Queer Literature from Latin America: Queer Dissidence Against Pinochet

Pedro Lemebel was born in Santiago de Chile in 1952 as the son of a baker. The trained art teacher was dismissed from school because of homosexuality. As a co-founder of the provocative performance group “Mares of the Apocalypse” and a satirist for magazines, he turned the Chilean establishment against him. And as a reader of his only novel, “Torero, I’m afraid,” you are immediately in the middle of the mood of optimism, and you can sense from the first pages the great hope for the end of the military dictatorship that gripped Chile’s capital in September 1986.

But you are also confronted with social reality, the modest home of the book’s protagonist, the “faint one from the front.” In the original Spanish, “Front” means, first of all, the “loca del frente,” i.e. the fag from across the street: She moves into a dilapidated house, tidies up properly, works as an embroiderer and quickly becomes an integral part of the neighborhood. There you will find her eccentric, but also likeable. The fag isn’t particularly interested in politics, but she can’t completely escape it, because news of the regime’s violent acts keep coming from the radio into the text of the novel and into her life, just like the sappy lines of the Bolero songs.

This novel is about revolution and love, about political and sexual dissidence. The protagonist finds himself between these two fronts by chance. Carlos, student and member of the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez – the organization that would later carry out the assassination attempt on dictator Pinochet – meets her in the general store and immediately falls in love with him. Carlos then primarily uses her house as a storage facility for forbidden books and for conspiratorial learning meetings.

The protagonist appears ignorant of Carlos’ political activities; but as a reader you quickly suspect that she understands exactly what it’s about. This not wanting to know exactly could promise underground security against state persecution. The feigned ignorance also seems to be an emotional self-protection, because would the young, attractive Carlos even be interested in the aged protagonist in less revolutionary times? A flirtatious, erotically charged game ensues in which the boundaries between sexual and political dissidence become increasingly blurred.

The two’s paths repeatedly cross with those of Pinochet and his wife Lucía Hiriart, who talk about their everyday lives. The dictator gives the impression of a fearful, paranoid, homophobic tyrant. Pinochet not only represents the brutal period of military dictatorship, but also a particularly bad form of patriarchy. His wife, on the other hand, is ostensibly only interested in fashion and her own reputation, but seems to have a clear understanding of current political developments.

These two narrative strands allow a look at the backstage of big politics, the domestic life. In this way, the novel repeatedly dissolves heroic male ideas of great politics. Because here it is not always the dictators or revolutionaries who pull the strings. This emphasis is undoubtedly inspired by reality: Lucía Hiriart is said to have been one of Pinochet’s closest advisors and to have been largely responsible for his participation in the coup.

The protagonist’s actions also show how political and sexual dissidence are connected: it seems to be her appearance as a slut that protects her from being suspected of being resistant. Even in the midst of unrest, she can get materials past the military and police to the right places without being bothered. But here too the text eludes us and remains unclear as to how much her ignorance is an act.

The book combines highly topical queer identities with a traditional left-wing revolutionary romanticism. This is probably one of the central reasons for the new edition, along with the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile. Published in German in 2003 under the title “Dreams from Plush,” “Torero, I’m Afraid” is a slightly linguistically revised version; both translations come from Matthias Strobel.

The semi-biographical character of the book, as Lemebel himself called it – today one would probably say autofictional – also fits the time perfectly. The light blue, pink and white color scheme of the band on the cover appropriately assigns the book to a discourse about trans identities. However, how useful this labeling is remains questionable. Lemebel, who died in 2015 at the age of 62, never described himself as trans, nor did the protagonist of his novel.

Today, when questions about gender are discussed much more naturally, he might have taken a different position. But the cover design creates the codification of an identity that does not do the book justice, as it plays with attributions throughout and remains fluid. The text is absolutely queer, because it is hard to grasp, flows with its exposed kitsch and self-irony and speaks of the protagonist sometimes as an attractive woman, sometimes as a bride, sometimes as a neighbor, sometimes as an uncle.

At one point, the reader is completely catapulted out of the text: on the day of the attack, the protagonist seeks refuge from police tear gas in a gay sex cinema and promptly ends up in a performance of “Die Hard 2,” the first Years later, in 1990, was published. So perhaps you can’t blame the publisher for promoting “Torero, I’m Afraid” as the “first queer romance novel in world literature.” Obviously it isn’t, also because the novel is a kind of rewrite of Manuel Puig’s “The Kiss of the Spider Woman.”, which is about a very similar constellation between a guerrilla fighter and a “Loca”.

Lemebel found this book to be too sad. Whether he managed to achieve a happy ending in his novel may not be so important when the journey there is already so much fun.

Pedro Lemebel: Torero, I’m scared. A.d. Span. v. Matthias Strobel. Suhrkamp, ​​216 p., hardcover, €23.

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