Pedro Lemebel, the Chilean writer, artist, activist, and provocateur, died last Friday morning of laryngeal cancer. By the afternoon, newspapers in Latin America and Spain teemed with tributes. In his native Santiago, hundreds gathered for his funeral on Saturday, and celebrities and politicians competed to offer the most extravagant praise. “Pedro Lemebel is an essential figure of Chile, a great artist who leaves an enormous void in the country,” said Claudia Barattini, the minister of culture. Chile’s socialist President, Michelle Bachelet, called him “a tireless creator,” “a fighter for social justice and defender of freedom.”

This is a surreal end for a writer who called himself a “queen” (una loca) and “a poor old faggot” (un marica pobre y viejo), and whose style and obsessions were forged on the social margins and in political opposition. Lemebel defined himself against establishments of all kinds: against Pinochet’s military dictatorship, but also against the Marxist resistance that condemned homosexuality as a bourgeois vice; against the neoliberal consensus behind Chile’s “economic miracle,” but also against the L.G.B.T. activists who Lemebel believed were making commodities of queer suffering and queer lives.

Pedro Mardones—he adopted Lemebel, his mother’s family name, in the late nineteen-eighties—was born in 1952 in one of Santiago de Chile’s poorest neighborhoods. The son of a baker, he studied metal forging and furniture making before working briefly as an art teacher in two high schools. (According to the obituary in El País, he was fired because of his homosexuality.) Raised in a house without books, he began writing in workshops organized by the Society of Chilean Writers; he attended them, he would say later, “because there were cookies and coffee and something to drink. There was wine, too, and pretty boys.” More than literary ambition, he was motivated “by desire for these other things, hungers of all kinds.”

But his literary début took place far from workshops or salons. In September of 1986, Lemebel staged what he called “an intervention” at a meeting of leftist opposition parties. Wearing high heels, with the hammer and sickle painted over half of his face, he read “Manifesto: I Speak for My Difference,” in which he indicted the Marxist resistance in Chile for its homophobia and sexism. “But don’t talk to me about the proletariat,,” he said, “because to be poor and a faggot is worse.” He continued:

Will the future be in black and white?

Will time be split between night and the working day

without any ambiguities?

Won’t there be a faggot in some corner

throwing the future of your new man off balance?

In 1987, Lemebel formed an arts collective with the poet and visual artist Francisco Casas Silva. Over the next decade, the duo often interrupted cultural and political events, calling attention to those they said were being ignored, especially queer people, people with AIDS, and sex workers. They dubbed themselves Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, the Mares of the Apocalypse. The name played on the association of AIDS with the plagues of the apocalypse, and on the vulgar use of yegua: “it’s a name like sow, like bitch; it’s a pejorative name for a woman,” Lemebel said. “We took it on, you could say, like a battle flag.”

The performances of the Yeguas were inventive, hilarious, and lyrical by turns, sometimes lavishly gorgeous, sometimes brutal. In one of their most powerful pieces, La conquista de América (1989), the two artists, barefoot and stripped to the waist, with Walkmen taped to their chests, danced the cueca, the national dance of Chile, on top of a white map of Latin America. Bits of glass from broken Coca-Cola bottles were scattered on the floor, and as they danced the map became stained with blood. The piece evoked Latin America’s recent history as well as its deep past, commemorating massacres both acknowledged and unacknowledged, from the time of the conquistadors to that of Pinochet’s regime.

Alongside the art he produced as part of the Yeguas, Lemebel wrote pieces, known as crónicas, for various newspapers in Chile, and these brought him a popular following. Gabriel García Marquez defined a crónica as “a story that is true,” but for Lemebel it was something stranger, a “bastard genre” accommodating reportage, memoir, economic analysis, history, poetry, and extravagant acts of imagination. Lemebel’s crónicas took on a bewildering range of topics, but his sympathies were always with the oppressed and the poor, with women and minorities, with “the human surplus that wipe the hypocritical smirk off the face of the victorious Chile of the miracle.”

Only a handful of these texts are available in English. “Loba Lamar’s Last Kiss (Silk Crepe Ribbons at My Funeral … Please)” appeared in the literary magazine Grand Street in 2002, in a translation by Margaret Jull Costa, whose rendition of Lemebel’s baroque vernacular is the best he has received in English. Loba Lamar is a black drag queen in Valparaíso suffering the final stages of AIDS, and the piece is narrated in the first-person-plural voice of her fellow-queens, who nurse her through the last weeks of the disease. As her dementia-fuelled demands grow more elaborate, they wander the streets in a rainstorm at midnight to satisfy her cravings: