A review by laura_sackton
A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel

I loved this book so much and yet I hardly remember anything from it! I found it almost impossible to pay attention to the audio for some reason, maybe because of Lemebel’s rambling, meandering, fast, zigzagging style, his long sentences and exuberant anger. Eventually I gave up and let it wash over me, knowing I’d eventually reread it in print. 

It’s a collection of his Chronicas, essays he published in Chile throughout his career. Essays, stories, poems, nonfiction, fiction, I don’t know, one thing I loved so much is how deeply uninterested in genre he is. Many of them are about the lives of locas and travestis, many are about AIDS, about Pinochet and the dictatorship, about resistance, about life on the streets and in the travesti communities. Some of them tell the life story of a particular travesti, some are about his political anger. Some are about hookups, resistance actions, neoliberal bullshit, white gays and macho gays and homosexuals from places like the US ruining queerness. He talks a lot about how queerness and the lives of travestis and locas, the queens and fags and trans women and gender faeries, are totally undermined by assimilation, by mainstream homosexuality, by people refusing to play with gender. He talks about Indigenous ideas about queerness, about how he does not care about Stonewall and is sick of hearing Americans talk about gay liberation. I dug it.

Most of what came through is his language, which is so poetic and beautiful, but also sharp, campy, a mix of tenderness and bitchiness and anger and delight,. He makes tons of jokes, he doesn’t use “proper” language. It’s hard to describe this but it’s so alive, so vivid, so funny and irreverent and flaming and vivid and vital. So much of this comes through even in the translation. 

I loved the translator’s note, which was so thoughtful. She talks a lot about his use of language, his style, the way he refuses to categorize himself and the people he writes about into neat western notions of trans or gay identity, and how that played into her translation, how some of translating this book was just letting those rigid boundaries go, and translating his playfulness, his way with language, into various words in English that capture the same spirit. 

This is such an incredible look into such an amazing queer ancestor, a writer who loved his people and lived his life loudly and refused to look away from everything that was happening in his country during a dictatorship, who poured himself and the specific lives of locas and travestis, into words, with such loving care. I feel so grateful to have gotten this glimpse, and I can’t wait to revisit in print so I can slow down and really pay close attention.