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“The Latin American queer adventure is in danger,” warns Alejandro Modarelli, analyzing the landscape of struggles for sexual dissidence after the sudden deaths of Pedro Lemebel, Diana Sacayán, and Lohana Berkins. Visiting Santiago, Chile, wishing to pay tribute to the renowned Chilean chronicler, Modarelli, an Argentine journalist, writer, and screenwriter, will present his latest book, “La Noche del Mundo” (The Night of the World), this Thursday, January 19th. The book, a collection of sodomitic chronicles from the end of the century, was published in 2016 by Mansalva and dedicated to Lemebel, his “mother figure.” “In memory of Pedro Lemebel, a woman of the people in her trench,” begins this baroque “brumary of queers,” as Alejandro Modarelli himself calls it. Presentes magazine met with the writer in Santiago and asked him five questions.

By Víctor Hugo Robles

1.- You're returning to Chile two years after Pedro Lemebel's death to present "The Night of the World," where you recount your near-death experience in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Does this new book of yours seek to exorcise your own near-death experience?

– A little over three years ago, I spent ten days in a coma after suffering a respiratory incident during a flight between Bogotá and Buenos Aires. The plane made an emergency landing in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in the Bolivian lowlands, where death hesitated, unsure whether to take me or leave my body in suspense. During those days when my life depended on a ventilator, I dreamed intensely. A collection of experiences more powerful than any fiction. Some even quite passionate, because Eros doesn't abandon you even when you're in deep trouble. In one of those dreams, I traveled to Santiago to meet with the man I considered my literary mentor, Pedro Lemebel, a project I still needed to coordinate with him. The Santiago I encountered had nothing to do with the one I finally met in 2014. My dream Santiago was like something out of a film noir, in black and white, reminiscent of the images of the bombing of La Moneda and, why not, of the memories of Pedro's most rebellious times—who else but the revolutionary hustler of "I'm Afraid, Torero"? Santiago was the stage for a political passion to alter the course of history, the tragic corner where farewells were believed to be forever. “The Night of the World” is the way I found to free myself from that joyful demon that had me locked in its alcove like a melancholic and infertile princess, and I already felt like finding another place to tie myself up. What to do after receiving the last rites? Well, turn the holy water into golden rain or a semen bath. There's a scene in Jean Genet's “Funeral Pomp” where the widow lingers behind in the funeral procession to rub herself against a man. I don't consider it in bad taste, but rather a moral obligation to life. “The Night of the World” concludes with a resurrection of the flesh. I think Pedro would have liked it. We're presenting it on January 19th at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, accompanied by dear friends, all crazy about Lemebel.

2. How do you remember that first meeting in Santiago, Chile, at Pedro Lemebel's apartment? Was Lemebel a friendly accomplice, or the apocalyptic writer you had read so much about? Do you feel closer to Lemebel's writing style or more aligned with other influences like Puig?

When I arrived at Pedro Lemebel's apartment in Bellas Artes, where he had organized a meeting for us to get acquainted, I was nervous; it was understandable: on the one hand, I had to internally process the admiration, which in one way or another creates distance, and also the legend circulating in Buenos Aires about the eccentric reactions of the working-class diva. No one else had arrived yet, and the madwoman was restless and aware of how difficult it was to understand her, because of the laryngeal cancer that had left her with a voice like a voice from a cave. Soon the other queues arrived: Jaime Lepé, you yourself, Víctor Hugo, and some amorous demon descended on that house. Between the first and last moments of that night, powerful friendships were forged, so much so that we became part of a group that accompanied Pedro in his final days and at his last supper on December 31, 2014. I think Pedro felt that I wasn't a vampire (he confessed to me that he had loved my previous book, "Rosa Prepucio") but rather—he told me—a velvet cactus. We were allies in the underworld where we both felt truly alive and in danger, and united in a baroque pigsty where even shit could shine if the ass it came from belonged to a sex-crazed madwoman. In that sense, let's say that in "La Noche del Mundo" there's more Lemebel than Puig. It seems to me that Puig, whose influence can be traced in some of the book's monologues, had a style that wasn't barricaded. In any case, I suppose Puig also hovered over "Tengo Miedo Torero."

3. The death of Pedro Lemebel was followed by the passing of Diana Sacayán and Lohana Berkins in Argentina. How much has the Latin American sexual dissidence movement lost without the irreverent lyrics and transvestite political struggles of such important and unforgettable figures?

These past years have seen the deaths of immense figures, and there is no one to take their place. The Latin American queer movement is in danger. There is an attempt to erase the memory of our shared struggles with other legally dispossessed groups. We should persist against the insidious extermination policies of neoliberalism, where suddenly the city is simultaneously and obscenely populated by beautiful mall queens and homeless people who peddle the impossible. I feel that in my country, working-class women have fewer rights than gay men because they cannot control their own bodies, they cannot afford a safe, clandestine abortion. And I certainly don't include trans women in this critique, to whom liberal democracy will always be indebted. There is no one to take their place. Lohana and Diana were the passionate driving forces behind a trans movement that, without a doubt, is the most politicized in Latin America. Perhaps because it was necessary to defend itself against local police obsessions more than anywhere else. The Latin American queer adventure, with so many leaders and beautiful monsters, is in danger. Hopefully, all of them—Pedro, Diana, and Lohana—are stirring up a ruckus in our own little world.

4. The struggle for sexual diversity in Argentina has always been an inspiration and a path for the Chilean gay rights movement's own battles. Equal marriage and the Gender Identity Law are two important examples. Has Mauricio Macri's rise to power and the dismantling of the legal and cultural gains of sexual diversity in Argentina represented a setback for those gains?

I don't think Macri will implement specific policies against the LGBTQ+ movement. He doesn't need to be so pushy, and even those of us who are considered "queer" can serve as garlands for his feast of the few. Certain social programs that represent an expense will lose strength, yes, because we are dominated by the CEOcracy (governments of businesspeople), and what matters is the balance sheet. Macri has his gay allies and has incorporated them into the bureaucratic hierarchy; there's even a trans woman of aristocratic origin who works in the Ministry of Security, no less, and she's become quite insistent on the means of survival of trans people who weren't as fortunate as she is. So, to answer, I think those who will suffer most severely in the coming years will be poor trans women, because the job quota law enacted for those seeking to leave prostitution is something that meritocratic neoliberalism rejects. The quota is a burden for this government and not a promising way to include minorities forced into street survival in the labor market. Macri believes that prostitution is an urban condition that can even be quaint; he commented something like that years ago. A macho idea, like the one that slipped out of his upper-class tongue that no woman secretly dislikes being told she has a nice ass.

5. How do you want "The Last Night of the World" to be read in Chile, as a longing for the homosexual body embodied in the queers who still defy the system or as a political critique of the neoliberal egalitarian and sanitizing gay model?

I must confess, and I say this with passion, that after a long hiatus I returned to writing literature—in that genre that corresponds to this fractal and unstable time: the chronicle—thanks to Pedro Lemebel. In his portrayals of the streetwise, protesting queer man, and in the splendid style of the Baroque, I began to rediscover myself as a writer. Let's say that style is the unconscious and inconsistent effect of a confluence of influences, mostly successive, and in that style, in the materials I chose, are Monsiváis, Puig, Perlongher. That is to say, those figures who, while witnessing a change in the way homosexuality was experienced, found themselves uncomfortable under the new regime of clones with bourgeois aspirations, typical of the Chueca or Bellas Artes circles, in an era in which the embrace of integration (welcome civil rights) is tainted by a disquiet over the loss of intellectual and transformative richness. Their obsession, which is also mine, was to embrace the belief that there must be a revolutionary foundation in our difference, something richer to offer to the course of history than the equalizing marriage. I'm talking about mindless assimilationism. Which means a loss of the identity of a pariah with a conscience: we are not equal. I even prefer to belong to the aristocracy of perversion rather than to the vulgarity of a blonde baby boomer with a family credit card.