Pride, Pain, and the Taste of Cocks: What Camila Sosa Villada’s Novel Reveals About Masculinity

I’m a straight, cis, white male writer from Europe. I write poetry (mostly) and some prose. I often write about masculinity. And I know the risk in that.

Because for men like me, masculinity is often written as myth, armour, instinct, legacy. It’s rarely interrogated as damage. As debris. As performance held together by silence and fear. When I want to write truthfully about masculinity, I look elsewhere. I look at queerness. I look at the margins. And few books have opened my chest like The Queens of Sarmiento Park by Camila Sosa Villada.

It’s a novel that smells of sweat, glitter, semen and saints. It’s furious and tender. It reads like a bruise that talks back. It doesn’t want your pity or your theory. It wants your witness. Villada doesn’t write for comfort. She writes for the dead, the disappeared, the dazzling ones.

And through it all: blood, motherhood, flight, and one unforgettable, shit-covered baby

The Father’s Gun: The Inheritance of Violence

Camila, the narrator, the travesti whose life unspools across the pages, begins her story in poverty, in brutality, in a home where masculinity comes with a gun.

“The doctors refused to give her a cesarean until my father threatened the head doctor. He put a gun to his head…”

This image stayed with me. Not because of its shock, but because of its normality. That’s what Villada is showing us, masculinity not as occasional violence, but as expected coercion. As care reconfigured into threat.

Camila’s father is a man who teaches her to work, teaches her to fear, teaches her to be silent. His lessons are in hunger and humiliation. The kind of masculinity passed from father to son like a curse.

I recognise it, not the extremes, but the logic. The quiet ways masculinity teaches us that domination is love. That softness is weakness. That shame is part of becoming a man. Camilla’s father is utterly ashamed of what his son becomes after this violent birth scene.

Fortunately, Camila escapes these clutches. But you never really outrun that kind of inheritance.

A Shit-Covered Baby and the Gospel of Queer Motherhood

One of the book’s most unforgettable scenes, maybe one of the most unforgettable I’ve ever read, comes when Auntie Encarna )a mother figure who we’re told is almost 200 years old) finds a baby abandoned in the reeds. Camila narrates the moment:

“She gets scratched as she reaches down to rescue the child from his tomb of thorns. Her skin starts to bleed, staining the cuffs of her blouse. She looks like a veterinary midwife shoving her hands into a mare to pull out a foal. She feels no pain, doesn’t even notice the cuts… He’s covered in shit, the stink is unbearable. Gagging and bleeding, Auntie Encarna hugs him close to her chest…”

That is motherhood. Not the polished, pastel version. This is birth as blood ritual. A nativity scene dragged through dirt and thorns, rewritten with waste and feral, unflinching love. Or maybe it’s Moses in the reeds, dragged from the muck by queer hands that know how to save. Either way, it’s biblical.

The travestis of Sarmiento Park don’t just rescue the baby. They raise him. This isn’t charity. It’s kinship. It’s politics. It’s a radical reimagining of family beyond biology, beyond gender, beyond the violence that left that child for dead.

Villada reframes care as ritual, not role. These aren’t men-as-women “playing” mother, they are real mothers. Fierce. Funny. Unapologetically loving. And when faced with the threat of state intervention, their instinct isn’t compliance. It’s protection at all costs.

“No!” barks Auntie Encarna. “Not the police! You can’t give a child to the police, it’s the worst thing you can do!”

Because the state doesn’t save kids like this. The state abandons them, criminalises them, disappears them. But Auntie Encarna doesn’t blink. The boy is covered in shit and blood, but she doesn’t flinch.

“The boy stays with me. He’s coming home with us.”
“But how are you going to get him home?”
“In my purse. Look: he fits perfectly.”

It’s comic. It’s holy. It’s punk as hell.

This is motherhood not as obligation, but as sacred defiance. A band of sex-working travestis carrying a newborn through the city like it’s the most natural thing in the world, because for them, it is. They know the world won’t recognise this act as legitimate. But they don’t need permission.

This isn’t a metaphor for found family. This is family. Built in the face of abandonment. Built in spite of law and bloodlines and shame. It’s also a version of hegemonic masculinity! It’s protectiveness.

Queer care in this novel isn’t soft. It’s survival. It’s militant. And it’s beautiful.

María la Muda and the Magic of Not Disappearing

Later, another miracle: María la Muda, the mute, ethereal sister who barely speaks, climbs to the rooftop—and becomes a bird, after slowly developing feathers from her mid-riff.

In another book, that would be a metaphor. Here, it’s gospel.

She doesn’t die. She transforms.

But here’s what makes it unbearable and beautiful: she doesn’t fly away. She stays. Auntie Encarna keeps her in a cage. Not to trap her, but to honour her. María becomes a living myth, grief with wings. A spirit kept close. Maria in the cage is like the memories of those who have passed in your hearts and minds.

As a European male reader, I expected flight to mean freedom. But Villada complicates that. María’s transformation isn’t escape, it’s presence. It’s memory that sings back. It’s death that doesn’t leave. It’s grief that perches beside you.

She’s not gone. She’s still there. And it hurts.

That, to me, is where the novel’s power throbs hardest. Villada doesn’t give us easy transcendence. She gives us transformation that lingers. In cages. In kitchens. In bodies and breath.

The Taste of Cocks and the Poetics of the Profane

You should know, Villada doesn’t write for delicate palates. Her language is visceral, sexual, and unsanitised:

“To this day I can’t understand what it is we like so much about such an insipidly flavoured piece of flesh.”

“COCKS DON’T TASTE OF anything.”

These aren’t just jokes. They’re rejection slips to fetishisation. To Western voyeurism. To the idea that queer bodies exist to be exoticised or pitied.

As a male reader from a culture where phallic worship is still embedded in humour, sport, politics, even art, this pulled the rug out. Villada takes the phallus, the supposed seat of masculine power, and renders it… bland. Insipid. A dead end. Tasteless!

This is not a novel that reveres male bodies. It dissects them. It laughs at them. And in doing so, it exposes how much of masculinity is illusion held together by fear and performance.

A Gospel From the Margins

What Villada has written is more than a novel. It’s a sacred text of resistance. A howl. A hymn. A middle finger raised with sequins on it.

She centres travesti lives not as tragedy, but as miracle. She writes sex workers as prophets. She writes motherhood as a punk act. She writes masculinity as ruin, but not without hope. She gives us other ways of being.

For someone like me, who benefits daily from structures this novel indicts, the work isn’t to relate. It’s to read. To sit with the discomfort. To write differently.

I won’t forget the shit-covered baby.

I won’t forget María in her cage.

I won’t forget the how the cocks taste, or don’t.

Camila Sosa Villada is a groundbreaking Argentine writer, actress, and performer whose work has become central to contemporary queer and travesti literature in Latin America. Her voice is unapologetic, poetic, and politically charged — shaped by lived experience and committed to giving voice to those long silenced or distorted by mainstream narratives.

Villada didn’t write this book for me. But she changed how I write. And maybe, if I carry it right, that’s enough.