Tuesday, October 29, 2024

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt nine)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

If women’s sexuality scared Franco, his regime’s views on homosexuality were wholly predictable. Browsing through my local second-hand bookstore, I found myself confronted by a book entitled Sodomitas. It was a 1956 tome, which put homosexuality into the same bad of ‘enemies of the state’ as Marxism, freemasonry and Judaism. ‘This book was written to demonstrate the danger that the sodomite poses to the Patria, the fatherland,’ its author, one M. Carlavilla, proclaimed. ‘The herd of sodomite wild beasts, thousands strong, has invaded the busy streets looking for its young prey . . . Your son may return home, corrupted, hiding his shameful secret.

‘There is an undoubted affinity between the sodomite and the communist, both being aberrations against the family,’ Carlavilla added, before launching into a 300-page investigation of the subject.

Homosexuals were a threat to the regime’s ideal of a virile Spain. ‘Any effeminate or introvert who insults the movement will be killed like a dog,’ General Queipo de Llano once threatened. Introversion, it seems, was a thoroughly unmanly, un-Spanis, suspicious attribute. When the country’s greatest twentieth-century poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, was shot by a Falangist death squad in the hills outside Granada, one of his assassins later boasted that he had ‘shot him twice in the arse for being a poof’.



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