Living la vida loca

Next year will mark ten years since the death of the Chilean queer activist, performance artist, novelist and essayist Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015), whom the former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet called “a defender of freedom”. Lemebel’s essays (or crónicas: informal pieces for papers and magazines on topical matters) typically covered Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and the inequality instigated by the HIV epidemic. But in pieces such as “Manifesto (I Speak from My Difference)”, he also called attention to the vein of machismo and homophobia that so often runs through Marxist movements:

“Don’t speak to me about the proletariat
Because being poor and a fag is worse
…
What will you do with us, comrade?
Will you bundle us by our braids for shipment to Cuban quarantine?”

“Manifesto” was originally staged in Santiago in 1986, at a meeting of leftist parties opposed to Pinochet’s dictatorship: Lemebel interrupted proceedings in high heels, with a hammer and sickle daubed across his face. A year later, he formed the arts duo Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse) with the artist and poet Francisco Casas Silva, and together they set about disrupting readings, exhibitions and political gatherings with a series of protests, one of which memorably involved them dancing the cueca (the “national dance” of Chile) on a map of Latin America strewn with broken bottles of Coca-Cola, until it glistened with their blood.

This new selection of crónicas is divided into five sections: “Maricón” (Spanish for “fag”) includes “Manifesto” and introduces us to Lemebel’s sensually provocative style; the second section, “Coup”, focuses on the years of dictatorship (1973–90); the third, “AIDS”, contains some of his most striking loca (literally, “crazy woman”, but also a reclaimed pejorative for cross dressers, trans women and gay men) crónicas; “Post-90” captures Lemebel’s disillusionment as the newly elected government, under Patricio Aylwin, fails to live up to its ideals (“this absurd demo of a democracy”); and “Finale” ends with something like hope – “The Transfiguration of Miguel Ángel”, a story of unlikely religious inspiration and gender conversion.

By “loca”, or “travesti” (transvestite), Lemebel doesn’t always mean transgender. Rather, he is identifying a marginal identity often associated with sex work – something “simultaneously uncompromising and malleable”, as his editor and translator, Gwendolyn Harper, puts it. Loca identity is culturally specific to South America, but also a marker of exclusion further afield. The Stonewall tavern in “New York Chronicles (Stonewall Inn)” is a “sanctuary of the homosexual cause”, Lemebel says, but not for a “third-world malnourished” loca like him, and he is quick to pour scorn on post-1969 liberation – on what he sees as the “holier-than-thou gringas” who have turned the site of gay revolution in the US into a tourist pub filled with “white, blonde and lean” patrons: “a quick look around and you’ll see you don’t belong here, that you have nothing to do with the postcard gold of its muscled, classical aesthetic”.

Back home in Chile, Lemebel’s sharp-witted, bold protagonists insist on space that is never freely given. And he is one of them. In “Letter to Liz Taylor”, he invites the star to send him an emerald from the crown worn in Cleopatra (1963) so that he can pay for AZT, the first antiretroviral medication used to treat HIV/Aids. AZT crops up regularly in Lemebel’s crónicas – “it stretches you out … maybe adds a few months to your life. Some travestis inject it themselves” – but it’s expensive, has side effects (unlike today’s PrEP and PEP) and works only in the short term. Love, too, is a reckoning with necessary brutality: in “Loba Lamar’s Last Kiss”, a group of loca friends are shocked by the appearance of a newly deceased friend and apply their “necrophiliac handiwork” to her face, forcibly reshaping it so that she’ll look good at her funeral.

Harper’s translation is rich and graceful – particularly her version of “Anacondas in the Park”, a depiction of a cruising scene in which men “coagulat[e] with the other men, who snake along the path”. A description of “a clutch of condoms … like stuffed cabbage rolls … waiting for the sun to ferment them in the magnolias’ saffron mulch” is both sensuous and violent, and the violence feels known, familiar. Lemebel’s stories are tender but raw, littered with jokes, innuendo and stabs at the heart. In “Even Poppies Have Thorns”, a tryst becomes a murder. Here and throughout the selection, the narrator despairs of “butcheries where society’s resentment demands the weakest, most vulnerable hides”. The butcher takes many forms: Aids, dictatorship, poverty, or a man with a knife.

The last essay, “The Transfiguration of Miguel Ángel”, tells the true story of a young boy who, during the 1980s, claimed to have spoken to the Virgin Mary. He later transitioned and became female. Treated as an oddity by the Chilean media at the time, he is reclaimed here as a “Virgin travesti”, a saint for “destitute transexuals” and “nudist hermaphrodites”, whose sex has been ordained by Mary herself. The beatification is a performance, of course, but a sincere one. Pedro Lemebel gilds his loca protagonists while refusing to cover up their scars or deny them their bravery, and in so doing illuminates Chile’s recent political history with the same candour.

Alice Wadsworth is an editor of the Brixton Review of Books and the founder of Queer Sex Ed Book Club at SET Social

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