Carlos Parra

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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