Lyrical Silicone
ON A SATURDAY MORNING in 2008, I tried to convince my mother to read the work of a writer I had just discovered: the Chilean essayist and novelist Pedro Lemebel. On a pleasant restaurant terrace a few blocks from her Santiago apartment, I tripped over my words, struggling to convey what was so appealing to […]
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ON A SATURDAY MORNING in 2008, I tried to convince my mother to read the work of a writer I had just discovered: the Chilean essayist and novelist Pedro Lemebel. On a pleasant restaurant terrace a few blocks from her Santiago apartment, I tripped over my words, struggling to convey what was so appealing to me about his latest essay collection, Serenata cafiola (“A Gigolo’s Serenade,” 2008). His language seemed to jump off the page in a way that, at the time, I found unprecedented.
“Lemebel?” came a voice from the next table. A petite, spry old lady turned to face us, smiling. “You like him? He writes about kinky stuff,” she warned my mother. “It’s honestly a bit disgusting. He writes, you know, like a fairy,” she half-whispered. My mother forced a smile, and my brow furrowed. Those expressions remained frozen until the woman finally decided to leave us alone. I started to repeat my argument, but Mom had already made up her mind: she would give Lemebel’s writing a shot.
A seriously funny, unholy combination of postmodern critic and drag performer, Lemebel, who died in 2015, wrote in an ornate literary style that combines the high with the low unapologetically, almost rudely. His theses are often highly speculative, his reportage probably a little made up. And yet, he had something the so-called “professional writers” of his time sorely lacked: he was painfully alive on almost every page. A new selection of his essays, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, has just been released by Penguin Classics, bringing together, for the first time in English (in a fine translation by Gwendolyn Harper), the author’s most iconic short pieces, and thus providing a sweeping view of Lemebel’s nonfiction work.
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In the largely conservative and pharisaic post-dictatorship Chile of the 1990s—a country that banned Iron Maiden concerts due to the band’s “satanic” influence—Lemebel’s arrival felt like the sudden explosion of a Molotov cocktail. An openly homosexual writer was not unprecedented. (Lemebel disliked the word gay, which he associated with the kind of highbrow sophistication that “fastens to power.”) Yet his defiant attitude, his chosen subject matter, his goadingly political drag performance art as part of the Mares of the Apocalypse collective, and perhaps especially his prose style, which flew in the face of established ideas of the “literary,” were all too much for the Chilean elite. The fact that he was becoming internationally successful felt to some older readers like a personal affront—which paradoxically made him irresistible to young people. To me, he represented everything most Chilean prose writers I was aware of at the time were not: quick-witted, funny, sharp, angry, and just the right amount of performative.
In hindsight, Lemebel was more than just a high-energy provocateur. He constantly reflected on the tension between written and oral forms, between the voices traditional literature excludes and those that make it into the canon. His style was a careful synthesis of that tension: he ruffled so many feathers because he wrote like no one else. Lemebel’s writing showcases how the sensuality of language can be blended with postmodern skepticism into a unique, compellingly contemporary aesthetic. Lemebel’s approach to the key questions of power and pleasure remains relevant and useful, and his relationship to the issue of truth in nonfiction, which is not straightforward, opens the way for new kinds of stories to be told.
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In his narrative essay “Everyone on Strike!,” Lemebel recounts an anecdote from his youth. During the right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet—who ruled Chile with an iron fist for nearly 17 years after a CIA-sponsored coup put him in power in 1973—Lemebel was part of El Coordinador Cultural, a group of dissenting performance artists. In those days, doing art interventions around Santiago could land you in jail, or worse. In his telling, Lemebel discovered that another member of El Coordinador was both a clandestine freedom fighter for the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) guerrilla movement and a secretly gay man. As they were making a gigantic protest sign at a hiding place, a lookout warned the group that police officers were patrolling the neighborhood. The planned performance, which involved hanging the sign on a nearby bridge, was at risk. The secret guerrilla fighter stepped forth valiantly, like the hero of an action movie, and asked the rest to join him. He would save the mission:
And then the reckless loca in me jumped out, and, stepping to the front, I said: I’ll risk it. Who else? Who will join us? And we stood there alone, just me and the gay guerrilla in the breach as the machos retreated, a little ashamed. We were two stubborn faggots who didn’t have any backing, and we couldn’t carry out this dangerous mission alone. […] At that moment, someone started banging on the door, breaking the silence. We all scrambled, trying in vain to find a way to escape. The sign, the sign, shit, grab the sign. […] And our souls flew back to our bodies when we realized that it was just a chubby friend of ours who’d run all the way back from the bridge. The street’s full of cops, he panted, collapsing into a chair. And that ended everything. We undressed slowly, removing our helmets and overalls, and I took the chance to get an eyeful of my guerrilla compatriot’s hairy legs.
Is this a beat-by-beat recounting of what happened? Did Lemebel call his old collaborators—those who were still alive, at least—and painstakingly fact-check his account? Unlikely. But his version has the breathlessness of a story shared hundreds of times among friends, amended often to land with the sharpest possible impact, punchline included. In Loca Fuerte: Retrato de Pedro Lemebel (“Strong Queen: Portrait of Pedro Lemebel,” 2022), a biography of Lemebel by the Chilean essayist Óscar Contardo, Lemebel is quoted as saying that he does what he can on the page to “muddle through.” He says, “When I create, I make a fantasy of myself. That’s the material I use to make my crónicas. A part of it is true, and the rest is silicone, baby. Lyrical silicone” (translation mine).
Unfaithfulness—to factual truth, to conventional forms, to political parties, to aesthetic doctrine—was Lemebel’s trademark. His signature genre is a uniquely Latin American form called “crónica,” commonplace in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. Traditionally, crónica blends aspects of journalistic reporting, opinion columns, and essays. Yet even within this expansive framework, Lemebel’s short pieces defy easy classification—part poem, part memoirish reporting, they do not often conform to the strict demands of the English-language conception of nonfiction.
Lemebel often reconstructs factual events in what can only be called a fictionalized account. Some essays are worthy of that most American—and most oxymoronic—of preambles, “based on a true story.” Research, painstaking fact-checking, and well-sourced interviews would only have tamed the spontaneous and arbitrary nature of his small discoveries. If writing an academic dissertation or a novel is like hunting a great whale, then writing a crónica is more like catching a rare species of cockroach. It glows for a moment before going into a glass display where hundreds of similar specimens await it.
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As a literary genre, the crónica was originally meant to describe a chronological telling of real events, generally in the first person. The Crónicas de Indias are accounts by Spanish conquistadores of their initial exploration of the American continent and their ill-fated encounters with the people already living there. From its inception, the genre was tied to hasty improvisation: hobby writers working quickly, against time, taking shortcuts, looking to get what they needed onto the page as quickly as possible. It was also tied to the vicissitudes of power. Many cronistas had to pay tribute to the literary and philosophical tradition, rationalize the abuses of the conquest, and plead to the king or the public back in Spain for money, men, or support.
Ironically, a modern version of the genre that had given voice to the Spanish conquistadores ended up becoming the perfect vehicle for a writer as different from and resistant to them as Lemebel. In “The Abyss of Sound,” a crónica about the ways in which the Spanish language was forced onto the Indigenous peoples of Latin America, he writes that “tourists and couples have scrawled names, dates, slogans, and doodles on this clay wall, imposing Spanish writing” on the ruins of an Incan city. He goes on to describe a visual, nonalphabetical writing that emerges from the spatial arrangement of stones by the Incans themselves:
These shapes might also be translated as a humming repository of syllables, or as scores for the lively music of a Mesoamerican earthquake. For the speech and laughter in the murmurous thumping of the Andean heart. For the shared and mourned as the blood crashes through arterial promontories. A voice that mimics the surroundings, like a mockingbird who traces a looping call between the trees. Until writing came and, with it, the Spanish alphabet that stifled her song. […]
The logic of the alphabet holds us prisoner. Our upbringing leads us down a path in our minds that the ABCs illuminate for us. But just past the edge of the page is an abyss where there are no letters. A jungle full of noises, like a secret market with scents and flavors and strange words that keep changing meaning. Words that gain color only once they’re in the receiver’s heart.
This passage furtively charts what I understand to be the main thrust behind Lemebel’s literary project. From the back pages of the daily newspaper La Nación and shielded by the free-form nature of the crónica, he was free to stage his attempts to move “past the edge of the page” and capture the murmuring voices that canonical literature in Spanish had left out. Voices that would not have survived translation into a more authoritative outlet—a drag queen who seeks casual sex in an alley but has to flee a police raid, or a publicly maligned victim of the 1990s AIDS panic, or a posh old lady who sells all her jewelry to support Pinochet (a voice Lemebel channeled in a jocular crónica titled “Merci, Beau Coup” and later expanded upon in his unforgettable and only novel, 2001’s My Tender Matador). What had made the improvisational format of the crónica fitting for the hasty accumulation of power now made it suitable for its careful deconstruction.
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Sometime during the 19th century, the crónica made the jump into the nascent newspaper, where it took on its contemporary form. The modern crónica meanderingly seeks those same moments of textual and observational wonder by connecting big ideas with elements of everyday life. Many resemble the sometimes arbitrary-seeming micro-essays that proliferate in contemporary American magazines, although crónicas are often connected to daily life in specific cities. The ethos of the cronista resembles that of a street photographer like Joel Meyerowitz or Martha Cooper—their intention is to capture a fleeting moment and apprehend its inherent playfulness, sadness, or quiet joy. The cronista’s digressive musings are often placed beside conventional news stories as resting places for the reader, reprieves from the crushing weight of a given day’s events. By their very essence, they are optional—or were, as the slow death of the local Latin American newspaper has made them ever scarcer.
Lemebel realized that the crónica’s potential lay in its less visible side. Tasked with describing a New World their Spanish readers would most likely never get to see, the original cronistas often found something they could not name easily, and they had to think on their feet. This resulted in improvised descriptions with a unique flavor, a magical matter-of-factness. Upon encountering the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (today’s Mexico City), the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés deftly switched his account from military concerns to wondrous architectural description (translation mine):
It is founded in the middle of a lake, with a main road as wide as two lances placed point to end, and so well made that eight mounted men can walk on it side to side. […] Many things in it float on top of the water. […] It has very good buildings that serve as houses and towers, especially those that house lords and important persons, and those of their mosques and the halls of prayer in which they keep their idols.
This side of the crónica extended the genre’s potential in a new, destabilizing direction. Lemebel often called it a “bastard” form due to its hybrid nature. The crónica’s nimbleness and flexibility, he realized, could be used to describe worlds largely unfamiliar to the existing written tradition, such as the flamboyant phenomena he witnessed in Santiago’s underground.
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In the essay “Black Orchids, or The DINA’s Cultural Center,” Lemebel tells the story of Mariana Callejas, a respected writer who married Michael Townley, a secret henchman and torturer for the Pinochet regime. Callejas hosted literary evenings at her home in the suburb of Lo Curro that were attended by many aspiring writers. Later, it became public knowledge that Townley had built a torture chamber in the basement of this house. Lemebel paints an imaginary picture:
Surely anyone who took part in those cultural soirées of postcoup kitsch will remember how the voltage would spasm and how annoying it was, interrupting the dancing, making the lights flicker and the music skip. Surely no one knew about the other dance going on below, where a metal prod would twist, drawing tortured backsides into voltaic arcs. Possibly they couldn’t tell whether a scream wasn’t just part of the dissonant disco music, all the rage back then. So they were just stupid, then, comfortably stupefied by cultural cachet, by whisky the [secret police] paid for, and by the house, too, an innocent little house with two stories, where literature and torture mingled together in the same drop of ink and iodine, in a bitter, raucous memory, smothering all vowels of pain.
In Lemebel’s hands, the scene eschews journalistic verifiability, turning instead into a scathing metaphor of how intellectual elites become tacitly complicit in the various kinds of hidden violence that guard their comfort.
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In the 1990s, the Chilean prose scene was dominated by a group of writers who, in one way or another, could be seen as disciples of the novelist Jorge Edwards. Edwards was an ambassador to Cuba during the socialist government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s, where he had soured on Fidel Castro’s political project.
A communist sympathizer and a borderline Castro apologist, Lemebel bucked this political trend. His baroque urban aesthetic was also the opposite of that of writers like Gonzalo Contreras, the quintessential Chilean novelist of the 1990s. Contreras’s style, influenced by Edwards’s, was dry, allusive, and self-consciously literary. He sought to write like Henry James. As an 18-year-old aspiring writer, he had attended a workshop in Callejas and Townley’s country house. By contrast, Lemebel was inspired by a group of Latin American writers who used aesthetic excess to push beyond the boundaries of traditional narrative: Argentines Néstor Osvaldo Perlongher and Manuel Puig, and Cubans Severo Sarduy and José Lezama Lima. Ironically, the latter two were often harassed by Castro’s hatchet men.
When Lemebel, in an interview, dismissed the gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas as a “propagandist,” Contreras was outraged. Arenas had been ostracized and imprisoned in the 1980s due to his sexuality, later fleeing during the Mariel boatlift to the United States, where he wrote an influential memoir about his prosecution under Castro, Before Night Falls (1992). In a 2001 op-ed, Contreras staged an unhinged attack against Lemebel, painting him as a lightweight and dismissing his contributions as mere “newspaper articles” about local TV celebrities (translation mine):
Quite the opposite [of Arenas], Lemebel has enjoyed life, pampered by the local intelligentsia and our country’s mass media. He has hypocritically manipulated those who subscribe to the clichés of political correctness. Our discriminated Lemebel has traveled as an official cultural envoy abroad, won grants, and is routinely invited to appear in prime-time television. […] His case is the inverse of Arenas’s: if Lemebel were not a faggot, he would be a nobody. It is his only “attribute,” he has taken advantage of it like no other, and he even has the gall to cry and complain about it. Arenas was a true writer, and a true homosexual.
Contreras’s broadside is an example of the kind of rhetoric Lemebel had to put up with from the literary and social establishment during his lifetime, even after he became conventionally successful in the late 1990s. At the peak of his career, Lemebel’s choice of subject and his nontraditional style always left him open to accusations of frivolity, and to hateful personal attacks.
Lemebel’s uncompromising stance on the dictatorship—he once said he would never shake hands with a “facho,” a Pinochet supporter—made him many enemies. He knew well that the respectable conventions of “polite” society are often protected by forms of exclusion and discrimination. When respectability is challenged, its guardians often unleash the dogs. Lemebel loved to resist the impulse to conform, and often derided those he saw as servile to established ideas of propriety. But he also reacted against leftist orthodoxy, which he saw as similarly retrograde in sexual matters. In his poem “Manifesto (I Speak for My Difference),” he rebuked pro-Soviet Marxists for their homophobia and authoritarianism: “Won’t there be a fag on some street-corner, destabilising the future of your new man? / Will you let us embroider birds onto the flag of the free fatherland?”
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Lemebel’s never-ending defiance, his resistance to being pigeonholed, and his use of resentment as a means of truth-telling have had an enduring effect on Latin American letters. His work is neither self-effacing nor self-affirming; rather, it presents the “I” as an unavoidable locus of contemporary experience—a place where identities, languages, and cultures inevitably, sometimes painfully, merge. This stance also allowed him to write about identity without the sanctimoniousness he dreaded; his literary formula placed hybridity, wit, and resilience above all.
Besides Roberto Bolaño, who called Lemebel “the greatest poet of [his] generation,” no other recent Chilean writer covers a broader range of topics and emotional palettes. Lemebel’s skeptical stance—one tends to picture him always with a playfully raised eyebrow—is what glues together his disparate aspects: tender, funny, angry, elegiac. No matter how far he meanders, his musings are compelling because his method is interactive. By challenging and provoking his audience, Lemebel almost seems to gaze through the page at the reader sitting there idly. His method was not purely an aesthetic formula; it constituted a way of living.
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