While walking down the 10 de Julio, looking for a drugstore that didn’t exist, Katty took her first steps across the streets of Santiago as a woman. On December 29, 1968, she was 18 years old, and as a gift she had received a skirt and high heels shoes. Because she still had short hair, she could barely make a bun. She went unnoticed among the passersby, in a strange rite of passage invented by the transvestites of the San Camilo neighborhood.
“They wanted to see what happened to me, whether they caught me or not. They regretted it later, as they were concerned that something would happen to me; that I would be taken to jail.”
Katty started dressing like a woman at night. In the
Harold Free
Katty’s life is shrouded in an epic halo. She’s one of the “historic” trans. She says she was at the first disturbances from 1973, months before the coup, when there were no organizations, no human rights, no children’s rights, gay rallies, nothing. Only few of that generation are still alive when she makes the counting. She is the voice that persists.
“I am tough, a tough one.”
She was from the countryside, from Curicó, and says that her father was the city’s Mayor: Arnoldo Parra Donoso. Her mother, she adds, was a community worker of the municipality, Ms. Luz Eliana González Apablaza. She had a distant relationship with both of them; the only thing she longed from her mother was her clothes, which she wore in secret. Berta, the nanny, scolded her. She told her to go play soccer and play with his marbles.
But she didn’t like sports. She only watched her classmates play soccer because she enjoyed looking at their legs. “I always liked men.” She had the hots for her dad’s driver, she says. “I seduced him. He was so handsome. I hugged him, tried to kiss him. Then, we were intimate.”
She was 11 years old.
Everyone found out, she says. It was a scandal, her father wanted to kill her. “He shot me all over Curicó square at night.”
- Katty, how do you explain that there are no historical records showing that your dad was mayor of Curicó? There are no records of any Arnoldo Parra Donoso as mayor of that city, ever.
- Who knows, I don’t know why is that, my dear. There was no computer back then. I can’t think of any explanation, I don’t know. As I’m telling you, it was for the World Cup of 1962.
The 1962 World Cup (held in Chile) is the date that, in Katty’s memories, was a turning point in her life. Her father sent her to Santiago with Berta, the nanny. “He had a house in Cervecería Unida, around Vitacura. That’s where I grew up and went to primary school No. 44.” She never saw her family again. “For them, I was already dead.”
Upon entering secondary school, the school José Victorino Lastarria, Katty says that she “came out of the closet big time.” When she was in her third year of secondary school, she was caught having sex with the Principal’s son in the gym and got expelled. But she wasn’t going alone: “I blew the whistle on two other boys, Erasmo and
They called Berta to go pick her up, but Katty ran away with the other two boys, and Larry, the Principal’s son. “The four of us went to Alameda to walk around the city, then to the park, in Providencia. We hung around asking for money, so we had everything we needed.” Eventually, the police caught them. The Principal’s son returned to his family. Nobody went looking for her. She ended up in the National Home for the Child (Casa Nacional del Niño), but she ran away from there too.
“Of course, I was gay. A fag, a faggot, a poof. In other words, I liked men. The more women-like a homosexual was, the more popular he was among the manliest men.
In downtown Santiago, between Posta Central and Plaza de Armas, Katty began to make her group of friends—“The Girls,” which was formed by Milenka, Bambi, Papi, Doc (
Sometimes the police arrested them for “
She says that Doc —a famous transvestite from street San Camilo— left her at the soda shop El Bosco, while she went to take care of her customers. “She would buy me a cup of coffee and I would wait for her. I wasn’t good at flirting.” One day, Doc finally took her to the brothel, Katty says. Since she was a minor, she was not accepted. Jorge, a pimp, received her in his house. In return, she cleaned the women’s room, swept the living room, and did the shopping.
A girl told her that she was not going to earn much money by doing errands and started “working as a maid.” The homeowners gave her a room, breakfast and lunch. “They took you as part of the family.” Sometimes they had to run away, because the police closed the block to raid the underground establishments.
– Don’t be silly! If they are such scumbags with the real women who give them children and everything, just imagine how they would be with someone like me, who is never going to give them a future, a child, nothing.
It was the time of the bohemian night, she recalls. She took classes with Paco Mairena, a choreographer at the Bim Bam Bum theatre. “He and Sergio Lesica, another choreographer, called me
Katty spent her time moving around the nightclubs of the North of Chile with the Royal Travesti Ballet.
- Did you always like dancing?
- I don’t know, why should I lie to you, the thing is that I had to survive.
The coup, she says, forced her to do a pause. She lived with a thief who was killed in 73, she says. She sold everything she had and ran away to Mendoza, where she worked as a maid. She then traveled to Buenos Aires. She dared to return to Santiago in 1976. “They used to tell us that terrible things had happened, many deaths, murders. All the homosexuals with an ugly record were killed.”
Madame Fontey
“I made myself,” says Katty, who is about to turn 68. She bought Peruvian hormones in Arica; in Tacna, a pair of breasts. “I just implanted a little on myself.” She never went to a doctor, she learned how to do it herself by reading, “but I used only sterilized equipment. I’m not a nutjob at all. A paramedic friend would take care of me in the hospital.”
She managed to have surgery in 2000 and changed her identity card just a few months ago, much later than most of her friends. She says that having surgery meant being born again. “Sex changes started under Pinochet’s regime. You needed the sex change in order to be able to change your name. All of us wanted to be a respected person, a lady, raise
Upon her return to Chile in 1976, she settled in Talca, because “there were brothels there.” She spent some time at the Zepellin, a city night club. During the dictatorship, she says, the bohemian night “got complicated.” At that time, Circus Show like ‘el Timoteo,’ emerged. “It was a way of outsmarting them. They did the circus and the transvestites emerge in between. Now it’s full of those.”
She met people from ‘el Timoteo’ when she worked on a nightclub in Valparaíso and they invited her to perform. They weren’t that big at the time, like they are now. She became good friends with Nano Rubio, the circus animator, and his wife, Yesenia Ite. Katty is Estéfano’s godmother, the couple’s younger son. “I raised that four-month-old boy, and his brother, Bastián, who was five years old at that time. Imagine
- And what do they call you?
- For
them I’m their auntie and that’s it. Because woebetide them if they call me grandma. I’ll fucking get back at them.
Katty lives with them in Gran Avenida. She is always worried about “the kids,” about getting lunch ready for them, about the time they get home, about whether they have clean clothes. She’s like a second mother, like the “decent woman” she is.
Since 2012, she is part of Traves Chile, the first group of transgender people created in Chile, where she is now President. Katty calls it a “group for elder transgender adults, street trans who have no other support.” She defends Silvia Parada, her founder, tooth and nail, who was sentenced to six years in prison for child abuse in 2014. “Silvia messed it up and everyone turned their backs on her,” she says.
– Giving work to transgender elders and to the entire diversity union, and having enough sources of employment and rights for all diversity people.
She doesn’t have the patience she used to have, she says. She openly criticizes the younger transgender generations, saying that they have lost focus, getting into drugs and failing to come out, “or walking around with this nonsense of non-binary, inclusive language. I don’t understand them, either you are or aren’t.” She is also upset by the “wealthy, employed” transgender people from “good homes,” who discriminate street transgender people. “They didn’t fight; they don’t have any history, nothing.” She also complains about crime. She says that the situation in Chile is “very bad.”
At times, she sounds like a grumpy grandmother, like any granny.
And sometimes she also sounds like a kind-hearted grandmother.
“You give them advice and they don’t listen. I tell them ‘love yourself,’ as I’m falling in love, old and still in love with myself.”
Walking through the General Cemetery, where Traves Chile opened Latin America’s first Transgender mausoleum in March 2018, Katty talks about death—the death of those transgender people who die on the street and no one claims at the Legal Medical Service. “This mausoleum is for them,” she says.
She adds that she would rather go to Europe to die, glamorous, good-looking until her last day, or Buenos Aires, next to Mirta Legrand. If not, well, here, then. However, no one should be spending money on flower garlands or “crap.” They better spend that money on diapers and donate them to a nursing home.
- And who’s going to claim you, Katty?
- I think the kids I’ve raised…
- Are they your family?
- I don’t know, girl, I couldn’t care less about family.
(*) Translator’s Note: The term “
