BUENOS AIRES — When Chilean writer Cristian Alarcón was six years old, he was once briefly left home alone, and snuck into his mother’s closet to try on her dresses and earrings. Surprised when his parents returned sooner than expected, he fell and broke an earring as he tried to quickly undress before they saw him.
“It’s the end of the world,” his mother muttered, not for the first time. His parents would send him for testosterone injections, and other treatments over the years, they hoped would stop him from becoming gay.
Getting caught in his mother’s dress is evoked on stage today as a pathetic, poignant moment in Alarcón’s play Testosterona, at the Astros theater in Buenos Aires.
He’s “no actor,” the 53-year-old writer admits, discussing the work with Clarín, but wants to share how he felt physically and emotionally as a child who had to suffer through his parents’ attempts to “cure” him of being gay. Alarcón’s achievement is telling his story with a mix of sadness and humor, and no shortage of strong feelings.
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Reacting to the signs of incipient homosexuality including the dress-and-earring incident, Alarcón’s parents sent him to psychologists but also for injections, though the little boy had no idea what was being injected until there were visible signs.
He had 25 years of uninterrupted therapy and 30 years in total, though he says he’s “not bitter” toward his parents, Sonia and Efraín Alarcón, now in their late 70s. They live in Cipolletti in central Argentina, where they moved from Chile when Cristian and his brother were children.
The aging couple have yet to see Testosterona, in which their son talks about sexuality, and his night-life escapades as a student in Ciudad de la Plata and later in Buenos Aires, as a journalist. “I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable knowing they’re in the audience,” he says. “They haven’t insisted and I’m not expecting them to come.”
No need for confessions
Author of two non-fiction books and father to a 21-year-old adopted son, Alarcón, says he’d asked his mother about the injections when he was 23. “She didn’t say much,” he recalls.
He abruptly asked her again in 2020 about the number of injections he had been given, to which she replied, eight. He had caught her off-guard as she was serving food, he says, so she then hesitated and rectified, saying she couldn’t remember.
“I don’t think it’s important that she confesses to anything. I had no need for the definitive truth,” he says.
His body was harmed and changed, but is reborn.
More recently while rehearsing Testosterona, he says he took her out for lunch and asked her again to tell him as much as she could about his treatment. “She couldn’t remember the pediatrician’s name and denied that the psychologist in charge of me between the ages of 6 and 9 knew I was being injected,” he says. “I found the psychologist. She said she had burned the records and had no recollection of me. I dare say she was lying.”
Alarcón says of his parents that it is too late to seek “revenge and ruin their lives. I love my parents deeply and I want the time we spend together really to be quality time.”
Body and snow
Another Alarcón’s obsession is his body, and he takes off his shirt at one point in the performance to dance to techno music with the other actor on stage, Tomás de Jesús, evoking the gay clubs he frequented in the 1990s.
He has a knife cut on his arm, left by one of the two boys who mugged him at home after he invited them back one night. The play brings out his fears of what testosterone could have done to his body. It is a body that was harmed and changed, but is reborn, he says.
Alarcón also recalls how his family crossed the snow-covered Andes when they moved to Argentina that winter in the 1970s, and the car broke down, prompting his mother’s “end of the world” fears of freezing to death in the middle of nowhere.
Alarcón wants the play to conjure the “snow storms, noise, fury and confusion” of life, which he has weathered. He admits his frenetic and voracious personality, and his work addiction, haven’t done much for his fatherhood.
Like with his parents, he wants to spend “the best possible quality time” with his son, Pablo. “He’s afraid he won’t know how to care for me, since I always want it all,” he says.
But then Alarcón adds after briefly closing his eyes, “I’ve realized you don’t need it all.“
