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

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.

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 a decade of drafts, residencies at the Headland Center for the Arts and Hedgebrook, as well as notebooks upon notebooks. There also lies the influence of Chilean essayist Pedro Lemebel, braided into Delgado Lopera’s narrative of a father, Ignacio; his 12-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Valentina; and his trans mother, Mamadora Eléctrica, inspired by the author’s own trans mother, Adela Vázquez. This is the story of what happens to a dream deferred in the dusty apartments, drag clubs and secluded rivers of Colombia in the 1990s.

“I’m imagining that space,” says Delgado Lopera. “The man who’s married to his wife, who goes to work every day, who’s just daydreaming about having sex with men, he’s not writing it, he’s not making art about this, right? I’m imagining what it is to live with this kind of fear, to negate yourself.”

He does all this, too, in puro Spanglish. The book’s editor, Gina Iaquinta, doesn’t speak Spanish, but when she read the manuscript for the first time, she says the writing made her feel like she did.

“I was just completely sucked in, and I was intrigued by the ambition, the characters, which just glittered off the page,” she says. “And linguistically I just thought, ‘This is an acrobat,’ the way that Julián writes and weaves these two languages.”

As far as endings go, Delgado Lopera doesn’t really like the happy ones. He wants your heart to break — and here, it might. Something supernatural, something speculative could still happen, but he wouldn’t necessarily call it magical realism — the same way Argentine writer Camila Sosa Villada might not use that term to describe her trans novel “Las malas.”

“I think that sometimes we need words to describe things that are seen as outside of the normal, but I think part of being trans is that there’s so many things outside of the normal,” Delgado Lopera says, with a laugh again. “And part of being Colombian is that there’s so many things outside of the normal.”

Besides, normal lacks sazón. Says Delgado Lopera, quoting Pedro Lemebel: “I could write with no tongue, like a newscaster on CNN, no accent and hold the salt,” Lemebel wrote. “But my tongue is salted.” This author’s tongue is too.