2023-04-21 22:25:08
After Franco’s death, in the clubs, boîtes and nightclubs, the girl who worked the most was the drag queen. It was the time of the uncovering and of magazines with naked women on the central pages; It was the time of the first joints and of Perich and Forges with their intelligent humor cartoons.
But it was also the time of that funny and folkloric humor where the jokes of ladybugs They were sold in the displays of gas stations. One of the ones that sold the most was La Esmeralda de Sevilla, which I met one night at the end of the century in a fair booth. She introduced us to Jesús Quintero and when Esmeralda found out that I was a writer, she began to give the thread and tell me about her life, a story of contempt, margins and harassment that began when they deflowered her in a vegetable cart. “Neither man nor woman,” she told me, “neither man nor woman. I am a sissy, as it sounds and as it is born. Ladybug by birth”.
She died during the pandemic, and these days I have remembered her again; I just received a record that is a compilation from that time. Its titled ladybug battalion and in it not only La Esmeralda de Sevilla appears, but also La Otxoa, Paco España, Violeta la Burra, Pierrot, Escamillo, Fernando Vargas and many other queens of the pen. This is a new production by Daniel Gutiérrez Collia, who already surprised us with his previous rumbera compilation for the Acropol label and which we reported on in this same newspaper. The memory of the streets (elDiario.es)
For the occasion, Daniel has brought together all the drag queens from those moments, when the night was freshly painted and the stars seemed to be made of glitter; when in the festivities of the neighborhoods of cities like Seville, Barcelona or Madrid that air of a popular orchestra to the rhythm of the pasodoble was still breathed and the most daring men dressed in women’s clothes and painted their noses, like that character from The happy boys of Atzavara, the novel by Vázquez Montalbán that portrays homosexuality and the cross-dressing of that time. It has just been reissued by Navona and it is a choral story, stung by the salt of the Mediterranean.
A novel that shows how the sons of the bourgeoisie cultivate their elitism by doing mischief while the sons of working-class Barcelona are not yet admitted to the group of bourgeois friends. If there was a chronicler of those times that are gone, that was, without a doubt, Vázquez Montalbán; That is why I told La Esmeralda de Sevilla that I was not the best person to write his life. Vázquez Montalbán was still alive and, when I proposed his name, I looked at Jesús Quintero for his approval, but he took the answer for granted, something that did not surprise me either, the guy who made his living making the superhuman effort that keeping silent means.
Now I remember these things while one by Paco España is playing on the album and I read that La Esmeralda has just been given a street in Seville; and Ernest Folch, editor of Navona, gives me the news that he is going to recover the entire narrative of Vázquez Montalbán, the best chronicler of our transition, the man who for years worked as much or more than a drag queen. After all this, all that remains is to exclaim: Let the cava run this Sant Jordi!
#Ladybugs #Battalion