Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid

3. The New Safita: Andalusia and the Phallic Woman in Plumas de España

· 33 ·· CHAPTER 3 · The New Safita Andalusia and the Phallic Woman in Plumas de España The debates surrounding the literariness of Egales’s “Salir del armario ” series touched on several questions about the gendered nature of cultural and sexual politics in Spain in a globalized age. The writer Luis Antonio de Villena, for example, criticized the series, and the Berkana bookstore itself, in an interview with the late Leopoldo Alas in the latter’s 2002 book Ojo de loca no se equivoca: Una irónica y lúcida reflexión sobre el ambiente (The queer eye never lies: An ironic and lucid reflection on the ambiente): The cultured gay public is still in the closet, and they buy gay literature at any normal bookstore, not at Berkana. They don’t go to bars in Chueca or to gay bookstores because they don’t want to do that kind of militancy. The ones that go to the “foam parties” at Refugio or to the Shangay Tea Dance on Sundays are not cultured; they don’t buy books. It’s a mistake to promote to them, because you’ll only sell three books, I told Mili Hernández. And she explained to me that it is for that reason that they’re publishing all those novels at Egales, because they’re easy to understand and they want to see if they can get those uncultured people to read, even if it’s reading very elemental gay stories, told in a conventional way. I told her that, if she wanted to educate them, the first thing she should do is teach them their own history, which they don’t know. (112) Here, Villena suggests a hierarchical cultural split between gay intellectuals and sexually frenetic locas, a division that certain exemplary lives (Foucault comes immediately to mind) might place in doubt.1 Villena splits literature into high and low varieties that he attaches to different modes of gay behavior: the sexual body, which has traditionally been feminized, 34 THE NEW SAFITA is associated with “low” or popular culture, tea dances, and foam parties, whereas the bodies associated with high culture are more ravaged by vices associated with the life of the mind.2 This concept has problematic implications for women, all of whom are generally linked in Spanish culture to the body and popular culture. In the same volume, Leopoldo Alas complains that contemporary gay culture in Spain has the effect of homogenizing gay identities by presenting a single norm that is unrefined, unintellectual, incurious (112). Alas’s book itself, however, creates its own homogeneous ideal of gays as cultured intellectuals who place little emphasis on the body (thus his elevation of smoking to a “cultural activity”). His study thus performs its own silencing of difference. Particularly silent in his text are women. Some of the contradictions apparent in the current gay book business and these assessments of it by “cultured” gay male intellectuals reveal the uneasy convergence in democratic Spain between reality and the idealization of the liberal public sphere in the post-Franco era. Eric O. Clarke explains that the principles of translation from private to public retained by the bourgeois public sphere have historically contradicted its own universalist, democratic ideals. While claiming to establish a “context-transcending” sphere through which to adjudicate competing interests equitably, the conversion from private to public has involved quite particular, context-specific determinations of value. (4) This is clear in the valuation of certain identity markers over others by gay male Spanish intellectuals, who seek to separate sexual and intellectual practices, and, with them, different qualities of gay males. As they attempt to distinguish themselves from the uncultured rabble, they seem to ignore the normalizing practices of the cultural public sphere into which they hope to integrate themselves—that of the Spanish intellectual elite, which continues to be sexist, sexually conservative, antipopular, and vehemently opposed to the (supposedly recent) incursion of capitalist practices in the literary market, which they associate with the propagation of popular culture at the expense of more intellectual cultural products.3 As a consequence of their desire to assimilate into the high-culture realm, THE NEW SAFITA 35 they create their own hierarchy of Spanish homosexuals that eschews the popular/sexual/feminine and omits women altogether, except as objects of their pedagogy—that is, the “lessons” they give Hernández or lesbians in general on pages 211–15—or...