TANGO EDWARDO
Herrera is cute in a sweet, naive way. He’s a young man delighted by the discovery of his own homosexuality and femininity and consequent attraction to female role models. Yet this delight is tinged with irony, because he seems to know that he can never be the women he emulates.
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Throughout Tango Edwardo, Herrera seems like a woman trapped in the body of a very gentle man. His feminine side is embodied in the Edwardettes (Erin Dailey and Marcia Jablonski), two girls who in the beginning go on shopping sprees, eat bonbons, and read trashy magazines, but later transform into some of Herrera’s female idols: Clytemnestra, Norma Shearer, Marlo Thomas, Saint Theresa, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
Herrera then ruins this vision in the poem’s last line: “[Theresa] jots down an inspired gloss on what it was like to be fucked by an angel.” Until that point the poem spoke for itself.
