Federico García Lorca and the Culture of Male Homosexuality

Spain in the twentieth century gave birth to an array of astounding artistic and literary talent, including the passionately iconoclastic writer Federico García Lorca. But his works were ill received in the homophobic atmosphere of institutionalized Spanish criticism. Because of this atmosphere, even today’s critics have effectively marginalized and disavowed intimations of homo-affectivity and homoeroticism in the great Spanish works.
This book first appeared in Spain in 1991 as counter-discourse against those prevailing ideological structures. Before its appearance, no significant work had focused on the position of Spanish culture towards homosexuality or on how homosexuality could affect the works of canonical writers. Engaging with homosexuality as an imperative source of meaning in artistic work, this volume rigorously studies the works of Federico García Lorca and several of his marginalized homosexual contemporaries, including Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Juan Gil-Albert, and Salvador Dalí. The study relies on the textual evidence presented by these authors to define the homosexual culture as one plagued by the realities of rejection, fear of the law, self-doubts, the lack of an authorized language with which to convey emotions, the awareness of disgust around the individual, the need to accept marginality to find sexual or emotional satisfaction, and the knowledge of one’s own social divergence, all of which have an enormous influence on any artist’s work.
With this new and updated translation, this work offers English–speaking readers the opportunity to focus on formal aspects of literary expressions of homosexuality.

Ángel Sahuquillo lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Ángel Sahuquillo
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 280
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2007
pISBN: 978-0-7864-2897-7
Imprint: McFarland

Translator’s Note      1
Foreword by Alberto Mira      3
Preface to the English-Language Edition      11

Introduction      13
1. Culture, Homosexuality and Lorquian Criticism      33
2. “The Other Half ”: Homosexual Purity in the Sewers      66
3. “Oppressed Norms”: Homosexuality and Class Struggle      105
4. The Metamorphoses of the Billy Goat: Hell, Gag, and the Rebellion of Homosexual Love      128
5. Shadows and Dreams: “Verlaine,” “Bacchus,” and Criticism of the Dominant Reality      162
6. “Suicide”: A Poem and Its Milieu, a Psyche and Its Circumstances      199

Epilogue: The Centenary      235
Chapter Notes      237
Bibliography      247
Index      263