Federico Garcia 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 Garcia 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 Garcia Lorca and several of his marginalized homosexual contemporaries, including Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Juan Gil-Albert, and Salvador Dali. 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.