Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

La Fountain-Stokes's academic writing has focused mostly on queer Puerto Rican culture. His book Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) discusses LGBT Puerto Rican migration from a cultural studies perspective, with chapters on Luis Rafael Sánchez, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luz María Umpierre, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Rose Troche, Erika Lopez, Arthur Aviles, and Elizabeth Marrero. Queer Ricans is based on La Fountain-Stokes's Ph.D. dissertation, which he wrote under the supervision of Jean Franco. The author received funding for this project in 1997 from the International Migration Program at the Social Science Research Council.

La Fountain-Stokes is best known as an author of short stories, but he has also published poetry and received awards for his plays. His first book of fiction, Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2009), includes 14 short stories written in the 1990s and early 2000s, some of them while the author was enrolled in a creative writing workshop taught by the Chilean author Diamela Eltit. His second book, Abolición del pato, was published by Terranova Editores in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2013. His fiction has also appeared in a number of anthologies such as Bésame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction (1999), Los otros cuerpos: Antología de temática gay, lésbica y queer desde Puerto Rico y su diáspora (2007), and From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (2011). He has also published in journals and websites such as Blithe House Quarterly and Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly.

La Fountain-Stokes has done solo and ensemble performance for stage and video. In 2004 he did a one-man show, Abolición del pato/Abolition of the Duck, as part of the Casa Cruz de la Luna First Experimental Festival in San Germán, Puerto Rico, and later at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) Out Like That Festival. The main character of this piece is Lola Lolamento Mentosán de San Germán, who is accompanied by Rigoberta Quetzal and the ñusta Isabel Chimpu Ocllo. The Village Voice described Abolition of the Duck as "This is not Avenue Q" in reference to the artist's use of indigenous dolls as puppets to talk about Puerto Rican homosexuality. Starting in 2010, he has collaborated with Fausto Fernós and Marc Felion of the Feast of Fun podcast in the making of a series of YouTube videos titled Cooking with Drag Queens, in which Lola von Miramar (La Fountain-Stokes's persona) makes Puerto Rican delicacies such as tostones and coquito together with Saltina Obama Bouvier (Fernós) and Daphne DuMount (Felion). He has also done solo videos, also available on YouTube.

La Fountain-Stokes's plays include ¡Escándalo! (2003) and Uñas pintadas de azul (2006, an extension of a short story included in his book of short stories). Both of these plays have been read publicly as part of the Pregones Theater Asunción Playwrights Project in the Bronx, but neither one has been staged.

La Fountain-Stokes has published scholarly articles in journals such as CENTRO Journal, Revista Iberoamericana, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, including his essay on his travels to Cuba, "De un pájaro las dos alas," which first appeared in GLQ in 2002 and was reprinted in Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited by the Jamaican American gay writer Thomas Glave. La Fountain-Stokes describes this article as a "fictionalized, experimental narrative or autoethnography based on [his] travel experiences as a gay Puerto Rican theater critic and former graduate student."

La Fountain-Stokes started his teaching career as an assistant professor at the Ohio State University (1998–1999) and then taught at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey for four years (1999–2003). Since 2003, he has taught Latino studies, American studies, and Spanish at the University of Michigan, including courses on queer Hispanic Caribbean culture, LGBT studies and Latino literature, theater, performance, and film. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2009 and to professor in 2019. His interviews in Spanish with leading Latino artists, journalists, and scholars such as the Uruguayan novelist and pop singer Dani Umpi and the Los Angeles Times journalist Sam Quiñones appear on the "University of Michigan in Spanish" channel on YouTube and on iTunes U.

La Fountain-Stokes received all of his primary and secondary education at the Academia del Perpetuo Socorro, an elite bilingual school run by the School Sisters of Notre Dame. He graduated from high school in 1986. He then studied at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Hispanic Studies in 1991. While in college, La Fountain-Stokes spent a year and a half studying at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He later went on to obtain a master's degree and Doctorate in Spanish from Columbia University in New York City.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes (born April 10, 1968) is a gay Puerto Rican author, scholar, and performer. He is better known as Larry La Fountain. He has received several awards for his creative writing and scholarship as well as for his work with Latino and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students. He currently resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He is currently working on a new book titled Translocas: Trans Diasporic Puerto Rican Drag which is on Puerto Rican and diasporic drag and trans performance and activism since the 1960s, and on the links between cross-dressing, sex/gender modification, and physical displacement in a geographic zone marked by frequent migrations. In this project, La Fountain-Stokes analyzes the work of a number of contemporary performers and activists including Sylvia Rivera, Holly Woodlawn, Mario Montez, Freddie Mercado, Jorge Merced, Nina Flowers, Monica Beverly Hillz, Javier Cardona, Lady Catiria, and Erika Lopez. He has another less developed book project on the use of animal words such as pato (duck in Spanish) to refer to homosexuality in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.