Pretend you're dead. Queer author Julián Delgado Lopera will carry you

7 min Click here to listen to this article Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print 0:00 0:00 1x This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. The purse had two heads, both bald. It wore two different eye shadows in shades of fluorescent blue and green; circles of neon pink blush on each face; silver dangly earrings on all four ears and both mouths occupied with cigarettes. I’d say this was the centerpiece of the outfit, but no; not even. Julián Delgado Lopera appeared onstage, pulled his brand new novel, “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You,” out of the purse with two heads and read a sticky-noted passage aloud to the crowd. It was the Thursday stop of his book tour at the Lab in San Francisco, not far from where Delgado Lopera once lived for more than 15 years; and on this night, it was also his 38th birthday. He celebrated the affair wearing a spectacular getup largely sourced from Colombian fashion designer Adriana Kanal of KNL Style: padded, black-and-white wings over a latex vest, a fishnetted top and sky-high platform boots. “I think the thing with writing is that sometimes there’s a perception, as if we don’t have a body, and so this thing is coming out of a mind and it’s separate,” Delgado Lopera later says on a video call from his hotel, sipping on a green smoothie. “But we have a body, and I like to very much embody my own storytelling.” Author Julian Delgado Lopera at recent book event in San Francisco. (Aaron Wojack) Onstage, the author was joined in conversation by Honey Mahogany, which followed readings by Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Maryam Rostami. Archival footage from the GLBT Historical Society played, plus Grace Towers and Kochina Rude gave drag performances. In short, it was a ki — and a riveting prelude to his reading on Wednesday at Skylight Books in Los Angeles, with queer author Michelle Tea, a fellow alumnus of the Sister Spit spoken word series. Based in Brooklyn, Delgado Lopera says he’s just finished teaching for the year as an assistant professor of creative writing and contemporary Latine literature at the City University of New York. Writing is just one of his many chosen mediums of storytelling; as one of the founders of Drag Story Hour, his resumé is a melding of fashion, fiction, oral histories, archival research and queer history. “I think queer history is just so fabulous and interesting to me, partly because I’m queer, but also because it’s just so fabulous and interesting,” he laughs. “It’s all of these parts of history that have been very hidden, and that also changed the way that we understand things: people who behave differently, who have a different relationship to their bodies, have a different relationship to their communities, how we come together, different ways of existing, different ways of talking, different ways of using language, different possibilities.” His sophomore novel, “Pretend You’re Dead,” dives deeper into queer history than Delgado Lopera’s 2020 debut, a coming-of-age story titled “Fiebre Tropical” — so much that it practically splashes into the Magdalena River, the most prominent river of his native Colombia. (Although his first first book, “¡Cuéntamelo! Oral Histories by LGBT Latino Immigrants,” was dripping with history too.) “It is a known fact that some people grow to be old, while others become birds or panthers or beasts. Some people even turn into rivers,” Mamadora Eléctrica narrates in the new book’s prologue, titled “Travesti Lore: La Maldición.” The term “travesti” was long reserved for transgender people in Latin America, namely those whose gender expressions leaned feminine. “Travesti Lore tells us it is in the Magdalena where the bodies of the first recorded travestis in the Americas were thrown by the Spanish,” she adds. How these Latine drag kings took center stage At a recent panel called ‘Living Legends of Drag: Stories of LGBTQ+ Artistry & Culture,’ two Latine drag kings — Manny Oakley and El Daña — connected their struggles across generations. Born and raised in Bogotá, Delgado Lopera immigrated to Miami when he was 15, though he goes back to visit Colombia at least once a year. “Pretend You’re Dead” came off one extended jaunt in 2019, when the author spent five months in the country researching its trans history. A drag queen friend introduced him to the multihyphenate artist Manu Mojito, who took him to the Red Comunitaria Trans in the Barrio Santa Fe. There, he discovered that trans history in Colombia, arguably more than in the U.S., lives inside of people’s homes, raw in their stories — not just sitting neatly in an academic archive. “Queer people, we’re the ones who are telling all the queer stories,” Delgado Lopera says. “But everybody else who has those desires and are existing in fear … they’re not saying it.” “Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You” alchemized those months of research, plus

Pretend you're dead. Queer author Julián Delgado Lopera will carry you

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