Pedro Segundo Mardones Lemebel (21 November 1952 – 23 January 2015) was an openly gay Chilean essayist, chronicler, and novelist. He was known for his cutting critique of authoritarianism and for his humorous depiction of Chilean popular culture, from a queer perspective. He was nominated for Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2014. He died of laryngeal cancer on 23 January 2015 in Santiago, Chile.
In 2001 he published his first novel Tengo miedo torero a difficult story of contextualized love during the attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet (September 7, 1986). For the presentation of the book, Lemebel arrived in a red dress with a feathered headdress, at a ceremony with many people that was public with politicians, filmmakers, journalists and a few writers. The book would later gain international recognition after being translated into English by Katherine Silver, then French and Italian.
(Wikipedia)
Lemebel on Playing the Part
We are encouraged to take surfaces or appearances seriously in their own right.
See also the conversation video with Juan Poblete.
- Lemebel, Pedro. My Tender Matador. Trans. Katherine Silver. New York: Grove, 2003.
On Pedro Lemebel
A conversation about My Tender Matador, with Juan Poblete (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Lemebel videos
Pedro Lemebel Interview – Off The Record 2001 (English Subtitles):
My Tender Matador (2020) Trailer:
- Rupprecht, Tobias. “The General on his Journeys. Augusto Pinochet’s International Trips and Diverging Transnational Justice and Memory Agendas in the Aftermath of the Cold War.” Global Society 33.3 (2019): 419-435
For Carlos’s birthday, la loca organises what we are told is a Cuban-style party, to which the neighbourhood children are invited for cake and candy, hot chocolate and party games. Once the kids have left, she puts on the record-player the song that gives the novel its title, “My Tender Matador” (in the original, “Tengo miedo torero”), and declares that “Now it’s time for a grown-up surprise. And with one quick movement, she pulled away the napkin to reveal a bottle of pisco, a bottle of soda, and two glistening glasses” (76-77). Under the influence of the alcohol—in the form of Chile’s national spirit—more revelations follow. La loca asks for “the gift of a secret. Something you have never told anybody else” (77). Carlos, his head feeling “like a merry-go-round of pisco-soaked cotton” (78), replies with a story of a youthful gay experience, as a kid in the countryside. Then, in a scene that probably does not pass muster in 2022 as easily as it did in 2003 when the novel was published, la loca, turned on “to the very tips of her false eyelashes” (80), takes advantage of the fact that Carlos has passed out through drink to undress him and give him a blowjob, leaving him “sprawled out like a Christ disjointed by the pisco’s alcoholic onslaught” (84). It is not exactly in vino veritas, but the drink allows la loca to strip Carlos of some of his customary defences, in a kind of redemptive sacrifice.
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