Seven titles about being a queer immigrant

David Santos Donaldson was raised in Nassau, Bahamas, and has lived in India, Spain, and the United States. He attended Wesleyan University and the Drama Division of the Juilliard School, and his plays have been commissioned by the Public Theater. He was a finalist for the Urban Stages Emerging Playwright Award and has worked as the Artistic Director for the Dundas Centre for the Performing Arts in Nassau, Bahamas. Donaldson is currently a practicing psychotherapist, and divides his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Seville, Spain. Greenland is his first novel.

At Electric Lit he tagged "seven novels [that] collectively give a wide perspective from the queer immigrant’s vantage point," including:

Latin Moon in Manhattan by Jaime Manrique

In this rollicking picaresque novel, Manrique’s protagonist, Santiago Martinez, is a young Colombian poet, navigating his way through the turbulent—and often hilarious—trials of being both gay and a newly-arrived immigrant in New York City in the 1980s. From a rural Colombian upbringing (where bestiality is presented as common place for boys’ sexual initiations), to the social world of the drug-dealing rich Colombian families and their literary politics in Queens, to the life a of a lone gay writer living in Times Square (along with its sex workers and their pimps), we fall in love with Santiago and his take on the new worlds he encounters. In Latin Moon in Manhattan, Manrique brilliantly pulls off a novel that is, at once, literary, social critique, comic, tragic, and heartwarming. Quite a feat.

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue