These days, when an American President has decreed that “there are only two genders: male and female” and issued a slew of executive orders and actions undermining the rights of trans people, an undaunted, lyrical voice from a southern corner of the hemisphere offers a model of resistance. Pedro Lemebel, the late Chilean writer who uniquely portrayed the overlapping calamities of the Pinochet dictatorship and the AIDS epidemic, wrote in his celebrated “Manifesto”:
Those lines, which he famously read publicly wearing high heels, his face painted with a hammer and sickle, during a Communist Party rally in Santiago in 1986, have new resonance today.
An exquisitely original writer, an activist who stood against the dictatorship and a critic of the traditional left’s homophobia, Lemebel played with drag and the gender binary. His work was entirely focussed on those living on the farthest margins of society—people escaping the norms and seen as different.
With the exception of Lemebel’s only novel, “My Tender Matador,” translated by Katherine Silver and published in 2005, and a few essays published in literary magazines, his work was mostly unavailable in English until last year, when Penguin Classics released “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” a collection of his most celebrated crónicas, including “Manifesto.” Crónicas are a distinctive Latin American hybrid that combines observation, memoir, reportage, history, fiction, and sometimes poetry—an apt genre for Lemebel’s literary innovations. He uses humor, vulgarity, acidic commentary, and tenderness to describe the lives of the most marginalized people in his society. His protagonists tend to be gender-nonconforming locas (queens), some of whom make their living as sex workers in the streets. The collection has been short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. The nomination was announced, coincidentally, on January 23rd, on the tenth anniversary of Lemebel’s death; the winner will be named on March 20th.
Lemebel was born Pedro Mardones in Santiago in 1952, but as an adult he changed his last name to his mother’s, in a gesture, he said, of “an alliance with all that is feminine.” He grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city; his brother Jorge, who often had to defend him from the insults and attacks of other kids, summarized those early years in a sentence: “Life was cruel.” His parents provided a refuge from that hostile world, loving and accepting him as he was. His father, a baker, “understood him very well,” Jorge said in the 2019 documentary “Lemebel.” His mother shared her makeup with him.
Pedro studied carpentry and metal forging before attending art school. He found work as a high-school art teacher in the seventies but was fired for suspicions of homosexuality, which was illegal in Chile until 1999. He was twenty when the military, under Augusto Pinochet, took over the government, on September 11, 1973; he would not become a published writer for another decade. But in the underground circles of Santiago he became known for his provocative appearances with a performance-art duo he formed with the queer artist Francisco Casas, called Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, or the Mares of the Apocalypse, a name that likely refers to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and frames the AIDS epidemic as a Biblical plague. They sabotaged cultural and political events and staged unannounced actions in public spaces to protest the marginalization of poor and queer Chileans in a very conservative society. In 1988, during a student occupation of the School of Arts of the University of Chile, they entered the campus fully naked, riding together on a mare, in a parody of the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, who founded Santiago. The performance, meant to protest the élitism of the university, was called “The Refoundation of the University of Chile.” The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño once wrote that Lemebel “is the best poet of my generation, even if he does not write poetry,” adding that “the Yeguas were, above all, two poor homosexuals, which in a homophobic and hierarchical country (where being poor is shameful, and being poor and an artist, criminal) constituted almost an invitation to be shot, in every sense. A good part of the honor of the real Republic and the Republic of letters was saved by the Yeguas.”
In the foreword to “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” the writer Idra Novey mentions an “apocryphal story” in which Lemebel, accepting his first literary prize, wore a pink miniskirt. This is, she writes, “a liberator tale, marking the arrival of an unforeseen leader, the artist capable of showing all of Chile that performing sameness wasn’t as necessary to their survival as they assumed it to be—that they didn’t, in fact, need to resign themselves to social and cultural suffocation for the rest of their lives.”
Lemebel’s crónicas, most of which were printed in local newspapers after the dictatorship fell, make up the most significant part of his work, and all of “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.” The collection has been brilliantly edited and translated by Gwendolyn Harper (who also works part-time in The New Yorker’s fiction department). The translation was particularly difficult. “In truth, all of Lemebel’s crónicas have been described, rightly or wrongly, as untranslatable,” Harper writes, in a note early in the book. Part of what makes reading Lemebel in Spanish exhilarating is his playfulness with language, the freedom with which he creates variations of Chilean slang, the love with which he turns derogatory words into endearing terms. In “The Million Names of María Chameleon,” he writes, “There’s a huge baroque allegory that enfeathers, enlivens, traverses, disguises, dramatizes, or punishes identity through a nickname” before listing a hundred and eight nicknames “plucked from the prickly fields of pansy culture.”
Harper has organized the crónicas into five sections. The first, “Maricón” (she leaves the word, which literally means “faggot,” another slur that Lemebel reclaimed, untranslated), includes “Manifesto” and other crónicas about gay life in Santiago. It also includes one about a trip to New York City in 1994, for the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, in which Lemebel writes about being disgusted by the commodified nature of gay culture in the United States. He describes “the thousands who respectfully remove their Calvin Klein visors and pray a few seconds while lining up for the dance club next door.” He condemns the whiteness of the gay movement, which, he says, looks down on him, “little miss native.” He writes, “It’s enough to step into the Stonewall Inn, where it’s always night, for you to figure out that the majority of the crowd is white, blond, and lean. . . . And if by some chance there’s a Black man or some Latina loca, it’s just because no one wants to be called antidemocratic.” In the introduction, Harper notes, “I don’t know whether Lemebel would be horrified or gleeful to have infiltrated Penguin Classics (possibly a little of both).”
