One hundred years ago this month, in November 1924, Weird Tales came back. It had been gone for three months by its cover date but closer to six or even seven in actuality. The last issue before the hiatus was the first and only quarterly issue of the magazine, dated May/June/July 1924. There was an overhaul of the magazine, the business behind the magazine, and some of its staff in that time. There was a new editor in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright, and a new cover artist, Andrew Brosnatch (1896-1965). Brosnatch's first cover illustration was for a story called "Teoquitla the Golden" by a pseudonymous author, Ramòn de las Cuevas.
Ramòn de las Cuevas was actually the archaeologist, anthropologist, and museum curator Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971). He is supposed to have taken his nom de plume from the name of a Spanish-American historian. I haven't found a historian by that name, but Harrington mentioned a historian called Las Casas in his story. He was Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566). I wonder if Harrington transmuted las Casas' name to arrive at his own pseudonym. In Spanish, las Casas means "the houses," and las Cuevas, "the caves." And so Ramòn de las Cuevas means "Ramòn of the Caves." Harrington's middle name, by the way, was Raymond.
I think caves meant something to Harrington. In his story, he wrote:
Dr. Branson turned to his new friend, Lewis, who lolled in a deck-chair beside him. "I'll bet," he suggested, "the old Indians used to have great times up in those caves before Brother Columbus butted in!"
"Yes," agreed his companion, "the Cronistas tell us that the Taino tribes held some of their most important ceremonies in caves."
"Teoquitla the Golden" was Harrington's only story in Weird Tales. I wonder if there was an original in the folk tales, mythologies, or histories--the European Cronistas--of Mesoamerican Indians. If so, he would have been the right person to have come across it.
Set in Mesoamerica, "Teoquitla the Golden" is about an American explorer named Robert Sanderson who discovers a place called Nahuatlan, located "in the Hidden Valley, the last stand of the Aztec nation." The discovery of a hidden or lost valley is a convention in genre fiction. You can call it a trope if you want. Otherwise, "Teoquitla the Golden" is a very unusual story. And I mean very unusual.
I'll cut to the chase: "Teoquitla the Golden" is about the transformation of a man into a woman. This isn't by any of the fake-scientific or pseudo-medical butchery employed today. The transformation is actually carried out with ancient ways and the use of potions--evidently plant-based--blown into the man's body through straws. (Is he a genetically modified organism?) The transformation is gradual. It is also complete. I should add that Sanderson did not like women before his transformation. His weird is that he would become something he once disliked. This idea makes me think of the movie Watermelon Man (1970) starring Godfrey Cambridge and directed by Mario Van Peebles.
I'm surprised that Weird Tales would have printed a story like this one in 1924, but then it was "The Unique Magazine." "Teoquitla the Golden"--the title refers to the man after he has been transformed into a woman--is an unusual and weird story, but it isn't told in a weird or sensationalistic way. The tone is actually pretty even, as you might expect from a man working in a science-based discipline. And the narrative is sympathetic to the man in his transformed state.
The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has an entry on what it calls "Transgender SF," SF indicating science fiction. Science fiction is of course supposed to be based in science--real science and not fake. Science is right there in the name of the genre after all. Transgenderism, though, is not scientific. There is no science in it. In fact it's antiscientific, as well as pseudoscientific. Its true nature is political. In fact, transgenderism is a political belief system that is totalitarian in all of its intensity, scope, and ambitions. If you doubt that, just speak those words and wait for the blowback from people who want you not only to shut up, but who also want to force you to accept, embrace, and internalize their belief system. If you transgress, you must grovel in apology. You must be humiliated into speaking lies as the truth. And if you hold to the truth, you must be silenced, shouted down, banned, canceled, ostracized, and even fined or imprisoned. Dissent simply cannot be tolerated. Once you have spoken the truth, it won't take long for them to lash out. They are likely to be exceedingly vicious in doing it. Don't falter, though. Stand up for yourself, and tell it like it is. In this, it's helpful to have knowledge of the totalitarian principle, possibly first articulated in genre fiction: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." This is how they think. You must agree with them. And if you won't on your own, you must be made to agree. This is what they have planned for you. So remember: to be forewarned is to be forearmed against their certain assaults.
As for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, it has obviously been ideologically captured, the evidence of that being, if nothing else, its use of the phrase "gender reassignment surgery," which is a atrocious euphemism for the mutilation and removal of breasts and genitalia: healthy and normally functioning tissues and organs, removed from healthy and normally functioning human bodies, including--and seemingly as an especial target--the bodies of children. And here I thought the first command of medicine is to do no harm.
I hesitated to write about "Teoquitla the Golden." I don't like to fuel people's delusions and ideological insanity. I also don't want to point the way to a work of art that will no doubt be used for propagandistic--i.e., anti-art--purposes. But this blog is about Weird Tales, its authors, artists, stories, and poems, and so I feel an obligation to do it. This is also an anniversary, the 100-year anniversary of what very well could have been the first sex-switch in the history of pulp fiction. And "Teoquitla the Golden" is actually a good and interesting story. But if you read it, you should set aside your twenty-first-century self and attempt to read it in the mindset of a person from one hundred years ago. Forget politics. Forget insanity. Remember art and literature and their purposes.
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| Weird Tales, November 1924. Cover story: "Teoquitla the Golden" by Ramòn de las Cuevas. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. Considering the subject matter of the story, you could take Brosnatch's last name as an obscene pun. Try not to. |
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