A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays by Pedro Lemebel, translated by Gwendolyn Harper (Penguin Classics 2024)
In 1994, the queer Chilean writer and performance artist Pedro Lemebel visited New York—“all-expenses-paid,” he notes in his sharp-tongued travelogue “New York Chronicles (Stonewall Inn)” —to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. He didn’t enjoy the trip. In Chile, Lemebel was nothing if not visible; he was, indeed, committed to visibility, in more ways than one. In his poem “Manifesto (I Speak from My Difference),” which he first read, in heels, in front of a crowd gathered to protest the brutal right-wing regime that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, he announces, “I am not a faggot masking as a poet / I need no mask / Here is my face.” But in gay Greenwich Village, surrounded by “two tons of muscles and bodybuilders in minishorts,” Lemebel felt unseen and unwelcomed, despite having dragged his “third-world malnourished loca body all the way here.” (We’re going to come back to that loca.) All the macho, military-styled men on Christopher Street reminded him of the “fascist brutality” he’d endured for so long. Maybe, he thought as he walked through the Village, the gay history he’d traveled up the spine of the Americas to celebrate wasn’t truly meant to include him; “maybe,” he wrote, “gay is white.”
“New York Chronicles (Stonewall Inn)” appears in A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, a Greatest Hits-type collection of Lemebel’s crónicas arranged and translated by Gwendolyn Harper. In Spanish-language writing, the crónica—a lightly journalistic form of short nonfiction that lends itself well to play and hybridity—is common; in English, we have neither crónicas nor a name for them, which impoverishes our literature. We could call them essays, and sometimes do, but in essays, writers often wander and ponder. A crónica is more like a snatch and grab. It’s a form beautifully suited to Lemebel, who spent the Pinochet dictatorship staging three-minute “flash actions” in protest and whose writing leaps from slang to poetry, filth to beauty so quickly it collapses any distinction between them.
A couple of notes on slang and language here. Chilean Spanish is ferociously slangy, and Lemebel’s writing is very Chilean. It’s also very queer. His gay language has nothing to do with that of Christopher Street; his world, in the 1980s, was not one of clones but of travestis and locas, terms Harper preserves in Spanish. Travesti, a collapsed version of transvéstita, refers broadly to a trans female identity not associated with medical transition; loca is roughly the same, though you could also read it, depending on the context, as wild girl or crazy bitch. In her introduction, Harper notes that travesti identity is not associated with “the Global North’s gender and sexuality identifiers, which [Lemebel] saw as a colonial imposition.” He contrasted the white gay culture of the United States, whose “misogynistic parallels with power” he points out in the crónica “Wild Desire,” with his “Amaricón” homosexual identity, which was inextricable from the poor, the indigenous, and the feminine. (Maricón means faggot; I dislike admitting that any word is untranslatable, but the portmanteau Amaricón is.) A key irony for A Last Supper for Queer Apostles’ readers—and, of course, for its translator—is that Lemebel saw English’s global dominance as an imposition, too. “I’ll never write in English,” he swears in the piece with which Harper chose to open the book; “with any luck I say, Go home.” Certainly he wanted to say go home to Chile’s influx of gay American tourists. He feared that their presence and influence meant the locas would die out.
This fear was not just cultural but literal. Along with Pinochet, the AIDS epidemic shaped Lemebel’s work and life. Although he died of laryngeal cancer in 2015, many of the locas he cared and wrote about died of AIDS; some of his most affecting works—and his floweriest, literarily speaking—are about tending to them in their final months. Camp was his dominant strategy for representing the absurd brutalities of both dictatorship and illness, a tactic that Harper links to his years as a performer. “How can anyone be natural when being watched?” she asks. It’s a question relevant “to actors, to queers, to anyone living under surveillance. Lemebel writes like he’s facing a crowd, or the firing squad. His affectation is also an urgency”—which brings us back to the crónica, nonfiction’s speediest form, ideally suited to writing about a clandestine fuck, a secret club, or a loca dying right before your eyes.
Not many of the crónicas in A Last Supper of Queer Apostles have narrative arcs. Building a story—creating characters, giving context, establishing and then raising stakes—takes time, whether or not the story in question is true, and Lemebel is nearly always in a rush. He starts his crónicas in medias res, frequently beginning them with the word And, then relies on swelling emotion to carry his readers along. In the collection’s poem-like, page-long dedication, he praises “holy luck” and “dangerous passion,” which twine together throughout the book. In “Her Throaty Laugh (Or, the Travesti Streetwalker’s Sweet Deceit),” Lemebel hovers invisibly at a loca’s shoulder as she performs “her nightly travesti tango,” picking up clients as if she had no reason to fear they might hurt her, as if what her night promised were just pleasure. Half her luck is just living through the night; the other half, explored in the latter half of the piece, is the loca’s bond with “her poor mama, the only one who understands her, who fixes her wig and tucks condoms into her purse.” Seeing the loca at home with her mother, though Lemebel gives us only a glimpse, amplifies our understanding of the bravery it takes for her to shrug off the “night’s dangers” and keep herself going—to say nothing of the courage of her mother, who sits at home “praying that la Virgen will keep her little girl safe.”