Queer Cities, Queer Cultures

Europe since 1945

Jennifer V. Evans, Matt Cook

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781441159304
• eBook ISBN: 9781441111661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Queer Cities, Queer Cultures examines the formation and make-up of urban subcultures and situates them against the stories we typically tell about Europe and its watershed moments in the post 1945 period. The book considers the degree to which the iconic events of 1945, 1968 and 1989 influenced the social and sexual climate of the ensuing decades, raising questions about the form and structure of the 1960s sexual revolution, and forcing us to think about how we define sexual liberalization - and where, how and on whose terms it occurs. An international team of authors explores the role of America in shaping particular forms of subculture; the significance of changes in legal codes; differing modes of queer consumption and displays of community; the difficult fit of queer (as opposed to gay and lesbian) politics in liberal democracies; the importance of mobility and immigration in modulating queer urban life; the challenge of AIDS; and the arrival of the internet. By exploring the queer histories of cities from Istanbul to Helsinki and Moscow to Madrid, Queer Cities, Queer Cultures makes a significant contribution to our understanding of urban history, European history and the history of gender and sexuality.

Pasts

1

The queer margins of Spanish cities, 1939–2010

Richard Cleminson, Rosa María Medina Doménech and Isabel Vélez

“Hablar en voz baja es hablar, pero solo para los que disponen de un oído alerta” [To speak quietly is to speak, but only for those who possess a sharp sense of hearing], JUAN GIL-ALBERT, HERACLÉS. SOBRE UNA MANERA DE SER.¹

Introduction

The return of political democracy and peace in most European countries would, particularly from the 1950s onwards, mean changes in sexual behaviour, new sexual identities, a transformation of the position of women in society and, even, incipient changes in attitudes towards homosexuality.² In Spain, where the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco had been consolidated at the end of the three-year civil war in 1939, these changes were slow to come or difficult to perceive. Despite this, and while Madrid and Barcelona were not Berlin, London or Paris, the chapter will illustrate how queer life did survive under the dictatorship and will trace some aspects of its more open presence in the post-dictatorship city.

For the defeated of the Spanish civil war – republicans, socialists, regional nationalists and anarchists, among others – the end of authoritarian regimes elsewhere rekindled the hope that the Allies would continue their advance beyond the Pyrenees and finally depose the pro-Axis General Franco. Such a hope was, however, quickly dashed. Franco remained in power, the 1940s were viciously repressive and the dictator was to become ‘rehabilitated’ in the 1950s as the ‘sentinel of the West’ in the fight against communism as US military bases were installed on Spanish soil and Spain ‘came in from the cold’. Although the regime underwent a certain degree of change over Franco’s nearly 40 years in power and despite the fact that it was not monolithically repressive and was contested by multiple forms of more or less clandestine resistance, the defeat of open democratic and progressive politics in Spain was confirmed until 1975, the year of the death of the Generalísimo or Caudillo, as he preferred to be called. Spain, a country where the vanquished in the civil war suffered the destruction of their social and political dreams through incarceration, death, internal or external exile, saw the institutionalization of traditional mores under the banner of ‘National Catholicism’, driven by strong fascistic rituals encouraged by the Spanish Falange especially in the early years of the regime.

For Francoism, with its notion of natural hierarchies, idealized ruralism, sharp social divisions between men and women and education in accordance with the ‘National Spirit’, all former leftist political parties and trade unions, along with ‘rational’, that is, non-religious thought, were considered part of the legacy of the ‘anti-Spain’, locked in combat with the true values of ‘Spanishness’ or hispanidad. For the ideologues of the regime, women had to be confined to the domestic sphere as ‘angels of the hearth’.³ Hegemonic masculinity, with the male elevated as the breadwinner and head of family and with violence legitimized as a political tool, meant that ‘effeminacy’ was decried as having ruined Spain and brought moral pollution to society. So strong was the association between masculine decadence and national decline that one of the cabal of generals who pronounced against the Republic, Queipo de Llano, declared in a radio address on 25 July 1936 in Seville as the full force of political repression rained down on the city, ‘People of Seville! I do not have to wish you courage because I already know of your valour. Finally, if any invert or effeminate should proffer any insult or alarmist judgement against our glorious national movement, I say you should kill him like a dog’.⁴

The politics of the ousted Republic (1931–39) was seen by the regime as a betrayal of the essence of Spain: the application of an imported European form of politics inappropriate to Spain’s historical roots and present needs. Given the flowering of sexual freedoms and the consolidation of a limited but diverse visible queer culture in the 1930s,⁵ Francoism reserved a special place for the city as a site of moral contagion, a fount of political, social and sexual transgression. Early on in the dictatorship, regime-acolyte and psychiatrist, Dr Antonio Vallejo Nágera, wrote of the necessity to psychically cleanse the Spanish city and to eliminate the perversion entailed by the loose morals of the Republic;⁶ within this context, the new regime presented the opportunity to impose a rapid programme of cultural and religious ‘sanitization’ and homogeneity, an endeavour extended beyond the metropole to Spain’s remaining colonial outposts.⁷ Although such an association between city and decadence is neither unique to Spain nor to authoritarian regimes (democratic countries were also concerned with ‘deviancy’ in the city), what was unusual about the Spanish case in post-war Europe was the intensity of this association and the exterminating measures taken against ‘undesirables’. The resulting physical and symbolic annihilation of the incipient predominantly male gay culture born during the republican period was trenchant; at least for a time, those who practised alternative sexualities were forced underground, into prison camps or exiled.

Given such an apparently bleak panorama, the task of how to ‘read’ the queer subject, whose desire and sensibility must be expressed in a coded way is particularly problematic.⁸ How can we trace not only what Richard Sennett has termed the ‘suffering body’, the body that was deemed unhealthy, non-normative or foreign and its pain historically,⁹ but also the murmurings of resistance and queer life lived out despite a harshly repressive regime either as a discrete form of continuity with a remembered past or as new flowerings of same-sex desire? Perhaps Gil-Albert’s words cited in the epigraph to this chapter are suggestive in this sense. We need to listen attentively to silences and quiet utterances; we need to accept the need to disrupt our own contemporary expectations regarding definitions, identities and evidence for queer existence. We need, in many respects, to read ‘against the grain’, identifying evidence that may be less easy to find and certainly less ‘robust’ than traditional historiography may suppose.¹⁰ In order to approach this task, we will do well not only to consider how what Michael Warner has termed ‘regimes of the normal’ operated under Francoism, but also to question what our present notions of ‘diversity’ include – and exclude – and revise our typologies of ‘queer’ to uncover expressions that are not located in our own notions of the strange, unusual, shocking, eccentric or extravagant.¹¹ In this way, more hidden, or at least differently expressed queer lives that do not necessarily follow other western or northern European models may come to light. Such ‘local orderings’ can generate different perspectives within any given regime of knowledge/power; they can also open up the doors to different kinds of histories and can illuminate traces of other subjectivities.

Longevity, memories and strategies of resistance

Memories of previous patterns of existence, established traces of queer presences and the longevity of certain localities in Spanish cities known for their queer life served as strategies of resistance or survival in the early years after the civil war, whose devastating effects – personal, political, economic and infrastructural – cannot be underestimated.¹² Often these spaces were located in the Spanish cities in the pre-war period, especially in the capital, Madrid; sometimes they were found in other cities such as Barcelona,¹³ San Sebastian or Cadiz and, less so, in rural areas.¹⁴ It was the larger city, nevertheless, that acted as a magnet for gay lives in the past, as it does in the present, while at the same time, as we have seen, constituting a focus for those regimes reactive towards homosexuality. This dialectical relationship between threat and opportunity means that, as Julie Abraham puts it, ‘To denounce the city is still to denounce homosexuality, and to denounce homosexuality is still to denounce the city. . . . To embrace homosexuality, then, is still to embrace the city, and to embrace the city is still to embrace homosexuality’.¹⁵ It is this dialectical relationship that will enable us to explore in this chapter the multiple configurations of queer life in Spanish cities, the ways in which these connect with other marginalities, such as the lives of immigrants and other ‘outsiders’ in the neo-liberal world, and from a perspective that examines how such subjectivities are mutually dependent, we suggest the interconnections, solidarities and tensions between all these figures of exclusion.

The thriving gay cultures at the end of the nineteenth century in Madrid and Barcelona were memories,¹⁶ if that, by the 1940s, but we should not assume that as a consequence of the repressiveness of the regime all gay culture had been completely obliterated. Queer life and queer (parts of) cities were also made by the availability of spaces outside of these cities and in their vicinities, which enabled queer experience to continue and consolidate itself. Sitges, on the coast near Barcelona, enjoyed relative freedom as a tourist centre and attractive venue for both national and foreign gays from at least the 1950s, permitted by the regime’s twin desire to earn foreign money and to present a patina of openness on the international stage. Another space was Ibiza, an island that also allowed Spaniards a taste of the kind of freedoms that most other Europeans enjoyed at the time, away from the drab, uniform and asphyxiating life on the mainland.¹⁷ In addition to the more overt presence of gay men and lesbians, on a more furtive level, Punta del Verde, near Cadiz, was renowned as a meeting point for men in the 1940s and 1950s,¹⁸ and certain products, for example, the ‘Lola’ cigarette brand, were recognized among the initiated as signs of being gay.¹⁹ Such examples suggest more than an incipient gay culture. The apparent paradoxical observation made by one contemporary writer that despite the repression, in Barcelona ‘Se podía vivir una vida gay llenísima en los años 50’ [You could live gay life to the full in the 1950s], requires an explanation.²⁰ This apparent paradox continued into the 1960s in Barcelona, a period documented photographically by Joan Colom, who recorded a full range of local figures in the Raval area of the city, including male prostitutes.²¹

In order to navigate this ‘double condition’, as Raymond Williams called it,²² whereby the city encapsulated the potential for the maintenance and production of secrecy, our approach in this chapter will be threefold while not aiming to be all inclusive or to provide an exhaustive history of queer experience in Spanish cities in the space of one short chapter. First, we discuss the relation between fiction and fact, between novelization and lived experience, as a device in the construction of queer memory. Second, we look at some specific expressions of queer life – the geography of queer space in Madrid and Barcelona. Third, we discuss the intersections between democratization, rights, citizenship and tourism in the early twenty-first century as instances where queer has become a positive commodity to be traded by municipal and national authorities and gays alike. Such a quality is often in contrast to other, perhaps non-sexualized subjectivities, such as the racial ‘other’ or the recently-arrived immigrant population.

The novelization/fictionalization of the queer past

In discussing queer Spanish cities, it is not our aim to present a simple hierarchy of ‘evidence’ whereby the existence of places of gay sociability, demonstrations or police arrests takes precedence over memories and memoirs, desires and expressed hopes.²³ As Mark Turner has pointed out when writing about London, ‘Fact and fiction blur here. As they always are wont to do, and much of the material [used in his book] requires us, at the very least, to interrogate our definitions of “evidence” when it comes to marginalized, often hidden, urban practices from the past’.²⁴ This is our cue to examine some examples of recent novelization and fictionalization of queerness in Spain, where queer lives may not be the main component of stories but are woven into broader narratives, often with transnational backdrops. These ‘fictions’ may enable us to disinter past realities and invite us to re-think the past in different ways; they should not be dismissed as ‘mere fictions’ or opposed simply to supposed ‘facts’.²⁵ Neither should we think of such representations as constituting mere ‘paradoxes’ or ‘contradictions’ under authoritarian regimes, but instead as an opportunity to examine the extent to which particular categories of representation (hetero/homo, man/woman, black/white) as fixed identities a...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Pasts
• Closing Reflections
• Index
• Copyright