Set in Santiago during the second half of 1986, the novel is a love story between a poor travesti and a leftist Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front guerrilla who participates in the attempted assassination of military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

It is in this context that the "Queen of the Corner" ("La Loca del Frente" in the original Spanish), an effeminate travesti in her forties,[12] who rents a dilapidated house to live in, arrives in the neighborhood.

Carlos, a handsome and virile young man, helps her to arrange her meager belongings, beginning to frequent the house and also inviting other university friends during the nights with the excuse of being a quiet place to study.

Secret meetings, held during curfew, begin to become more and more frequent, and in those in which Carlos can not participate, he stays talking with an increasingly enamored landlady, who despite the requests of her few gay friends, has not wanted to introduce her lover.

During these conversations, the Queen of the Corner brings up her past links to prostitution, a broken family, being motherless and being the child of an abusive father, whom she abandoned at the age of 18 when he wanted to force her to do her military service.

One day Carlos leaves a suspicious metal pipe at the Queen's house, and then invites her for a walk to Cajón del Maipo, where Augusto Pinochet and his wife, Lucía Hiriart, usually go to rest, accompanied by a strict military contingent.

Later, as they drop her off at her house, they hear in the car a radio report about a raid on weapons of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, a revolutionary and armed extreme left-wing group opposed to Pinochet.

[12] The next morning, the Queen, who earns her living embroidering tablecloths, goes to leave an order in the upper district, to the home of Señora Catita, the wealthy wife of General Ortúzar, who is organizing a large military dinner for the celebration of September 11.

[21] After receiving a call from the warehouse on behalf of Doña Catita, the Queen asks to be told that she no longer lives in the neighborhood, and sensing a bad omen, she decides to spend the rest of the afternoon downtown.

At the cathedral she joins a protest by the women of relatives of disappeared detainees, which is repelled with tear gas, having to flee into a gallery, where she is guided by a taxi boy to the Cine Capri, a depressing gay porn cinema.

Despite his attempts to offer her his services, the Queen is too worried, so she finally leaves the cinema, finding the city in shock, as the attack has already taken place, learning that all the members of the Front have been saved, that seven soldiers have been killed and that Pinochet is unharmed.

The Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front did indeed exist, claiming responsibility for the extensive power outage that affected half the country on 1 May of that year, in commemoration of International Workers' Day.

[24] Also real are the constant protests, the violence of the Carabineros de Chile to repel the demonstrators, and the announcements of Radio Cooperativa, which played an important role in opposing the military dictatorship, denouncing its human rights violations as much as possible.

[25] For the launch of the novel, Lemebel, known for his performances and travesti appearances, wore a deep red dress and a feathered headdress, in a ceremony with a large audience of followers, politicians, filmmakers, journalists, and writers.

Willy Haltenhoff wrote for the newspaper La Nación that its writing was the "most original and portentous, due to its baroque nature, of the Chilean literary environment, an imagery of exceptional linguistic richness", associating it with Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, and with the films Strawberry and Chocolate and Before Night Falls.

José Promis, for El Mercurio, highlighted the "carefree, irreverent, sarcastic and, above all, intentionally provocative style that the author has always exhibited", saying that reading this work "startles, disconcerts, but entertains and has a gratifying flavor".