Flesh Wounds and Purple Flowers Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco Paperback - 160 pages (1 August, 2001) Arsenal Pulp Press; ISBN: 1551520982

THE GAY LATINO VERSION OF VALLEY OF THE DOLLS
A tragicomic story of a Chilean drag queen's travels through North America
FLESH WOUNDS & PURPLE FLOWERS takes the reader into the world of Latino machos and cha-cha divas of Santiago's gay underground, full of dreamers and schemers looking for salvation abroad. One of them is Camilo, a strong-willed queen who makes it out of Chile in the early '80s, but en route to New York lands in Vancouver, where he decides to stay. All the while he maintains contact with a starry network of machos and maricones in Chile, Cuba, and America; as well as an exiled gringa with a mysterious past, a straight lover left behind in crumbling Havana, and a transsexual confidante in Santiago. Told in the musical lilt of Spanglish, Camilo tells his story as he lays dying in his hospital bed, recalling a life of sequins, disco, and a plague that is at the same time debilitating and liberating.

Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco was born in Chile and has lived in Canada since 1985. He works as a community educator and social researcher in Vancouver, and his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Best Gay Men's Fiction 2000, Contra/diction: New Queer Men's Fiction, and Hockey Night in Canada.

Paperback, good condition