2024-01-06 10:05:19
“Tear. Because I couldn’t help but cry when making this page”, writes the Aragonese cartoonist Marina Velasco (1997). It shows two young homosexuals embracing in a cell during Franco’s regime. One is Arnau, the other, a boyfriend she stayed with in Barcelona in 1970. Two policemen saw them kissing and arrested them. “I prefer not to talk about what happened when they put us in the van…”, he confesses to her today. Until ten years ago and after going to therapy, he couldn’t accept what happened that day. His family disowned him and sent him to England to “straighten him out”. Hers is one of the six real stories that the illustrator makes visible in Que no se olvide (Premi Fnac – Salamandra Graphic 2023), her debut in comics, a fresco of witnesses of what it has meant in the last century to be part of of the LGTBIQ+ community in Spain. A title that is added to the recent Que el fin del mundo nos encuentre bailando (La Cúpula), in which the veteran Barcelona cartoonist Sebas Martín (1961) parks his usual gay-themed comic strip and contemporary to tell a love story between two men in the turbulent Barcelona of 1935 and in the months before the Civil War.
“There has been a lot of talk about the repression during the dictatorship, but there is some limbo about what it was like during the Second Republic – points out Martín -. It seems that everyone was very left-wing but there was a lot of masculinity and, despite being homosexual or lesbian was not punished, they were arrested for public scandal. In addition, communists and anarchists considered homosexuality a bourgeois vice. And for those on the right, if you were a worker and gay, you were guilty of being vicious and perverting.”
Martín composes a documented story about Tomás, a young and humble office worker in the then working-class neighborhood of Poblenou, who has not yet come out of the closet and falls in love with Basilio, a worker and skilled boxer in the thuggish and nocturnal Barcelona of Barri Sino and the Parallel Character, this one, based on a friend of an uncle of the cartoonist; his first-hand anecdotes helped him compose the story.
Velasco’s comic also takes its seed from family history. “My great aunt had a friend all her life. It was an open secret, but at family gatherings it was never openly said that they were a couple. She didn’t want the stories of those who were forced to keep quiet and to hide for fear of the consequences, they had no references and they saw that in the textbooks, homosexuality was a disease that had to be treated with electroshocks. People I have interviewed even today want to remain anonymous.”
Some of their witnesses underwent Church-controlled conversion therapies to cure homosexuality. “They continued to exist – he complains -. It is a huge step back that Ayuso removes his ban and repeals part of the LGTBI laws in Madrid.”
Law of lazy and busybodies
Martín points out about this: “In some streets in Madrid they threaten you and say ‘fuck you, go back to Chueca or Malasaña’. The older gays warn young people that it took a lot to get the rights they have today and that it is very easy to lose them. There have always been homophobes and we have suffered attacks, but now, with Vox and the PP, they feel legitimized and are on the agenda. And you see barbarities in Russia, in the Arab countries, in Argentina … This wave of widespread hatred is panicking. You can never let your guard down.”
“Although things have improved, in recent years the hate speech has increased – agrees Velasco -. There are still people who look badly at two girls holding hands. And you are afraid when you see that they are coming at you search”.
Martín’s story ends just before the coup of 1936. Now he writes a continuation. “To imagine what would happen to them during the war and the dictatorship.” The two comedians remember that, although it was not until 1954 that Franco formalized the persecution of homosexuality by modifying the law of lazy and troublemakers, before that gays were already the object of “mistreatment, harassment and arbitrary arrests by of the police and falangist groups” and could end up in forced labor.
#Persecuted #gay #Diari #Girona