ABSTRACT
In an interview in Barranquilla given shortly before his death with John Better Armella, a gay Colombian crónica writer and poet, the Chilean crónica writer Pedro Lemebel (1955–2015), talked about the connection between his writing career and “Hablo por mi diferencia,” a famous manifesto he read in 1986 in a gathering of the Chilean political left resisting the Pinochet dictatorship. “When I wrote Manifesto (I Speak for My Difference), someone paid me to publish it, and they asked for another text. So my chronicles were born out of the need to survive. It’s worked out well, which is why I say with all the false modesty of a bald queen that, in Latin America, chronicles are what pays to get my hair done” (Better 2017: n.p.).
