Después de todo

This novel, published as early as 1969, tells the story of Javier Lavalle, a homosexual man who assumes himself as such without fear and who takes his choice of life to the ultimate consequences. Young and brilliant university professor, with a weakness for his most beautiful students -with whom he develops all kinds of seduction strategies-, he is forced to leave his chair and his provincial city after a scandal that breaks out as a result of an attempted blackmail, thereby destroying a promising career as a teacher. Refugee in the anonymity of the immense Mexico City, he is losing his youth, increasingly beset by poverty, forced to satisfy his sexuality through venal relationships with street boys who come over and over again to his house offering paid caresses, in spite of which he does not stop assuming and claiming his difference: "I will be as I am until the complete absence of sexual appetite or until death. And I confess: I like my state; but at the same time I point out: I did not choose it". A pioneering work in defense of the right of people to live their dissident sexuality freely, with a splendid narrative rhythm and great literary quality, it is considered the most influential homosexual-themed novel in Mexican literature, although today in that country it is unfindable outside of libraries and archives. In Spain it is now published for the first time, more than 50 years after its appearance.