Carlos Parra

Carlos Felipe Parra Heredia (born 5 February 1968), known professionally as París Galán, is a Bolivian drag queen, LGBT rights activist, and politician.

A member of La Familia Galán, a collective of LGBT drag performers, Parra is the country’s best-known drag queen.

Carlos Parra was born on 5 February 1968 in Oruro.

His mother, a widowed Quechua indigenous woman, raised him alongside ten siblings.

Parra realized he was gay at the age of 4, an orientation he shared with one of his brothers, Roberto.

Recalling the social challenges he faced for his sexual orientation, Parra noted that he never had to come out as a child.

"Everyone knew what I was; they called me La Parra. I was always like that: visible; I was a transgressor, and I associated with transgressive people."

In 1986, shortly after graduating high school, Parra's mother sent him to live in La Paz "to get him away from his fag friends".

Instead, Parra's stay in the capital led him to develop even closer bonds with the LGBT community, as he formed new relationships with many of the city's travesti residents.

He spent a short leave of absence in Paris on a scholarship from the French Embassy, during which time he completed a postgraduate degree in linguistics and learned to speak English and French.

Upon his return to La Paz, Parra became more active in the city's gay nightclub scene.

In particular, he frequented Sopocachi's Bronx bowling alley, where he was introduced to Diana Sofía Galán (Marco Salguero), a drag performance artist who introduced him to the art of transformismo femenino.

Together with other artists, Parra and Salguero began performing drag shows as a group, with the troupe coming to be known as Las Galán by La Paz's queer community.

For the duration of the late 1990s, Parra's collective continued to see small success performing at gay bars and discothèques.

Although the troupe as a whole remained relatively underground—"hidden by the dim and gloomy lights of nightclubs, and seen only by people [we] knew", as recounted by Danna Galán (David Aruquipa)—Parra was "much more daring and willing to pursue" public ventures.

The collective formally constituted itself under that name in 1997, with each member taking the stage surname Galán as an homage towards Salguero, their drag mother.

For his stage name, Parra chose París after the city where he was educated.

In 1998, he was a finalist on Miss La Paz and placed third at the national pageant.

He came out publicly as gay on the program Atrévete hosted by Ximena Galarza.

Although Las Galán was originally conceived of as a gay movement, the adhesion of new members of different gender identities led Parra to envisage a more inclusive style of transformismo.

In conversations with Aruquipa, the pair worked to adapt transformismo to include more exaggerated elements of drag queen culture.

The resulting style, labeled transformismo drag queen, had "a more irreverent aesthetic".

Through the usage of colorful wigs, strident costumes, as well as the incorporation of androgynous and zoomorphic elements, performers could take their appearance "to its extreme," giving transformismo drag queen a more "playful and transgressive connotation".

Although Salguero was unfond of the "drag queen" label, Parra collaborated with Aruquipa to introduce the term to the wider community.

The resulting style, labeled transformismo drag queen, saw huge success once the group went public in 2001, becoming a staple of La Familia Galán's performances at pride parades and folkloric events.

The experiment was a resounding success, with transformismo drag queen becoming "synonymous with [Las Galán] in street marches and interventions", especially after the collective made its public debut in 2001.

That year, in December, Las Galán were invited as an explicitly drag queen group to perform at the Plaza Abaroa during a pride event commemorating the fifty-third anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Having previously participated in LGBT rights and HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, Parra became more involved politically at the onset of the 2006–2007 Constituent Assembly.

Although his troupe attempted to collaborate with other activist organizations to consolidate a broader LGBT movement, internal disagreements and factionalism hampered the community's efforts at securing rights-affirming legislation.

In 2006, he contested a seat in the Constituent Assembly on the Free Bolivia Movement's electoral list but failed to attain the position.

He made history as the first-ever openly transgender individual to win elective office in Bolivia after being elected to the La Paz Departmental Legislative Assembly in 2015.

To date, he is one of just two queer people and the second gay man in Bolivia to have held political office as a lawmaker, after Manuel Canelas.

Born and raised in Oruro, Parra later studied linguistics in Paris.

He settled in La Paz, where he became a popular fixture of the underground LGBT nightclub scene.

Together with other queer artists, he performed drag shows as part of La Familia Galán, a drag collective based in the city.

Although the group saw small-scale success as a troupe of purely feminine gender performers, Parra and other members worked to introduce more exaggerated androgynous and zoomorphic elements of drag queen culture to their art form.

Years later, in 2015, he was elected as a substitute member of the La Paz Departmental Legislative Assembly, becoming the country's first-ever transgender legislator.

Although Parra attempted to fill an open primary seat left vacant by his party's failure to nominate a candidate to hold it, electoral authorities refused to accredit him.

After a four-year legal battle, during which he went on multiple hunger strikes, Parra was finally seated in 2019.

Having had over half his term of office cut short, Parra sought reelection in 2021 but failed to secure a second term.