(This text was presented at the UAAC Conference in Waterloo, Canada, 2018)
In 1966, a young Spanish filmmaker named Esteban Farré directed his first and only movie, Sábado en la Playa (Saturday at the Beach). The movie had no proper plot and though it showed scenes of young gay male sex workers at a touristic village on the Mediterranean coast, the censorship assumed that the film was so cryptic that there was no risk in the audience going to the cinema to watch it. If there is no audience, they thought, there is no scandal. Consequently, the movie was not censored and it became one of the first Spanish movies openly portraying gay and non-normative male gender expressions. Sadly, the Spanish censorship agency operating during the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco was right. It was screened in some precarious movie theatres, but due to the lack of spectators, screenings were soon discontinued. As Film Historian Alejandro Malero writes “it didn’t even have the strange honour to be considered disappeared (which has benefitted other movies that have become almost mythical when they are recovered). Simply put, nobody has ever remembered Saturday at the Beach”[1]. As mentioned before, Esteban Farre never made another movie, and of Sabado en la Playa, there is only a single copy remaining. Esteban Farre gave it to one the actors, Francisco Ruano, before his death.
My MFA research investigates how to express experiences of haunting on the Spanish Mediterranean coast through drawing. I therefore work with issues of liminal presences and political violence in the context of touristic sites. It includes the ghosts of those assassinated during the Franco dictatorship as well as those who drown daily while attempting the Mediterranean crossing. Though it does not focus on queer experiences, my project is theoretically, methodologically and politically queer and it intends to bring queer reflections to our understanding of history, memory and political action. Queer bodies, and more so, penalized queer bodies in times of fascist dictatorship, become liminal at the beach: they are present but often hidden in spaces where bodies are highly visible. As a Southerner Spanish queer artist, born months after the arrival of democracy in Spain, I am very aware of the presence of those bodies, those stories never told, but to which I owe so much. This presentation is a brief attempt to narrate the queer haunting at the beach, to question the failure of the archives in accounting for these experiences, and to reflect on the potential of queering strategies in art. In short, my presentation is a tribute and a call for queer resistance in times of fascism.
I will start by setting up the context in which the haunting process started. After the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, General Francisco Franco, leader of the army that fought the democratically elected government of the progressive 2nd Republic, instituted a fascist dictatorship that would last until his death in 1975. This regime, described as National-Catholic by the dictator himself, sets Catholicism at the core of the Spanish national identity. For example, in the Discourse of Spanish Catholicism re-edited in 1954 (the first version was published in 1934), we can find statements like “Spain, Christ’s girlfriend” “All Spanish history is ecclesiastic history”, “Spanish language has been created to speak to God”. By creating this theological national paradigm merging Catholicism and Spain, Franco regime equates any infringement to the Catholic religion as anti-Spanish. This has tragic consequences for homosexuals under the dictatorship, who were not only consider sinners, but were defined as dangerous to the nation.
Surprisingly, and for reasons that we do not have the time to approach here, homosexuality was not made illegal until 1952 (13 years after the beginning of the dictatorship) and was not made legally punishable until 1970. It is in 1970 that the Francoist regime imposes re-education therapies, lobotomies, electroshock treatments and other forms of tortures for male homosexuals and trans people. Many male homosexuals were sent to two specialized isolated prisons in Southern Spain, while others, including MtF trans and crossdresser people identified as male by the authorities were sent to male prisons where they were subjected to routine rapes.
There was always homophobic violence in the Francoist section, for example writer Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated in 1936, in the words of one of the killers, “for being a faggot”. Nevertheless, it is from 1952 that we can observe an institutionalization of this violence through the legal and medical systems. From 1970 until 1978 homosexuals in jail were identified as “social prisoners”. This notion of the “social” prisoner vs. the “political” prisoner and the “common” prisoner had a terrible impact on their lives: after the death of Franco, an amnesty process was started but no political faction supported the release of “social prisoners”, which explains why they were still in jail at the beginning of the democratic period. Furthermore, until today, “social prisoners”, contrary to “political prisoners”, have never received any compensation for the repression they suffered. As the manifest of the Association of Social Ex-Prisoners reminds us “the last homosexuals abandoned the prisons [...] after the 1st democratic elections [...], and after the passing of the Constitution by the Spanish people”[2].
If we were to look at the archives related to male homosexuality in this period, we would have to browse through pages and pages from the archives of the judicial system, the medical system and the police. This seems to be a community that only becomes visible to us today through their inscription in an archive created and formulated by the same systems of power that were exercising violence against them. Their lives are, in the words of Foucault, “a little more than a register in their encounter with power”.
But is that all there is?
On a late morning in spring, my friend and I walk from an almost empty beach to the salt mines situated just behind the dunes. The salt mines are comprised of several large sea water pools built by the Romans and still in use. The water in the pools turns pink with time, so that the pools situated the furthest from the sea are brighter and redder. Hundreds of pink flamingos live in these waters yearly. Due to the strong wind, the pine trees are short and have a tendency to grow almost horizontally, creating caves with their branches. If the tree is large enough, one can enter the cave and lay down inside, completely hidden. Within the homosexual and queer community, we “remember” this very pink place as a site of furtive meetings and sex, still in use.
As someone who didn’t grow up in a large city with a known gay village, like Madrid or Barcelona, my queer repertoire often has the beach as the epicentre of resistance. Names of close-by towns, like Benidorm or Torremolinos, bring to life epic stories of lesbian bars, drag queens performances and gay gatherings that conflict with the always grey image of the Francoist dictatorship. These Mediterranean beaches that were exploited from 1960 on by the regime to bring foreign capital and clean its image as a fascist dictatorship, became the sites were queer life could flourish[3]. For example, once upon a time, the small town of Torremolinos hosted the first openly gay man bar and the first ever lesbian bar in Spain. There was also a jazz bar, concert spaces were local and international stars performed, and even a small pub opened by an old British lady in memory of her deceased gay son. The story goes, that it was in this town where John Lennon had his first homosexual experience. In the official archives, what we have left from this history is the police raid of 1971 where 139 people were arrested and most gay businesses were closed. Until today, we still don’t know the exact location of many of these bars, including The Dany’s, the first openly gay bar in Spain. These archives also fail to account for the aftermath, as if there was none, when indeed, this raid, though tragic, had interesting consequences for queer resistance. Some local queers continue to live in Torremolinos and opened new spaces (including the first space of safe sex education in Spain) after Franco’s death, others contributed to the dissemination of queer life in other touristic areas of the Mediterranean coast.
Remembering Saidiya Hartman’s reflection on the implicit violence of the archive[4], what Foucault names “the register in the encounter with power”, I argue that, as long as we live in a homophobic and transphobic society[5], the failure of the archive is necessary in the construction of a queer resistance. I pose that the one of the responses to this archival failure may in fact to ask, as scholar Anjali Arondekar does, “can an empty archive also be full?”[6].
In other words: what can the lack of archival material tell us about queer life, how can the failure tell a story.
In my research, I propose to use the strategy that Jose Esteban Munoz calls “queering evidence”[7]. He argues that “the key to queering evidence [...] is by suturing it to the concept of ephemera. “. And, he adds “Think of ephemera as a trace, the remains, the things that are left, hanging in the air like a rumor”.
On my walks along the beach, I find multiple objects, abandoned or lost by someone: an empty can, a piece of rope, broken sunglasses, a shoe. What are the stories behind these objects? Who left them? Who lost them? In 2018 only, more than 31000 people have attempted the Mediterranean crossing between Morocco and Spain, of those, at least 141 died. Are these objects the remains of these crossings? Are those bodies in the water, next to me? Sometimes these remains are in fact bunkers from the war built on first line at the beach. Sometimes there is in fact no physical object, but a rumor travelling from queer ear to queer ear about having sex in the pine caves.
I would like to now present to you how these questions, reflections and hauntings impact my practice-based work as an artist. In the piece that I am currently producing for my MFA thesis, I draw remains: pencil on paper that I glue to a cardboard. The cardboard is black on the other side, I cut it out and make it stand with a simple wooden stick. Pop cans, plastic bags, pieces of clothing, broken glass bottles, rope, dismembered hands, broken chairs, teeth, juice bricks, cigarette buts, vital organs, bullets, pieces of a boat, de-inflated balls, fragments of bombs, etc. I am aiming for a total of more or less 200 drawings in order to fully occupy the centre of the gallery. To provoke the very queer feeling of disorientation, scale has been altered, small objects may be drawn large, large objects turned up much smaller than in real life. The strategy of hierarchical scale does not apply, for example dismembered body parts are as any other object, sometimes small, sometimes big, hidden behind a drawing of a crushed beer can. Though objects are repeated, the drawings are all different. In the gallery, all the drawings are turned to the opposite direction to the entrance, only offering their back, an abstract mass of black silhouettes to the viewer. The viewer is therefore summoned to walk around the piece to see “the things that are left”.
These “things” are pieces in fragmented narratives where silence and the unknown are, interestingly, the most common component. In turn, the viewer is now left to give meaning to these drawings and stich these objects, words, silences, rumours, remains, traces together. This process echoes some of the characteristics of what Marianne Hirsch call post-memory, experiences that are passed from a previous generation, that “precede one’s birth” and that are “not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” The drawings confront the viewer with a story that happened before they entered the space. Why are they here? to whom they belong? why the all seem to be damaged, broken, crushed? As far as I know, I have not created a pre-existence narrative, but I am purposely playing with the viewers’ tendency to give meaning to these objects.
My work reflects on “the things that are left” as well as in how we embed these things with a relationship to queerness. The meanings and stories we create from ephemera depend on our positionality, our life experiences, our knowledge, our emotions and our imagination. The viewers are given a lot of flat monochrome drawings of objects and they are left to make sense of them.
In Spanish from Spain we have a particular way of identifying someone as queer, we use the verb “entender” to understand. We may say “Pepe entiende/Pepe understands” or “tu primo entiende?/does your cousin understand?”. Understand what? You may ask. In this expression, the verb understand does not require an object, it is just “understand” because if you “understand” you are already aware of what: everything “lost from the evidentiary logic of heterosexuality”, as Jose Esteban Munoz puts it[8].
I propose my work as an exercise in “understanding”. In reading “the things that are left” between the lines and actively seeking a recognition of resistance in our gestures, our bodies and our stories. I believe that the action of acknowledging the power of ephemera should coexist with archival research and the construction of non-oppressive archives. In these archives, we should be able to access the forgotten film Saturday at the beach, not because it is evidence of queer life at the beach during the dictatorship, but because we know there was queer life at the beach and we are interested in learning how a contemporary director portrayed it.
As I mentioned before, my research does not focus on queer experiences, but my project is theoretically, methodologically and politically queer. I argue that, as long as we live in a racist neoliberal society, the same strategy of queering evidence may apply to migrant and refugee stories and stories related to the struggle against fascism. I therefore propose, to use a queering approach to all these subjects, to move queerness from the margins to the methodological centre.
[1] Melero, ‘“Sábado en la playa”: una pieza crucial para el puzle del cine gay en España’, 7.
[2] http://expresos-sociales.blogspot.com/p/contacto.html
[3] 1- laws against homosexuality did not apply the same for foreigners than for Spaniards, which explains why there are so few records of arrests of foreigners for homosexual activity, 2- sites were far away from Madrid, so police were more lax and easier to corrupt, 3- homosexual and transsexual sex work with foreigners provided a much better income than with nationals (who could also be informants).
[4] Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’.
[5] I propose, that as long as we live in a racist neoliberal society, the same terms apply to migrant and refugee stories and stories related to the struggle against the Franco dictatorship and the current political apparatus.
[6] Arondekar, ‘Without a Trace’, 1.
[7] Muñoz, ‘Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance’, 65.
[8] Muñoz, 81.