Octavio

Octavio is not a novel to use. It is a courageous text for the time it was published in Mexico (1982), which narrates the love encounters and disagreements of a young and intellectual man with the beautiful and banal boy that gives it its title, in which homoeroticism and his manifestation through a joyful sexuality is mixed with anecdotes and reflections that seek to answer the great questions that have always worried the human being. In this short novel, as in all those by Jorge Arturo Ojeda -a pioneer in gay literature in our language-, the author unequivocally celebrated divergent sexuality, proudly proclaiming it, vindicating virile enjoyment, rebelling against moral censorship prevailing society at that time, normalizing it by endowing it with the same joyous look that until then had been reserved for the heterosexual man when he glossed over his own sexuality. Today this work transports us to a time when sex was pure uninhibited joy, long before the AIDS pandemic profoundly altered the way gays related to each other. But this peculiar novel not only celebrates and vindicates the dissident jouissance, but it is also the story of a permanent search for beauty in all its manifestations by its protagonist, which also makes it a logbook of the loneliness of existence, despite the vital and even hopeful joy that emerges from its pages.