Jesús Manuel "Chu" Ramos Otero was born in Manatí, Puerto Rico in 1948. In 1968, he moved to New York City to pursue his career as a writer. He is now considered one of the first openly out homosexual writers of the Puerto Rican diaspora.

Otero's writing is often considered controversial because of its unabashedly political, feminist and homoerotic subject matter. He wrote primarily semi-autobiographical pieces that dealt with themes of exile and rejection. The feeling of being exiled was twofold for Otero, who felt exiled from Puerto Rico for having left to the United States, and rejected in the United States because his writing did not deal with issues of race and class status that had become expected of Latino writers. The practice of writing for Otero thus became closely linked to his sex life because both writing and sexual acts were victimized by migration. As a result, much of Otero's writing deconstructs traditional gender categories in order to imagine a more liberated narrative form that might then translate to everyday life.

Otero studied Spanish literature at New York University, where he received a Master of Arts degree (MA) in 1979. He went on to teach Caribbean literature at Lehman College, York College, and LaGuardia Community College while pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish literature at the City University of New York (CUNY).

In September of 1971, Otero founded Aspasguanza, a theatrical workshop in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Four years later, in 1975, Otero founded the publishing group El libro viaje, which was devoted to getting as many Puerto Rican authors published as American. During this decade, Otero traveled and collaborated creatively with his live-in partner, John Anthes, who died circa 1979. After Anthes' death, Otero began a relationship with the Puerto Rican painter Angel Rodríguez-Díaz. While little is known of John Anthes, Otero dedicated two of his works, "Ritos cancelados" and "Ceremonia de bienes y raices," to him after his death. Much of Otero's semi-autobiographical writing highlights his relationship with Anthes. Throughout his life, Otero harnessed close friendships with other influential Puerto Rican authors, and often collaborated with them. These people include Rosario Ferré, Ana Lydia Vega, and Magalí García Ramis.

In 1990, Otero returned to Puerto Rico to live out his final days. He died on October 7th of that year of complications from HIV/AIDS. His posthumously-published work, Invitación a polvo, which Otero defined as "completely untranslatable," directly addresses topics around the AIDS crisis.

In 1998, the Guadalajara International Book Fair published Tálamos y tumbas prosa y verso de Manuel Ramos Otero, which includes numerous short stories and the book of poetry, El libro de la muerte. In 1999, and again in 2002, the Pergones Theatre company in the Bronx adapted Otero's short story, "El locura de la locura" to stage the play "El bolero fue mi ruina." It was then adapted to an off-Broadway show in 2002 and staged by the Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture.