PEDRO LEMEBEL (1952–2015) was a queer Chilean writer and activist who resisted homophobia, decried oppression, and subverted the culture of machismo during the murderous dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973 to 1990) and its aftermath. Few of his writings are available in English translation—his use of chilenismos (idiomatic phrasing specific to Chilean Spanish), gay slang, and figurative language all present challenges to translators. More of his work will soon be available in translation, bringing to our ears his renegade voice, which Lemebel himself once characterized as “mariconaje guerrero” (“warrior faggotry”).
In a country long under the thrall of right-wing dictatorships, subject to toxic strains of machismo and the postcolonial oppressions of the Catholic Church, Lemebel’s status as an effeminate man with indigenous roots, from one of Santiago’s poorest areas, made his marginalization complete. The neighborhood of his upbringing was subject to routine military crackdowns. In his early career, he was fired from teaching jobs for being openly gay, and he would later be spurned by leftist organizations for the same reason. Yet he took on those forces with performances and a body of writing of equal fearlessness. His arc from pariah to celebrated international author, embraced by his own people—indeed a queer national folk hero—is unlike any other. As a young Chilean activist noted while I was in Santiago, “Lemebel is taught in high schools now.”
Lemebel was born Pedro Mardones but took his mother’s surname in defiance of patriarchal naming customs. His father was a baker, and the family lived in Zanjón de la Aguada, along an irrigation ditch that flows into the Mapocho River, providing the city of Santiago with fresh water from runoff high in the Andes. It was a shantytown for displaced working-class families who had begun building rudimentary homes in 1946, with clay floors, corrugated cardboard walls, and roofs of zinc sheets. Its residents were considered squatters by the government and violently repressed by the military.
The Making of a Writer
Lemebel’s writing developed in tandem with his performative activism. In collaboration with his friend Francisco Casas, he formed Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (“The Mares of the Apocalypse,” a feminist subversion of the biblical Horsemen). Their guerrilla actions called into questions ideals of masculinity and heteronormativity by confronting the political elite and the military regime, as well as their enablers in the Catholic hierarchy. At the Chilean Human Rights Commission, Las Yeguas danced the cueca, Chile’s national dance, on a map of South America littered with broken Coca-Cola bottles, until their commingled blood stained the map in dance-step patterns. They each danced the female role alone, signaling the absence of the desaparecidos (political detainees who were “disappeared” by the state). It was a haunting appropriation of the symbolic dance as much as a rebuke of colonialist violence. They threw their bodies into this and their other performances, acts of transgression that directly challenged repressive structures doing active harm to marginalized people.
The poem “Manifiesto: Hablo Por Mi Diferencia” (“Manifesto: I Speak for My Difference”) is Lemebel at his most confrontational. To deliver this poem, he stormed a meeting of leftist parties in full drag, with a hammer and sickle painted on his face, reciting it over objections from those assembled. The text calls out the authoritarian regime as well as the rampant homophobia among the leftists of his day. In the poem, which was written in 1986, Lemebel demands his dignity as a marginalized voice while decrying the abuses of the dictatorship.
Hablo por mi diferencia
Defiendo lo que soy
Y no soy tan raro
Me apesta la injusticia
Y sospecho de esta cueca democrática
Pero no me hable del proletariado
Porque ser pobre y maricón es peor
Hay que ser ácido para soportarlo
I speak for my difference
Defend what I am
And I’m not so strange
Injustice disgusts me
And I mistrust this democratic cueca
But don’t talk to me of the proletariat
To be poor and queer is worse
One must be acid to bear it
One of the historical references in the poem occurs in lines that rebuke one General Ibáñez, a homophobic and oppressive military dictator who ruled during formative periods in the 20th century and created the very police force that is committing human rights abuses to this day in response to opposition:
Como en el barco del general Ibáñez
Donde aprendimos a nadar
Pero ninguno llegó a la costa
Por eso Valparaíso apagó sus luces rojas
Por eso las casas de caramba
Le brindaron una lágrima negra
A los colizas comidos por las jaibas
Like General Ibáñez’ ship
Where we learned to swim
But no one made it to shore
That’s why Valparaíso turned out its red lights
That’s why the houses of caramba
Shed a black tear
For the queens consumed by crabs
This section refers to a mournful episode in which homosexuals were rounded up and imprisoned by Ibáñez and executed by way of fondeamiento, the practice of throwing detainees off ships at sea with weights bound to their legs. The poem invokes the past abuses of the Chilean state to convey the depth of Lemebel’s suffering at the hands of authoritarian rule. As Lemebel noted in a 1996 interview that appeared in the anti-Pinochet daily La Epoca: “A country without memory is like a blank slate where you can write anything and reinvent history for the comfort and discretion of those in power.”
The Chronicles and Tengo Miedo Torero
After the arrest of Augusto Pinochet at the London Clinic Hospital in 1998, the satirical periodical The Clinic was founded as a weekly publication that continues to this day. The founding editor, Patricio Fernández, invited Lemebel to write chronicles for the periodical, assuring him free rein with no censorship. Although he contributed to other periodicals, Lemebel wrote regularly for The Clinic from its inception until his death. Several volumes of compilations have been published in Spanish, including Adiós mariquita linda, published in 2004 by Editorial Sudamericana.
The book is organized in six sections, giving an idea of the latitude Lemebel took with his uncensored platform. The first section, “Pajaros que Besan” (“Birds that Kiss”), consists of five sketches of Lemebel’s love affairs with street trade, mostly sureños, young men from the south of Chile noted for their earthiness and their swagger. In his descriptions of the young men, Lemebel unleashes a desire that is both lecherous and nurturing.
The chronicles of the second section describe instances of Lemebel’s travels throughout Chile, mostly as an invited guest on the basis of his literary reputation. Several of these trips do not go as intended. A public appearance in Antofagasta, a prosperous port city in the north, is canceled at the last minute in an act of censorship by the then president of Chile, who is coincidentally visiting the city at the same time. While in a northern desert town for an appearance at a book fair, Lemebel picks up the young man working at his hotel’s front desk. His reception as a queer literary star in Chile occurred later in life, after years of scorn from the cultural mainstream. Validation from abroad—he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, among other honors—led to acceptance throughout his native Chile.
In the third section, he recounts his visit to Cuba in 2006, remarking on social and economic conditions and chronicling an intense encounter with Adolfo, a Cuban artist who escaped confinement at the AIDS hospital to spend a night with Lemebel. The fourth section takes up indigenous and pan-Andean concerns. “El abismo iletrado de unos sonidos” (“The Unlettered Abyss of Certain Sounds”) is a lament for pre-Columbian oral language inspired by hieroglyphs seen in Chan Chan, the ruins of a pre-Columbian adobe city in Peru. The fifth section is a series of explicit love letters to a rocker, a certain “Angel,” a fleeting love affair. The chronicles that make up the final section describe Lemebel’s life in the bohemian enclave of Bellavista in Santiago among his queer friends and fellow artists, while decrying the commodification of gay life. This section includes a remembrance of performance artist Andrés Pavez, who was lost to AIDS. The book also includes a glossary of chilenismos and gay slang.
Lemebel’s best-known work internationally, Tengo miedo torero (published in English as My Tender Matador in 2001), is set in Santiago, circa 1986. The novel is a love story between a balding gay man, known as la loca de la esquina (“the queen of the corner”), and a handsome student revolutionary, Carlos, who is meticulously planning an ambush on Pinochet. Written in the third person, the novel presents the daily life and thoughts of the queen, interspersed with sections offering a satirical portrait of a henpecked Pinochet, his wife, and her adored gay hairdresser. The two stories—that of the protagonist and his beloved guerrilla, and that of Pinochet and his fashion-obsessed wife—take place in parallel, converging toward the day of the ambush.
The title of the novel is taken from a verse of an old-fashioned torch song. The Queen of the Corner’s head is filled with such music, and he occasionally sings it aloud in his “faggot falsetto.” His iconic women are interpreters of these cuplé standards, among them Spanish actor and singer Sara Montiel (“Sarita”), a gay icon for her camp sensuality, her high-drag glamor, and her melodramatic performance style. The novel belongs to the Latin American tradition of the “guerilla” novel: fictions of liberation struggles, as well as queer-themed works such as Argentine Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (The Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976). The queen, while helping Carlos’ cause, develops romantic feelings for him. Carlos, inclined to return his affections in order to advance his revolutionary aims, feels something for the queen beyond loyalty to the cause.
Dénouement
Lemebel died of cancer of the larynx in 2015, which had left him voiceless for two years. He posted about it on his Facebook page shortly before his death (it is still visible there): “Fucking cancer stole my voice (although it wasn’t really in tune, as we say). A kiss to those with whom I shared a troubled night.” He is frequently invoked as a founder of the current Chilean resistance movement, which was triggered by a small increase in the Metro fare and has grown into an intersectional movement, including demands from indigenous, feminist, queer, and environmental activists. These demands, taken as a whole, are Lemebelian in scope: an effective deconstruction of the patriarchal pact of oppressor church and colonizer state that brought the Chilean people to this state of despair.
Among the miles of graffiti I saw on my recent visit to Santiago was a line from “Manifesto” repeatedly scrawled on city walls as an encouragement to the resisters: “Soy más subversivo que usted” (“I am more subversive than you”). Today’s ongoing protests for economic justice, political reforms, and state accountability echo the 1986 protests against Pinochet, as depicted in the pages of My Tender Matador: the lacrimogenas (tear gas bombs), the targeted harassment and arrests, the police violence, the surveillance tactics. Even the cry of the current resistance movement, “Chile Despertó!” (“Chile has woken up!”), suggests one of Lemebel’s images, that of the nation stoically enduring indignities until one fateful moment.
According to Daniela Mardones, Lemebel’s niece and the executor of his literary estate, more English translations of his work are forthcoming. We may expect Lemebel to be celebrated by the literary establishment for his defiantly queer personality, while his relevance as a voice of abjection, poverty, and marginalization will probably be de-emphasized. Taken as a whole, notes scholar Diana Palaversich, his body of work “articulates, in effect, a double manifesto.” The first is sexual and advocates an anti-colonial queerness—“una identidad chiloca”—to counter the hegemony of imported gay globalism, which he described as the “cold pink spring” of American “white, rich and elegant gays … who only look at each other” and are “misogynist, fascistic, allied with the male that sustains the power.” The second is political and insists on centering queerness within other experiences of marginality, subject to exploitation and abandonment within neoliberal capitalism.
Lemebel’s uncompromising bravery in the face of authoritarian oppression can inspire the resistance movement in the U.S., where we increasingly face many of the same threats to freedom and justice that Chileans have confronted. It can also direct the gay rights movement in the U.S. away from cooptation and compromise and toward an inclusive and expansive concept of liberation and greater solidarity with intersectional struggles.
Dale Corvino’s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and online, including The Rumpus and Salon. His chapbookWorker Names was published in 2019.
