A Last Supper of Queer Apostles gathers together a collection of Pedro Lemebel's essays (crónicas). Lemebel (1952-2015) is/was a brilliant writer whose work focused on the marginal communities of Chile: gay men, the poor, sex workers, and transsexuals. His work is angry, inventive, playful, keenly observing. Reading his work is rather like watching someone juggling fire, with the same uneasy potential for beauty or disaster.

Lemebel's essays are packed with material that one needs to sit with—they demand a period of "sinking in" from readers. A last Supper of Queer Apostles is the first collection of his essays translated into English: they demanded a great deal of and were done justice by translator and editor Gwendolyn Harper.

For anyone who understands that the boundaries of their world go far beyond the borders of their country and that gender is not the binary many would insist it *must* be, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles offers a feast of ideas.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

Pedro Lemebel's essays focus on the Queer community as they go from being celebrated to being hunted by the Chilean Pinochet government and the AIDS Epidemic. Told with love, we see the special faces and their perseverance through hardship. We see the details of the beauty of their lives despite the sometimes ger-wrenching experiences.

This book significantly impacted me as I fear for our future in this country. It is always the smallest and weakest community that tyrannical bullies target. Small populations like the LGBQ community and specifically the Trans community are always targeted first. They are the canary in the coal mine with oppressive governments. When their rights are taken away, all of our rights are taken away. This book is also a reminder of that and a reminder of what we can lose.


Favorite Passages:

“So that the revolution does not completely rot
I leave you with a message
Not for my sake
I am old
And your utopia is for future generations
There are so many children who will be born
With a little broken wing
And I want them to fly, comrade
I want your revolution
To drop them a piece of red heaven
So that they fly.”

“An asthmatic loca who, finding an exit with a last mouthful of oxygen, doesn’t know if her life or her lungs suffocated her more, who knows she’s going to hell and so wants to live no matter what, burning her hands, clambering up the smoky scaffolding until she finds a window on the third floor, so tall, so high up. And with such a big audience below, waiting perversely to see if she jumps into the void, over this crowd of onlookers who will watch fires without caring what happens. Deciding to take the leap because just maybe she’ll float down on the golden air that’s now burning her lungs. Daring to do it now, since she’s already burning and the sea’s so far away and a vertigo of waves is applauding her. Barely a step, the bonfire pushing her from behind as it ignites her hair into a torch. One step, a single step on a glass runway, and the spectacle of a loca in flames, flying high above the Valparaíso docks, will be remembered as a glittering jewel on the city’s prostituted neckline.

“Minorities sometimes come up with other ways to act in contempt, using what seems like superficiality as a weapon. Gastón, tanning on his beach towel, knew how to break free from that yard of torment, as if a loca’s irreverence could transform a beach towel into a rug for flying, a magic carpet that would hover over the iron bars, float out past the soldiers’ guns, and raise him above that camp of horrors.
Maybe some of the prisoners who got out of there alive still remember the morning when Gastón received his letter of transit, granting him permission to depart immediately for exile in some European country. Gastón, grinning from ear to ear, carefully put away his bathing suit, folded his towel, and breathed deeply, gulping down air as if he wanted, with a single sigh, to erase the morbid atmosphere of that place. Then he wished everyone goodbye and, walking on the tips of his toes, crossed over the spikes at the entrance. And, still glowing tropically, he disappeared from the road in a cloud of dust, never looking back.”

“I never knew what happened to you: maybe you were in hiding, or snatched away, tortured, riddled with bullets, or disappeared inside our national pain’s musical score, which is silent and without justice. Something tells me it was like that. Santiago is a street corner, Santiago is not the big wide world: here sooner or later everyone finds out, everything comes to light. That’s why today, after hearing that song, I mouth it silently just for you and walk splashing through puddles in the park. This winter is coming on hard, the fall afternoon sinks into a sky reflected off pools of water. Cars jammed together honk their horns at the traffic lights. The students come and go with their enormous backpacks, ready for the cold or some big march. The city dwellers shove each other at the bus stop, waiting for the Transantiago in a mass, in chaos, in a tumultuous commotion that saturates the streets. Mas la ciudad sin ti . . . mi corazón sin ti . . .”

“There’s only one photo left from that party, a bleached snapshot where the sissy faces reappear, exposed to the present at a distance. It’s not a good photo, but their sexual militancy jumps out at the viewer. The receding years frame them, their mouths are extinguished laughter, echoes of gestures frozen in the flash of a final toast. Jokes, sneers, quips, and shade drip from their lips, ready to fall, ready to lace their kisses with irony. It’s not a good photo, the image blurry, an unfocused haze that never stabilizes into memory. Maybe the photo is fuzzy because the stained tulle of AIDS shrouds almost every loca in a double disappearance. That shadow, it’s a fragile cellophane bandage that wraps around la Pilola Alessandri’s waist as she leans her faggot hips against the right side of the table. She purchased the epidemic in New York, the first one to bring it back, the genuine article, the latest, most exclusive gay trend in how to die. The hottest mortuary look, which made her drop pounds faster than any diet, leaving her as skinny and pale as the models in Vogue, as stretched and chic as an orchid’s sigh. AIDS wrung out her body and she died pressed and pleated, fashionable and stunning in the rarefied ranks of her miserly death.

“La Palma came back and died happy in her agony, stripped of her savings. She said goodbye listening to Ney Matogrosso’s music, humming the saudade of her parting. See you at the next party, she said sadly, gazing at the photo nailed to the wallboards of her misery. And right before she closed her eyes, she looked so young again, almost a blushing maid raising a glass and a fistful of bones that summer of 1973. She looked so beautiful in the photo’s reflection, wrapped in la Pilola’s white mink, so queenly in the halo of albino fur, that she told the Ghost, Hold on a sec, and held back Death’s bony hand while she took one last look at herself, indulged her narcissus in furs for one final moment. Then she closed her lids and let herself go, floating away on a velvet memory.
It’s a bad photo, the shot hastily taken because the locas couldn’t stop fidgeting, almost all of them blurred by too many poses and their wild desire to leap into the future. Practically a last supper of queer apostles, where the only thing clearly rendered is the pyramid of bones on the table. ”

In short, there’s always a metaphor that, in ridiculing, beautifies the flaw, making it unique, one’s own. A nickname that hurts at first but later makes even the girl herself laugh. What starts as overexposure to a shame constantly yelled and named and pointed out turns into a ghetto rebaptism that camouflages the real name. A reconversion where caricature becomes a sign of affection.
And there are loads of ways to name yourself.”

“And so neoliberalism cross-dresses memory’s scars, laying a mask of silver and gold across its uniformly painted eyelids, ready for Carnaval.”

“And outside, in the street, in front of the presidential palace, the blurry faces of the disappeared are pasted on signs that their family members hold against their hearts. And these photos are the only thing left of them, the only thing keeping them here at the edges of this disgusting clique. Maybe in the street, with their faces turned to the sun, illuminating their extinct features, maybe the street is the only place they can be that alive, that direct, like an ethical declaration that exposes the agreement’s end game. They’re in there—those who agreed to play a game of poker with marked cards. We’re out here, outside the game, with our memories of Sola Sierra, with the mothers and family members and the moral mettle of Viviana Díaz and Mireya García, unshakable in their demand for justice no matter who you are. They’re in there, at their long reconciliation table, toasting with wine that impunity has poisoned and breaking the bitter bread of forgetfulness.”