Pedro Zamora and Pedro and Me in Requiem: Scoring the Loss

THE COMICS GRID Journal of comics scholarship Lewis, A D 2015 Pedro Zamora and Pedro and Me in Requiem: Scoring the Loss. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 5(1): 12, pp. 1–8, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/cg.bf COMMENTARY Pedro Zamora and Pedro and Me in Requiem: Scoring the Loss A. David Lewis* When originally published at the turn of the century, Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned (2000) was riding both the popularity of its reality television roots and the growing awareness of homosexuality in the popular consciousness. At that time, too, Macmillan publisher Henry Holt had its own website set up to support Winick’s work; it featured interviews, tour dates, and, most importantly, omitted scenes originally drafted but not completed by the author. The opportunity to finally include this apocrypha was missed in the newer 2009 addition, as the publisher opted for a one-page afterword. This paper discusses how this constitutes a missed opportunity to reconnect with Pedro. In as much as the original graphic novel—or any graphic novel—is a construction, the tenth anniversary edition of Pedro and Me disallowed the excluded raw material from being included in audience’s score-overdue deconstruction of the work. It has been twenty years since Pedro Zamora died, yet the most recent edition of Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me graphic novel (published in 2009) failed, in some measure, to live up to its subtitle: it remained a story about Friendship but inadvertently added to the Loss by adding little to What I Learned over the past two decades. When originally published at the turn of the century, Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned was riding both the popularity of its reality television roots in The Real World and the growing awareness of homosexuality in the popular consciousness. At that time, too, Macmillan publisher Henry Holt had its own website set up to support Winick’s work; it featured interviews, tour dates, and, most importantly, omitted scenes originally drafted but not completed by the author. The opportunity to finally include this apocrypha was missed in the newer 2009 addition, as the publisher opted for a one-page afterword on Updates (p. 185) focused on characters’ expanded biographies. The shame here is that these unrealized scenes aptly reflected the unresolved issues of identity, ethnicity, and orientation raised in the content and analysis of the original edition. In as much as the original graphic novel—or any graphic novel—is a construction, the tenth anniversary edition of Pedro and Me disallowed this raw material from being included in audience’s score-overdue deconstruction of the work. Moreover, this new edition follows the original book’s visual motif of a steadily dwindling Pedro except for the restorative, positive, and, arguably, essential coda at the end, Pedro as an intact memory. For those missed opportunities to reconnect with Pedro, we should continue to mourn, even now in 2014. * MCPHS University, United States “The White Pedro” In their reviews of the 2000 first edition of Winick’s graphic novel, Ricardo Ortiz and Web Behrens each comment on the author’s unique placement—and not just as a member of MTV’s barrier-breaking The Real World cast: He’s straight, Jewish, and physically healthy, all things that fellow Real Worlder Pedro Zamora was not. “The balance he strikes is indeed delicate,” notes Ortiz (2000, p. 33), commenting on Judd’s bond with castmate Pedro. Judd engages in several balancing acts—mediating between graphic novelist and memoirist, between his television Real World personae and his real-life personality (and, even, his textual characterization), between furthering Pedro’s cause and abusing Pedro’s popularity, et cetera. Judd comes to share Pedro’s space, then fill the void left by Pedro’s death from AIDS as the series concluded its broadcast. This overlap is emphasized as the opening of Pedro and Me, where “Winick smartly contrasts his own childhood with Zamora’s in the early chapters, then brings them both together in their MTV house” (Behrens 2000, p. 34). In fact, the dual biographies that open the book shift from parallel lines of a Latino and secular Jewish American, two contrasting origins for two young men, to an intersection between friends who become strongly linked to one and another. “It also establishes that this is the story of how one (sensitive, thoughtful, and creative, but otherwise apparently conventional) young straight man from suburban America come not only to accept and to tolerate, but to embrace in friendship, and in love, a young Gay man with AIDS” (Ortiz 2000, p. 33). At certain moments (e.g., in the book’s title, during moments of friendly banter, or in these reviews), Judd and Pedro are practically equated. “Like Zamora before him, Winick emplores young people to learn how to talk about sex with their friends and partners — but most importantly, Art. 12, page 2 of 8 to value themselves” (Behrens 2000, p. 34, my emphasis). And, there seems to be a fair amount of support from both the text and cultural theorists that to read Judd as transcending his own sexual orientation & ethnicity and/ or crossing over into Pedro’s has certain merit. Looking back, though, perhaps this applause of mutual blending neglects to scrutinize categorization itself; it fails, to paraphrase Behrens, to value itself in any sort of post-racial or post-sexual contexts. In his analysis of The Real World’s third season, José Esteban Muñoz (1999, p. 155) describes Judd as simply “a Jewish cartoonist from Long Island,” presumably denoting a Caucasian ethnicity. While not necessarily an incorrect description, Muñoz’s flat designation certainly is limiting. Muñoz provides a quick rationalization: “I am aware that the preceding descriptions seem to be somewhat stock, but these were the primary identity accounts that the program offered.” That caveat hints at the incongruities of analyzing Pedro Zamura, his ethnicity and sexuality, without doing so for, and perhaps starting with, Judd’s as well. The words of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1999) and Eric Lott (1999) are helpful in this regard. In her essay, “Axiomatic,” Sedgwick says: After all, to identify as must always include multiple processes of identification with. It also involves identification as against; but even did it not, the relations implicit in identifying with are, as psychoanalysis suggests, in themselves quite sufficiently fraught with intensities of incorporation, diminishment, inflation, threat, loss, reparation, and disavowal. (p. 338) Sedgwick, in short, says that identity is sticky; one cannot befriend it, be against it, or remain entirely parallel to it without taking some of it upon one’s self. In fact, the construction of “self” is largely dependent on interaction—certainly, the construction of “whiteness” is, says Lott (1999): To assume the mantle of whiteness, these examples seem to say, if not only to ‘befrien (...truncated)