Camping it up in the Francoist Camp: Reflections on and in Ante el espejo of Luis Antonio de Villena

Autobiography is typically practiced by older writers, reflecting on the totality of their lives; yet gay life-writers, in an effort to come to terms with their sexuality, often become autobiographers at an early age. Luis Antonio de Villena, whose entire poetic corpus contains elements of self-representation, undertook his memoir, Ante el espejo, at the age of thirty. He prefaces it with the words of Rousseau: “Je sais bien que le lecteur n’a pas grand besoin de savoir tout cela, mais j’ai besoin, moi, de le lui dire” (5). ¹ In so doing he places his life within the context of classic Western autobiography while simultaneously expressing a desire, present in numerous lesbian and gay writers, to give social visibility to his sexuality. Ante el espejo has nevertheless been described as a semi-autobiographical text ² insofar as certain details are patently fictitious. In fact, Villena breaks the so-called autobiographical pact, according to which author, narrator, and protagonist are identical (Philippe Lejeune 15), ³ and dissociates himself from his autobiographical persona. He does this in “un intento de cortar, de independizarme por completo del niño y del muchacho que fui y gritarle en la distancia: ‘¡Ya no me perteneces!’” (131–32). At the outset Villena holds an essentialist conception of the self, but in the end he undermines the ideology of identity through an intermittent and subtle parodying. He thus uses his memoir as a mirror that not only reflects but rescripts and reconfigures the past. Like the queer child posing before his mother’s mirror, the adult life-writer “camps it up” in Ante el espejo, denaturalizing the social milieu through which he, as a homosexual and aristocrat, was initially constituted as unnatural. Although he fails to achieve the naturalness for which he longed as a child—”la adolescencia le quedaría siempre como una privación, como el robo que un desconocido ladrón le había cometido” (130), ⁴ he ultimately represents himself not as the victim of an ontological theft but as the agent of his own difference.

Queer Performativity and the Aesthetics of Camp

Villena’s self-representation as a non-heterosexual and non-bourgeois within the framework of Francoist Spain (executed in the past and reaffirmed through the writing of the autobiographical text itself), reveals a camp aesthetic that current queer theory can help to inform. Moe Meyer, in the ground breaking collection of essays titled The Poetics and Politics of Camp, designates camp as the act of being queer in an explicitly social context. He writes: “I define Camp as the total body of performative practices and strategies used to enact a queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility” (5). ⁵ For Meyer, camp is not an essence residing within human beings or things, but an act, as well as a way of reading and of writing, “that originates in the ‘Camp eye’” (13). In short, it is a form of parody. In keeping with the thesis of Anthony Giddens that power and dominance rest on the ability to produce codes of signification (31), Meyer conceptualizes parody as an instrument through which the marginalized and disenfranchised enter alternate codes into the dominant discourse. Whereas the “original” marks the site of dominance, parody, and “Camp, as specifically queer parody, becomes . . . the only process by which the queer is able to enter representation and to produce social visibility” (11). ⁶

The autobiography of Villena functions as a “camp eye” that destabilizes dominant, bourgeois configurations of gender and social class and turns homosexual and aristocratic posturing into acts of defiance. According to Thomas A. King, bourgeois ideology, as articulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in fact conflated the two terms. It viewed aristocratic demeanor as an appearance that lacked the ontological foundation necessary for moral rectitude and material progress, and ultimately as effeminate, insofar as bourgeois notions of selfhood were negotiated on an implicitly male body (26). As a consequence, the “residual elements of [the] performative [aristocratic] self...