Queer Places:
Biblioteca Pública Piloto, Cra. 64 #50 – 52, Laureles - Estadio, Medellín, Laureles, Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia
Jaime Jaramillo Escobar (Pueblorrico, May 25, 1932 – Medellín, September 10, 2021), known by the pseudonym X-504, was a Colombian poet, editor, workshop leader and translator. Co-founder with Gonzalo Arango and other writers of Nadaism, a protest movement that changed the perception of Colombian literature and art in the mid-1960s. His work is characterized by irony, sarcasm, parodic games, popular language, irreverence, and the sententious tone with which he satirizes society, its customs and its institutions. The homosexual poet and openly singer to the beauty of the pubescent and the young, was one of the first to face the clerical and patriarchal intellectual horde that has dominated Colombia from the Colony until
modern time.
Jaime Jaramillo Escobar lived his childhood and youth in several Antioquia towns, especially in Altamira and Andes, where he was a companion of Gonzalo Arango. When, in 1958, his former school classmate lit the first fires of Nadaism in Medellín, Jaramillo Escobar, decided to join the movement under the pseudonym of X-504. "The X is also for asking who I am. It's a question mark. The stranger who interrogates you. The one who passes through your hands without making himself known and leaves after having given you everything but his name. I am the false name of truth [...] X-504, prisoner number ... X-504 exists so that Jaime Jaramillo Escobar can live freely, without the weight of literature and admiration," Jaramillo Escobar once explained.
In contrast to the incendiary character of Nadaism, the discretion of X-504, paradoxically, was almost scandalous. Gonzalo Arango described him as the rarest of the nadaistas, because he religiously pays the rent on the last day of the month, writes checks with funds, wears a vest, every morning at 8 o'clock he says "good morning" to the boss, etc. However, the most discreet poet of Nadaism would end up being widely recognized. The Cassius Clay Prize for Nadaist poetry that he won in 1967 with his book The Poems of Offense,
proves it. Along with Los elementos del desastre, by Álvaro Mutis, Morada al
sur by Aurelio Arturo and Baladas by Mario Rivero, it is considered one of the
most significant texts of Colombian poetry written between 1950 and 1975.
X-504 published Sombrero de ahogado (1983), Eduardo Cote Lamus National Poetry Prize, and Poemas de tierra caliente (1985), Universidad de Antioquia Poetry Prize. In his Antología Selecta (1987), he included poems from two unpublished books: Poesía revelada and Poesía pública.
He received numerous tributes and his work has been profusely studied, and disseminated in different books, magazines, newspapers and audiovisual media. For more than two decades he worked as a workshop leader for young poets at the Biblioteca Pública Piloto
of Medellín.
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