Los Invisibles

A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850-1940

Richard Cleminson, Francisco Vásquez García

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780708320129
• eBook ISBN: 9781783164875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

Research into homosexuality in Spain is in its infancy. The last ten or fifteen years have seen a proliferation of studies on gender in Spain but much of this work has concentrated on women's history, literature and femininity. In contrast to existing research which concentrates on literature and literary figures, "Los Invisibles" focuses on the change in cultural representation of same-sex activity of through medicalisation, social and political anxieties about race and the late emergence of homosexual sub-cultures in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As such, this book constitutes an analysis of discourses and ideas from a social history and medical history position. Much of the research for the book was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to research the medicalisation of homosexuality in Spain.

Chapter One

Introduction

In Alexis o el significado del temperamento urano, published in 1932 in Madrid, the Uruguayan literary critic and homosexual rights advocate Alberto Nin Frías wrote that in his day like no other, the individual’s sexual life had gained a significance far above any other aspect of their existence.¹ Nin Frías, whose book Homosexualismo creador was also published by the well-known Morata house,² reflected the realities of a time which, despite considerable differences, strikes a chord in today’s world where sexuality is still claimed to be the driving force behind one’s character, feelings and actions. It is true that Nin Frías wrote his two books on the ‘homosexual question’ in a period that was in many senses exceptional. It cannot be denied that his books would have been published with difficulty even five years earlier, under the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923– 30). The Spanish Republic (1931–6), emblem of modernity, opened up a political and cultural space which was, apart from the period from 1975 onwards, unrivalled in Spain’s contemporary history for its degree of openness and spirit of cultural experimentation.³ The homosexual question flourished under its aegis.

However, despite certain parallels that can be drawn between the 1930s and the present day it is noteworthy that, in contrast to some other European countries, most of the now extensive work on sexuality and gender in Spain has been confined either to the Inquisition period or to more literary or sociological accounts of post-Franco times.⁴ Save the more accessible subjects of study from the early twentieth century such as the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca and literary figures in more present times such as Juan Goytisolo, Luis Antonio de Villena and Terenci Moix, work on the contemporary history of male homosexuality in Spain has been minimal (it is even more sparse on female homosexuality), despite the large, although disparate, variety of sources readily available to the historian.⁵

It is, therefore, not surprising that in recent publications related to male homosexuality in literature or culture, to name two areas, the past really does seem to be a ‘foreign country’, with accounts rarely touching upon the pre-Transition period.⁶ There may well be, nevertheless, good reasons for this lack of historical emphasis. The conception that homosexuality was ‘repressed’ and therefore invisible before the ‘transition to democracy’ is a strong motif which still holds sway. The aura around famous homosexual figures, such as García Lorca, may have, paradoxically, obscured the very nature of homosexual subcultures in the 1920s and 1930s as well as their historical investigation. The fact that homosexuality is, to a considerable degree, still taboo in Spain, is a third historically potent explanation.⁷

Eric Hobsbawm, in his recent book on the ‘short twentieth century’, wrote that one of the most eerie developments in recent years has been the tendency to forget history, to have one’s past erased.⁸ In the context of the recuperation of all kinds of people’s history – from that of the persecutions of the Nazi period, the recent attempts to ‘recover’ historical memory from the Franco period, and that of the multiple directions that social history has moved into – a history of male homosexuality in the contemporary period is, we feel, justified and necessary on numerous grounds. The increasingly sophisticated arguments that sexual history cannot be divorced from wider social and historical processes has been championed convincingly by too many historians to list.⁹ That Spain’s sexual history is still largely to be explored suggests that there are multiple insights to be drawn from an analysis of the workings of sexuality in its broader historical context. Furthermore, the study of similarities and differences between different national sexual histories can only enrich our historical understanding of all societies concerned.¹⁰

The methods of research employed here and the conceptualization of what material is relevant to this history will reflect, to some degree, the authors’ own quests and concerns, not to speak of the availability of archive material. Instead of an extensive exposition of our theoretical framework, apart from some necessary considerations which follow, we have tried to let theoretical insights inform our writing implicitly. Our book is guided by a number of questions such as the following: how far are existing models for the history of homosexuality both in Spain and wider afield adequate for Spain? Are the discourses on the configuration of the history of male homosexuality in Spain as specific as, say, the Spanish nineteenth century with its battles between absolutism and liberalism and the rise of political movements such as Carlism or anarchism? How peculiar, in a word, is the history of Spanish homosexuality?

These questions necessarily invite some kind of methodological and theoretical positioning. The pages of this book are devoted to presenting a history – not the history, as if there were such a thing – of male homosexuality in Spain in the period from 1850 up to the years of the Civil War (1936–9). The concentration on a relatively short period of time requires some justification. We do not focus on this period because there is somehow ‘more’ history to be written about but rather because we feel that, in accordance with much historical writing about the history of male (and female) homosexuality in Europe and elsewhere, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the formative years of what became crystallized as ‘homosexuality’ in the contemporary period.¹¹

If we believe that ‘homosexuality’ more or less as it exists, is represented and lived today has more in common with the mid to late nineteenth century and early twentieth century than it does with, say, the early eighteenth century, such an impression responds to the fact that we take as the ‘creation’ of European homosexuality the latter years of the nineteenth century. The concept of homosexuality having been ‘created’ in this period (it was named thus in 1869), however, is often employed as a shorthand which is just too brief and uncritical.¹² The assertion begs the question who or what created it and for what purpose, if any? We also may ask, if homosexuality was thus created or ‘invented’ in Europe, was its path the same in all European countries? Is this framework valid for Spain?

Our assertion that ‘homosexuality’ describes a recent phenomenon inevitably touches upon a historiographical nerve that is often seen to be articulated around what has been too rigidly interpreted as a basic divide in the way in which homosexual history can be written. While John Addington Symonds in England at the end of the nineteenth century or Nin Frías in Spain in the third decade of the twentieth, in their bid to argue that homosexuals should be treated more justly, marshalled for their arguments a historical train of ‘homosexual’ individuals from Greek times through to their own present, historians in the 1980s, particularly in the United States and Britain, began to question the essential historical links of continuity between individuals in vastly different societies over long periods of historical time. Instead of such continuities, which these latter authors believed to be more imaginary than real, historical inquiry focused on how similar or identical acts could represent or mean different things in different places and times.¹³

The two positions thus described enjoyed theoretical dominance principally in the 1980s and 1990s in the context of the upsurge of Lesbian and Gay Studies and, later, Queer Studies and have been labelled, respectively, essentialism and social constructionism.¹⁴ While some English-language historiographical circles now consider the debate to have exhausted itself, it is perhaps too early to assume the same for Spain.¹⁵

The possibilities and limitations afforded by both positions have recently been analysed by Eve K. Sedgwick. For the purposes of individual or even collective biographies, in terms of constructing or affirming identity or for the demanding of political rights, the essentialist perspective holds much attraction. On an individual biographical level, it is common to see how essentialism is used to buttress a claim or justify a historical identity. Historically, this has relied on the notion of a special nature for homosexuals, either anatomical in some way or psychological, which is read as fuel for affirming rights. Often, as a result, the essentialism versus social constructionism battle tends to be reduced to the nature/ nurture or innatism/environmentalism supposed dichotomy.¹⁶

Such an essentialist narrative would allow for the affirmative construction of identity and effectively resists other epistemologies which argue that such an identity is socially produced, learned or fleeting. But the inverse ‘everything is constructed’ and therefore fictive, denies personal experience and, for some, destroys any political basis from which to claim rights.

On the political front, both positions can be productive¹⁷ but there is nothing necessarily progressive about either. Essentialist positions which generally emphasized the congenital nature of homosexuality, in the writings of past advocates of homosexual equality such as Ulrichs, Hirschfeld and Ellis, may have functioned as a weapon against persecution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; one must recall that many Nazi commentators viewed homosexuality as contagious at least in the ‘Aryan’ population and not something which was congenital.¹⁸

While essentialism may have something to offer in terms of individual biographies or even as a political tactic, it must be less effective in the writing of gay history as it tends to project back into the past a more or less stable homosexual subject or identity, with less emphasis on the formation of that subject in relation to medical, psychiatric or political discourses. In the light of social constructionists’ criticism, some accounts that rely explicitly on essentialism have adapted the latter to form a more sophisticated form of this position. Rictor Norton, for example, proposes the use of ‘queer cultural essentialism’, which considers there is a nucleus of ‘queer’ desire that is transcultural, transnational and transhistorical, a ‘queer essence’ that is innate, congenital and constitutional. The key, for Norton, is ‘not to confuse the constancy of the desire with the variability of its expression’.¹⁹

One of the many problems with such concessions, however, is the category ‘desire’. Here, the notion of desire is too static, primitive and naturalized. Desire, we would argue, changes in its expression, in its very ‘being’, according to the historical circumstances in which it is realized. It does not just mean the same regardless and therefore is with difficulty ‘transhistorical’. In this book, we prefer to take a leaf from John Searle’s recent account of the construction of social reality according to which it could be argued that ‘homosexuality’ should not be taken as a ‘natural fact’ but as an ‘institutional fact’, a kind of subjectivity forged from language and human a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: The Birth of the ‘Invert’: a Truncated Process of Medicalization
• Chapter Three: The Sexological Context, 1915–1939: Sexual Inversion, Marañón’s ‘Intersexuality’ and the ‘Social Dangerousness’ of the Homosexual
• Chapter Four: ‘Quien Con Niños se Junta’: Childhood and the Spectre of Homoerastia
• Chapter Five: ‘In Search of Men’: Regeneracionismo and the Crisis of Masculinity (1898–1936)
• Chapter Six: Homosexual Subcultures in Spain: the Intersection of Medicine, Politics and Identity
• Chapter seven: Conclusion
• Bibliography