“Los Invisibles”: A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850–1939 (review)

Historians of homosexuality have for many years been preoccupied with the question of whether “homosexuality” travels across time and space. In a different context, Spanish historians have asked whether the history of Spain is fundamentally “different” from that of the rest of Europe. These questions have rarely been posed together, but this book, jointly written by a British scholar and a Spanish scholar does just that through an in-depth analysis of historical documents—including medical, psychiatric, legal, and literary texts—from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the Franco dictatorship.

Like the history of twentieth-century Spain generally, Francoism casts a long shadow over the history of Spanish homosexuality. As Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García note, “the conception that homosexuality was ‘repressed’ and therefore invisible before the ‘transition to democracy’ [after 1975] is a strong motif which still holds sway” (2). The book’s title, “the invisible ones,” both acknowledges and problematizes this theme. It also reminds us both that the history of homosexuality has largely been hidden in histories of modern Spain and that Spanish homosexuals remain largely unseen in the general history of European homosexuality. The authors challenge this dual marginalization, demonstrating that homosexuality was of interest to Spanish professionals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while showing that these writers were often influenced by ideas from France, Britain, and Germany. Even if Spanish concerns about homosexuality were not entirely “different,” they did follow patterns that add a layer of complexity to histories of homosexuality that focus on northern and western Europe.

The period under study—1850 to 1939—reflects this concern to locate Spanish homosexuality within a broader European context while acknowledging Spanish specificity. Following Foucault, the authors identify “the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [as] the formative years of what became crystallized as ‘homosexuality’ in the contemporary period” (3). Yet they are critical of literal readings of Foucault that produce a formulaic and linear approach to the history of homosexuality that moves progressively from sodomite to invert to homosexual. Instead, the authors use Fernand Braudel’s idea of “multiple temporality” (24n29) to argue that the history of homosexuality in Spain shows “the multiplicity or coexistence of old and new figures, of old and new models of subjectivity” (8). The authors also acknowledge their debt to the theoretical and historiographical paradigms that have shaped the history of homosexuality outside Spain, including the debates around essentialism and social constructionism and the impact of queer theory.

The authors make a point of the so-called Mediterranean model of sexuality: the contention that in southern Europe (and Latin America) male homosexuality was constructed not around sexual identity but around roles or types, specifically, the “active” and “passive” partners in sex acts. For Cleminson and Vázquez these models are not mutually exclusive, and the “pre-gay” figures of the marica (effeminate fairy) and maricón (active homosexual) coexisted with the later “homosexual” well into the twentieth century (9–10). Their task as they see it is not to trace the disappearance of one type and the rise of another but rather to map “their resignification and reincorporation into new economies of the sex/gender system” (10). Following other histories of homosexuality, this book is also a history of gender—of changing historical meanings of masculinity and femininity.

The introductory chapter places the book in the context of these wider theoretical and historiographical developments. The remaining chapters trace the coexistence of different homosexual subjects over ninety years through an analysis of competing discourses of homosexuality. Chapter 2 investigates the “birth of the invert,” looking at medical texts and legal cases. Same-sex sexual acts were not criminalized in Spain, in part because of the influence of the 1810 Napoleonic Code, and in marked contrast to Germany and Britain. At the same time, Spanish legal scholars drew inspiration from scholars in...