cases, plays about people of color can be a kind of “torture porn” or “victim porn,” González continued. They are “stories of people being oppressed, and not much hope, and non-people of color get to see that and feel as if they’ve had an experience.” González doesn’t denigrate those stories; he just wants a greater range of stories told.
“Because my work is both about people of color and queer, it gives people more incentive to say, ‘I don’t know about that — that’s not our target audience’” His work is also “incessantly hopeful, and that can be not what everybody wants in this day and age — which seems really counterintuitive to me, but it’s a part of what my struggle is.”
To listen to the full interview with Ricardo Pérez González, click on the file below.
