Literature
At the beginning of the 20th century, Spanish authors like Jacinto Benavente, Pedro de Répide and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent had to choose between ignoring the subject of homosexuality or representing it negatively. The only authors publishing literature with LGBT content were foreigners: Augusto d'Halmar from Chile published Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto, Alfonso Hernández Catá from Cuba published El ángel de Sodoma and Alberto Nin Frías from Uruguay published La novela del Renacimiento. La fuente envenenada, Marcos, amador de la belleza, Alexis o el significado del temperamento Urano and, in 1933, Homosexualismo creador, the first essay representing homosexuality in a positive light.
Others, like the authors of the Generation of '27, took refuge in poetry. The gay and bisexual poets of this literary movement were amongst the most influential in Spanish literature: Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Vicente Aleixandre and Manuel Altolaguirre. These poets were highly influenced by the great gay authors of the rest of Europe, such as Oscar Wilde, André Gide, mainly his Corydon, and Marcel Proust. At the time, Emilio García Gómez published also his Poemas arabigoandaluces, which included the pederastic poets of Al-Andalus.
About mid 1930s there was a slight liberalization that was cut by the Spanish Civil War. After the Civil War, with Lorca assassinated and the majority of gay and bisexual poets in exile, gay culture retired anew to the cryptic poetry of Vicente Aleixandre, who never admitted his homosexuality publicly. Other gay poets of this period are Francisco Brines, Leopoldo María Panero, Juan Gil-Albert and Jaime Gil de Biedma and, in Córdoba, Vicente Núñez, Pablo García Baena and Juan Bernier, belonging to the Cántico group.
Among the authors that appear after the Spanish Transition, are worth mentioning Juan Goytisolo, the most influential outside Spain, Luis Antonio de Villena, maybe the homosexual intellectual most involved in gay studies, Antonio Gala and Terenci Moix, both the most known gay writers, thanks to their appearances on TV. Other known gay writers are Álvaro Pombo, Antonio Roig, Biel Mesquida, Leopoldo Alas, Vicente García Cervera, Carlos Sanrune, Jaume Cela, Eduardo Mendicutti, Miguel Martín, Lluis Fernández, Víctor Monserrat, Alberto Cardín, Mariano García Torres, Agustín Gómez-Arcos, Óscar Esquivias, Luisgé Martín and Iñaki Echarte.
No lesbian authors in Spain publicly acknowledged their homosexuality until the 1990s. Gloria Fuertes never wanted her sexual orientation to be public. The first lesbian author to be openly gay was Andrea Luca. Other authors who have treated love between women in their books include Ana María Moix, Ana Rosetti, Esther Tusquets, Carmen Riera, Elena Fortún, Isabel Franc or Lucía Etxebarría, in her novel Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes, Nadal Prize 1998.
On the publishing side, there are two publishing houses specializing in LGBT themes, Egales (founded in 1995) and editorial Odisea (founded in 1999). The first one has been awarding the "Terenci Moix prize" for gay and lesbian narrative since 2005, the second one the "Odisea prize" for gay and lesbian books in Spanish since 1999.
Read more about this topic: LGBT Rights In Spain, LGBT Culture
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
““If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets—the little thrilling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty—surely they are due to Steam?”
“And when we travel by electricity—if I may venture to develop your theory—we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page.””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)