A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays

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 available in English for the first time

A Penguin Classic

There are few writers who pushed the envelope like Pedro Lemebel. In life, he was an openly queer man living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship; in art, he was a brilliant innovator of the written word, combining memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry in his crónicas. 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—Lemebel infuses political urgency with playfulness, realism with absurdism, resistance with camp, and in his AIDS crónicas, he immortalizes a generation of Chileans doubly “disappeared” by casting each loca, as she falls sick, in the starring role of her own private tragedy. The best of his crónicas are collected here, in deft new translations that introduce readers of English to the subversive genius of an artist whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde make him an icon of queer counterculture not only in Chile but also around the world.