history / tourism / grief

He read the names of those that had disappeared, those that had been abducted in the middle of the night by agents of Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA) from their families and brought here, tortured and killed and now thirty years later, in their absense, their families responded: "presente." A chill went down my spine.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a ceremony outside what had been for so many years a derelict building, known now primarily by its address: Londres 38. In the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship, opponents of the regime were being rounded up, tortured and murdered, many of them were students, activists in there twenties. AQUI SE TORTURO Y ASESINO. Here thery were tortured and murdered. For years relatives of the victims fought for recognition, every week standing in vigil outside the former DINA interogation centre that remains government property, lighting candles and pasting posters of their missing love ones on the walls of Londres 38 and every Thursday a government employee would paint over them in a dull battleship grey. On 14 October 2008, a little over thirty-five years after the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown by a military coup, the president, Salvador Allende committing suicide as the army of Augusto Pinochet surrounded La Moneda (the presidential palace), I attended a ceremony marking the commencement of construction. Londres 38 is to be made into a memorial for those, los desaparecidos (the disappeared) that were killed by that regime.

I suppose it's moments like this where you have to wonder what the hell you're doing at something like this. Watching old women cry over sons and daughters, still living in the moment they were taken from them, you really have to ask whether you have any right to be there. When Claudia asked me if I would be interested in going, I said yeah sure, it sounds interesting but the reality was something else; was this grief tourism? I asked myself.

I recall a heated discussion that I had with Claudia and a couple others a few weeks prior while we were holidaying down in the south of Chile. We met a British couple who had been in Chile for the ski season and with that finished, were heading into Argentina. They'd stayed in the nicest of resorts, and other than the ski slopes and the occasional pisco sour they were happy to stay hermetically sealled from the rest of Chile and its history. They knew nothing about Pinochet or Britain's complicity in the deaths of thousands of Chileans and this irritated Claudia. They had come to her country without the slightest idea about Chile's past. She was right to be annoyed, but then I guess I entered Chile with only the vaguest of details. For christsake, the Lonely Planet pretty much says, Pinochet came to power in a Military Coup and some years later retired. Subtext I guess is that Pinochet is not polite discussion in Chile. However I told Claudia that there was no point dwelling on the ignorance of other people especially when this couple seemed generally shocked by what Claudia had told them. It was a far better story to tell that this British couple had learnt something and would go on to educate others in turn. So I thought anyway.

So maybe this helps legitimate my presence at Londres 38, but there are limits I think to this. As the doors opened and the relatives moved in to place flowers and to grieve, I stopped. "Claudia," I said, "I can't go in. If you want photos you'll need to take them yourself" and I handed her my camera.

Maybe I'll go back when the memorial opens.

we don't speak the same language

What is so fun about being in a relationship? You're always worried abouth them and they you, and then you're worried that their worried, and you have to figure them in to all your plans for the future, with anything that you decide directly affecting them... and then there are the arguments, the stupid little fucking arguments that blow things all out of proportions, like for example, last night when Julio and I agreed to meet at six and we both sat around for half an hour waiting for each other in the same fucking place without seeing one another. He left without calling me, pissed and when I called him he was so angry at me, where was I and what time did I think it was? I asked him the same question. When we finally met at seven he was still shitty, how is this my fault? I asked. He didn't buy into any of this mutual acceptance of blame. It was my fault. He complained that he waited around for thirty minutes in the cold for me and I din't turn up. I was fucking sitting over there the whole time, pointing to a seat opposite the metro. I told him that I was cold to and I bet he didn't get into an argument with a crazy local about the difference between frogs and toads (sapos y ranas). He didn't find my attempts to lighten the mood very amusing. We walked for a while in silence when I finally said that if he would prefer meeting up another day it was okay. He shook my hand, yes fucking shook my hand and stormed off.

I sent him this message:
Tú eres una de las pricipales razones por las que yo estoy aquí. Quiero que entiendas que estoy tratando tanto como es posible.

Loosly translated: You are one of the principle reasons why I am here. I want you to know that I am trying as hard as is humanly possible.

What else can I do?

Quick addendum: It turns out that when he said "thirty minutes", he didn't mean "meet me in thirty minutes". He was sitting round waiting for me while I went and got a coffee. This was why he cracked it. Ah... mi culpa. Woe the joys of being lost in translation.

It´s hard to remember that our lives are such a short time... when it takes such a long time

I am killing myself with every puff I take; christ I sound like a QUIT commercial! I woke this morning with the sensation that there was something there, something on the wall of my lung and no matter how much I coughed it wouldn't dislodge. Maybe it's cancer. Maybe I want another fucking cigarette!

I've been thinking a lot about the past lately, about my relationship with my father before he died. I remember when I was maybe 10 or 11, about a year before he died, we were sharing a caravan because my grandmother was staying with us and so they put her in my room and I got to sleep in a rented caravan that sat in our driveway. It was my mum's brilliant idea that my father sleep in there too. Maybe she thought it would be our chance to bond or maybe they were fighting. I don't recall.

We didn't. Yeah that pretty much sums up that week. We didn't talk, communicate, nothing, we just went to bed and slept. I remember I was reading some boy-fiction about conservationists in Africa battling poachers to save some mountain gorillas and just as my father turned the lights out, I wished that just once that he would talk to me. Did he hate me? I thought about telling him that I might be gay, then at least that would get a reaction out of him. It's funny how something so trivial, so long ago can just come up like reflux and feel so raw. I wonder though, had he known that he was going to be dead in a little over a year, how those nights in the caravan would have passed.

and so I dreamt

... that I witnessed the second coming of Christ. Yes the son of God was brought forth once more into the world to clarify I few misinterpretations of His word; this time around in the form of actor and failed singer, Mandy Moore.

Mandy, angelic and radient as always, guided our rag-tag gang of disciples around the countryside preaching His/Her word aboard a poorly maintained and disintergrating mini-bus. I can't remember too much of what this liturgy was about, soley that I kept pestering her with questions about my sexuality. "So what's the go on the whole gay thing?" I'd asked her. She promised to get back to me with an answer.

The last I heard the whole story was being made into a movie, I think I was going to be played by one of the Belushi brothers, possibly the dead one.

gay pride worldwide

Julio refused to go and it took us some time of heated and confused discussion to understand why, with all my bad spanish and his seeming inability to slow his speech to a rate that renders understanding possible. At first I thought he believed that all gay relationships were un-natural and should therefore not be celebrated and kept in secret and shame, to which I replied with some indignation: "¡NO SOY CONTRA NATURALEZA!". He clarified, it wasn't that he thought gay relationships were wrong, but wider Chilean society were of such an opinion and he didn't see how one pride march was going to anything but cement this feeling. Coming from a semi-radical background, I can't say I agreed.

I bought a book the other week that chronicles Chilean political posters of the 60s and 70s, there's one colourful print that states that "sometimes praying isn't enough" with a priest in full vestment, arm held back, taught, ready to hurl a rock. What have gay people ever gained from staying quiet? In the 1930s there was a Chilean president, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo who rounded up homosexuals in a series of systematic witch-hunts. These people were never heard from again and it is rumoured that they were thrown alive, their feet set in concrete, to the bottom of the ocean. Only fifteen years ago, in the port city of Valparaiso, a place famous for its art and cosmopolitan life style, the gay nightclub Divine was deliberately burnt to the ground; sixteen patrons died inside. No one has ever been charged.

Inroads have been made in Chile regarding treatment of their gay population. In 1998 sodomy laws were removed from the statutes and since there have been efforts made by all levels of government to improve relations with the gay community. It's not perfect, no. I have read numerous and recent reports of police brutality against gays but victims, with the assistance of groups such as the Movimiento de Integración y Liberación Homosexual (MOVILH), are making complaints against offending officers. Again I ask, what have we ever gained from staying silent?

On 27 September, I attended Santiago's third gay pride march. I can't say I understood all the speeches. There was the municipal councellor candidate, Gozalo Cid and Rolando Jimémez, president of MOVILH among others. They expressed solitarity for the gay community in Ecuador as, from what I could understand, a Bill is to be introduced that would remove expression of same-sex love from their equivalent of a Crimes Act.

Like any pride march, anywhere in the world there was music and dancing and girating and one really sexy guaso (sort of the Chilean equivalent of a cowboy) shaking his hotpanted clad booty to "girls just want to have fun" by Cyndi Lauper. And there were the drag queens, walking down the Alemada in impossibly high heels, drapping themselves provocatively infront of the presidential palace. This is what the media cover, Julio told me emphatically, not the old men holding hands for the first time in public, not the same-sex families with children or the parents who want their gay boy or girl to live without shame and guilt and fear. They ignore the long line of gay Chilean writers and intellectuals such as Andrés Perez, Pedro Lemebel and Pablo Simonetti. They sensationalise and pervert and instill prejudice.

Maybe so, but nonetheless I bought him a badge that says "No soy gay pero mi pololo sí," I'm not gay but my boyfriend is. It took him a few minutes to see the funny side but eventually he let his frown give to smile and I was content.