A Last Supper of Queer Apostles

Selected Essays

De: Pedro Lemebel, Gwendolyn Harper - editor translator introduction, Idra Novey - foreword

Narrado por: Fred Sanders, Vico Ortiz, Idra Novey, Gwendolyn Harper

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Translation Prize*

“These days, when an American president has decreed that ‘there are only two genders: male and female’ . . . an undaunted, lyrical voice from a southern corner of the hemisphere offers a model of resistance.” —The New Yorker

“Intoxicating . . . Sexy, political and deeply humane . . . We all owe Penguin Classics a round of shots for A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.” —The Washington Post

A galvanizing look at life on the margins of society by a crowning figure of Latin America's queer counterculture who celebrated “melodrama, kitsch, extravagance, and vulgarity of all kinds” (Garth Greenwell) in playful, performative, linguistically inventive essays, now in English for the first time

A Penguin Classic

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas—that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. Touching on everything from Che Guevara to Elizabeth Taylor, from the aftermath of authoritarian rule to the daily lives of Chile’s locas—a slur for trans women and effeminate gay men that he boldly reclaims—his writing infuses political urgency with playfulness, realism with absurdism, and resistance with camp, and his AIDS crónicas immortalize a generation of Chileans doubly “disappeared” by casting each loca, as she falls sick, in the starring role of her own private tragedy. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing English listeners to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Listeners trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

©2023 Pedro Lemebel (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Stupendous!

Fearlessly subversive, in-your-(and everybody's)-face and full of love in every letter.

This, my first experience with Lemebel's work, encompasses gay life in Chile, in the context of the Pinochet/military junta years followed immediately by the AIDS pandemic. It's comprised of essays ('cronicas') that spotlight the extreme ironies of gay people's existence, the extreme dangers they face while at the same time being used extensively by the same police/military state that uses them (think Kiss of the Spider Woman dynamics).

He also holds up a mirror to the 'developed West' (USA, Western Europe) who breezily and flippantly flaunt their "Gay Inc." (my term) version of Gay Lib as THE STANDARD to live by, when other cultures are still fighting for basic democracy, much less gay equality.

An entire section deals with the AIDS pandemic, how it crushes so many lives in the country where being Gay is still persecuted, and where the disease was an import from the aforementioned 'developed West', and treatment, years behind the curve, occurs in the black market.

Many of the essays discuss the fraught and desperate existence of MTF transvestites/transexuals who's only mode of survival - for themselves and the loved ones they try to support - is the danger-filled street prostitution.

There's no shortage of haunting irony and bold subversion in Lemebel's style - it literally sets the pages aflame. But there's no hate - just breathtaking honesty, poetically stated.

For the sake of brevity, I sign off saying that this is a book which MUST! MUST! MUST! be read by anyone interested in the realities of LGBT+ life outside the now-comfy cozy borders of the 'developed West'.