Lechedevirgen Trimegisto's Inferno Varieté, Queer Mexicanness, and the Aesthetics of Risk

For many, unfortunately, Puñal, will just be another taxonomic demonym, they will describe him as a frustrated and violent faggot, infatuated and full of resentment. Their eyes will not see beyond what they are used to seeing, and that, that will be the advantage.

—Lechedevirgen Trimegisto, "Pensamiento puñal" (2013)¹

On an evening in March 2014 at the Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro, Mexico, an altar table is draped in a red cloth, candles flicker in the dimmed light, and a tray is at the center of the table holding a bowl of water. The artist stands beside the altar in a baseball cap, a black button-down shirt, a bolo tie decorated with the prayer card of the Blessed Virgin, black pants, cowboy boots, and needles across his forehead piercing his skin. The sounds of a Catholic mass begin to play as he moves behind the table to light the candles. Slowly, the artist starts removing the needles one by one from his brow, blood spilling down his face. As he removes each needle, a white projection screen behind him displays details of the aftermath of a bill that had been enacted into law in Uganda a few weeks earlier that criminalizes homosexuality with death. More specifically, the screen cuts to a cell phone video that went viral three days following the new legislation, capturing a young man being brutally beaten on the streets of Uganda for his alleged homosexuality. The video, to which I will return again in the subsequent sections, documents a group of men physically taunting, punching, and kicking the young man, until they set his body on fire while onlookers watch him writhe and roll on the ground, burning alive on the street. And yet, on that spring night in Querétaro, we encounter the gruesome images ominously playing on a screen behind the bleeding face of queer Mexican performance artist FELIPE OSORNIO—better known by his artistic name LECHEDEVIRGEN TRIMEGISTO—in his premiere performance of Inferno Varieté (2014–2015).

Since that evening, Lechedevirgen's work has gained such tremendous popularity that it has been presented at showcases in Tijuana, Chicago, Glasgow, London, and Barcelona. The queretano artist created Inferno Varieté to shed light on the spectrum of violence that he associates with Mexican masculinity, homophobia, and politics. Yet the material existence of actual human blood, juxtaposed against the visual portrayal of the brutal attacks in Uganda, points to an aesthetics that runs deeper than gender and sexually related violence. The unexpected presence of these fiercely troubling images places spectators into an aesthetic encounter with risk. In other words, Lechedevirgen exposes bodies—his own, the Ugandan young man, and the audience—to the possibility of being too close in proximity to the hazards and dangers of being a marginalized sexual minority.

This essay asserts that bodies have the capacity to challenge regimes of power and social norms by being positioned at the center of artistic and aesthetic practices as a locus for political discourse. I suggest that bodies perform and convey cultural memories of their violent and sexual histories across space and time, while making knowable the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of sexual alterity. But perhaps the memories these bodies perform also move in social and material worlds where other fictions and feelings roam. In these crossings, the body becomes a rhetorical object and canvas onto which fantasies, fears, and other discourses are projected and performed. So what if the body, specifically a sexualized body, could perform the labor of national narratives? In this sense, the body in its sexual materiality has always been mobilized in the search for modern expressions of Mexicanness. In Mexico, the trace of these bodies through sexual representation lingers in national narrative literature of the twentieth century, coupled with the elaborate imagery of men wielding their "manhood" as an authentic expression of their Mexicanness: from Samuel Ramos's profile of el pelado's (oaf) virility and phallic obsession, to Octavio Paz's gran chingón (great fucker) groping his pistol, to even...