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MADRID EN TRANSITO

Travelers. Visibility, and Gay Identity


Gabriel Giorgi

Indeed, contemporary Spain is among the most progressive societies


on the planet, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the
flowering of gay life.
David Andrusia et al., Frommer's Gay and Lesbian Europe

n the tourist's snapshot quoted above, Spainsurrounded by superlatives


moves ahead on a global map of advances toward progressiveness. In this map, the
"flowering of gay life" is perceived as evidence of historical progress; through the
eyes of a gay tourist, Spain proves to be, finally, contemporary.
The figure of gay and lesbian tourists "coming out" to the world combines
travel and politics in an explicit way. Gays and lesbians traveling around the world
as gays and lesbians reveal a map of democracies where it is increasingly conceivable to claim gayness as a way to move across spaces and borders. Gay tourism
functions, in this sense, as an articulation between discourses of political rights
and transnational displacements in a landscape where national borders are currently being reformulated in both their symbolic and their practical effects. In this
context, the gay tourist emerges as a cultural role, a persona that combines travel,
social progress, and politics in new ways.
"The tourist is one of the best models available of modern man in general,"
Dean MacCannell pointed out in the opening pages of his classic text. The
Tourist.* For MacCannell, the tourist represented one of the purest specimens of
industrial society, a figure who allegorized the tension between the present of modem society and its touristic outsides. This pure representation is no longer a totalizing figure: in recent decades the tourist as the "modern man in general" has
been persistently challenged by alternative narratives and gazes, one of them that
CLQ8:\-2
pp, 57-79
Copyiighl 2002 by Duke Univereily Press

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of the gay tourist. Tourism increasingly reflects different posilionalilies and subjectivities: ecological, educational, sexual, identitarian, and religious. Il retains,
however, its force on the definition of the present, since it always needs to construct shared temporalities as well as distances and differences, and similarities
as well as otherness between home and destination. Gay tourism thus grounds
itself in a temporal imagination in which images of gay life help formulate a perspective, perhaps a diagnosis, of the times. As the epigraph exemplifies, gay
tourism evaluates the state of a gay community and its visibility across nations,
thereby testing the state of democracy abroad. A moment of crisis of the "modern
man in general" but allegorical in its own way, gay tourism functions as a discourse of authority and witnessing that validates political progress, historical
advances, and dimensions of the visible in foreign lands. A figure made possible
by contemporary articulations between sexuality, free market, and democracy, the
gay tourist becomes a carrier of gay identity in its mobility across nations.^
Spain, traditionally a hot spot for tourists, represents quite an exceptional
example of the repositioning of a nation on the map of modernity. In the last three
decades it has experienced radical social and political changes that transformed a
country generally regarded as backward and conservative into a modern democratic nation and a metropolitan power. It was also, as the guidebooks for gay and
lesbian travel promise, transformed into a society highly tolerant of homosexual
life. Spain is said to have made a "historical leapfrog" after the death of Franeo,
in view of the unexpected extent of the country's modernizing impulse. The trope
condenses the doubts it fosters in some critics, who regard Spain's bright modernity as illusory or weak.-^
In analyzing how Madrid is constructed as a sight for the gay touristoor,
better, how the figure of the gay tourist and Madrid meet and mirror each other in
the discursive scenes of the gay traveloguesI aspire to illustrate the position of
the Spanish capital in a new geopolitical landscape. Less an attempt to describe
contemporary gay life in aetual Madrid than an exploration of some aspects of contemporary imaginings about mobility and visibility, my article focuses on the mirroring between territory and travelers in Madrid as a site of transnational circulation in a geopolitical landscape where gayness plays a role in the demarcation of
territories and circuits. How are Madrid and Spain narrated for the gay tourist,
and sometimes for the loeals through the eyes of the gay tourist? And what does
that narration say not only about gay tourism as such but about gayness as a mediation between travelers and territories, as a passage between nations and thus as
transnational identity production?'*
In spite of his or her meager literary prestige (writers and poets are travel-

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY. AND GAY IDENTITY

ers, nomads, perhaps expatriates or exiles, but never tourists),^ the tourist is a figure enmeshed in narratives, perpetually represented as an object by travelogues, a
genre of surprising narrative efficacy in which sequences are tightly organized and
time is always "now." The tourist, as constructed and addressed by travelogues,
becomes a mediator between space and time, between geography and history. This
is why the tourist is a crucial figure of modern and postmodern culture, an "agent
of modernity," in the words of Caren Kaplan. The tourist posits the occasion for
perpetual rearrangements between eras and travels across space as much as
through temporalities.
My goal is not only to analyze some historical effects of the discourse of gay
tourism about Madrid but to make them resonate with other discursive materials,
such as a recently published gay novel about hustlers and migrants in Madrid, in
order to perceive how the global expansion of gay culture reproduces equations
between time and space that are usually associated with postcolonial imagination.
Although gay visibility is normally associated with postmodernitythat is, with
the multiplication of languages, alternative historical claims, and conflicting
social/cultural positionalitiesits contemporary travels can be framed within the
modern tension between the metropolis and the periphery, a universe in which certain transformations of global culture are reinscribed and redefined in metropolitan terms. "Who defines this present from which we speak?" asks Homi K.
Bhabha in reference to the oscillation, specific to modernity, between what he calls
the performative and the pedagogical.'' The splitting of temporalities opens new
loci of enunciationthe performative force of newnessbut is reinscribed by an
authoritative present formulated from the metropolis.^ In its global travels gay culture combines radical challenges to cultural traditions and normative sexualities
with powerful rearticulations of cultural hierarchies on a postcolonial map. It
places a visibility, of bodies, desires, and styles, that negotiates alternatives to
heterosexism and conservatism in different societies but at the same time freezes
tensions raised by the current landscape of global neocolonial domination and
intensified mobility. As a Village Voice headline announced a couple of years ago,
"Gay is global": the sign of gayness solidifies the present of homosexual cultures
throughout the world. From that present, gay culture narrates local histories,
breaking decades or centuries of silence, but also reinforces the complementarity
between the local and the global in a transparency that creates a new set of challenges and erasures.**
This ambivalent effect is closely connected with the role of the market in
the transnational expansion of gay culture. The market not only creates some of
the conditions for that expansion (gay and lesbian tourism being, perhaps, the

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most evident example of tbe process) but plays a crucial part in the definition of
gay identity and its political and cultural visibility. "Tbe correlation of market
value and political equivalence, the correlation of consumption and citizenship,"
argues Eric 0. Clarke, "allows commercial representations to function as i/^they
were democratic arenas for self-determination."^ The gay or lesbian tourist is certainly a result of that correlation between consumption and political enfranchisement, an equation that determines in terms of class but also of race and genderhow gay culture travels around the world. As the market opens pathways
across nations and challenges traditional sexual cultures, it significantly regulates
conditions in which gay identity claims visibility and creates inclusion.
As gay visibility goes global, it becomes a way to codify traveling bodies,
a way to perceive and recognize them in a changing urban landscape. Madrid, the
new gay destination and aspiring metropolis, located between historical times and
geographic poles, seems to offer an unavoidable scenario for these tensions around
gay visibility as they are displayed by representations of diverse travelers and travels across the urban landscape.

Madrid: The Gay Destination, the New Democracy


Few cities in Europe boast the kind of frenetic fun people can experience in Madrid. . . . A few may be coy about their sexuality outside
the gay quarters or at work, but once they get to Chuecawell, you'll
have to see it with your own eyes.
Miguel Banon Penalba, "Madrid, City of Passion"
The first issue oi Passport ("Go First Class"), a San Francisco magazine dedicated
to gay and lesbian travel, features an exhaustive report, quoted here, on "gay
Madrid." The attention is on Chueca, Madrid's brand-new gay quarter, mostly
developed in the last five years and growing fast. Chueca is the "example of the
new openness" that singularizes contemporary Spain.^^ As Pefialba says, "You'll
have to see it with your own eyes." Chueca makes gay people visible and offers
itself to the tourist's gaze: to experience Chueca is, in the first place, to see visibility. Gay visibility becomes a tourist "sight."
In making gay people visible, Chueca epitomizes the new democratic
Spain. The social life and public practices of the gay community are at the same
time symbols for the nation's political stance. There is, then, a double value acted
out in gay visibility: on the one hand, the new openness offers conditions and sites
to experience gay identity and desire; on the other, it provides a sense of contemporaneousness, of shared historicity with other modern, liberal democracies.

TRAVELERS. VISIBILITY. AND GAY IDENTITY

In a democracy that still needs to demonstrate its strength and its resemblance to the older, so-called advanced democracies of the United States and
northern Europe, gay visibility stands out as a symbol, a token of social tolerance
and achieved freedom. Tourism becomes, in this way, more than a business: it
becomes an instance of historical and political validation (or, to put it more
bluntly, a business that requires some historical and political conditions). Only the
language of tourism can sanction Spain's transfiguration into a "European showplace."" The metaphor highlights the visibility of a "new" culture, as well as the
way it is exhibited and its desire to be seen by or to pose in front of foreign eyes
a language of tourism converted into political progress because it performs the
accession to modernity. The tourist's gaze, the tourist's knowledge, validates the
repositioning of Spain on the global map.'^
One example of the remapping of Spain's new and old identities for the gay
tourist is provided by Rancho Mirage Travel, a Web-based travel agency:

A New Spain
The times are certainly changing in Spain. Once one of the most conservative and repressive societies in Europe, since the death of Franco and after
several elections, Spain has become a European showplace. One example
of the new openness, the Spanish National Tourist Office publishes a guide
. . . called Madrid Night Life. One section is called The Gay Life and provides a comprehensive guide to gay bars and other venues, even including
subway and bus directions. Could you imagine such information being
available in the USA and in the language of our visitors?

And the Old Spain


Traces of medieval Madrid can still be seen to this day in the area of Puerta
del Sol, Calle Mayor and Plaza del Valle, ancient churches and Moorish
buildings are still prominent in these areas.''
Madrid transforms itself into an assortment of historical eras, an urban landscape switching between the (gay) twenty-first century and the "old Spain." This
is, one can argue, what the discourse of tourism is supposed to offer: the availability of time difference at walking distance, without any major risk or effort.
That the modern part of the package is exclusively defined by gayness, however,
makes of this a particular kind of offer. It shows how gay visibility is immediately translated into the vocabulary of liberal democracy as a condition of trans-

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national circulation and is temporalized in a present tense that echoes other loci
of modernity.
In 1996 the Spanish Tourism Institute, the official tourism office, published
a gay guidebook titled Gay Spain: Feel the Passion, to be distributed, apparently, in
Spanish information offices in the United States. After the conservative Popular
Party gained control of the government, the guidebook was withdrawn. In response,
Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana, a gay and lesbian activist group, distributed it on the
Web. Although the unfortunate decision of the Popular Party made less evident the
official presence of gay visibility in the Spanish democracy, it is suggestive how
the guidebook's discourse places Spain in a sequence of modernity played out
around gay rights: "In 1995 Spain became the first Latin country . . . forbidding
discrimination in housing and employment"; "Spain will become the third country
in the European Community with such a [partnership] law on its books"; "A new
dawn of tolerance, social justice, and freedom is emerging. The doors of the closet
are wide open, never to be closed again."'* The place of Spain in relationship to
Europe (the Europe of the European Community) and to Latin Americathe double face of Spain's new geopolitical positionis affirmed by a chronology ("first,"
"third") in the advancement of homosexual rights. The timing exhibits the ways in
which a local modernity desires to be seen as well as the standards it has to meet to
be reflected in a global framework. Tbe inscription of gayness in this scene of
recognition shows the historical value assigned as a marker to help counterbalance
the attendant delay in turning democratic and to fast-foi-ward historical "progress."
Madrid, aspiring metropolis, jumps forward, getting close to the global present by embracing gayness as a marker of history. Chueca becomes one of the privileged scenarios of that movement toward modernity. Gay/modern, or gay-as-modern, functions in this way as a historical signifier that reorganizes the temporality
of homosexuality and society according to a sequence that places gay culture as a
reference to the present, to the "now"a present defined in global terms. The gay
capitals (New York, London, Paris, and, later, Madrid) are, not surprisingly, the
metropolises of the postcolonial world. They are the sites where the contemporaneous is perpetually reinstated as the "now" of history. Gayness, in the global era,
is part of that replication. The tourist, as an "agent of modernity," engenders a scenario for that echo.
The celebrated transparency between Spain and the "civilized" gay world,
as it is repeatedly allegorized by the tourist, exhibits the borders of contemporary
gay identity when it functions as a mediation between national territories and cultures. It mirrors geography with historygeneral history and gay historyfrom
which Spain and Madrid move "ahead" and are embraced by the North.

TRAVELERS. VISIBILITY, AND GAY IDENTITY

This radical change is reflected in the way in which the travelogues construct historical backgrounds of contemporary Madrid. The report of Passport
frames Madrid in an account of Spain, extending from the Roman Empire down to
the liberalization under democratic rule, in which Chueca appears as a natural
outcome of both the healthy Spanish democracy and its expanding economy. In
the first part of his report the writer, a self-identified Madrilefio, clarifies the goal
of his endeavor: to correct international (American) misconceptions about contemporary Madrid and Spain: "I think most Americans have a misconception concerning the look and feel of present day Madrid. For those who think of the city as
old looking. Catholic, and uptighta place where everyone does flamenco dancing and attends bullfightsoh! you are so wrong!"'^ No rhetorical stress can adequately highlight how modern Madrid has become. The change is verified in the
corrections to the city's images that were persistently forged and distributed by the
tourist campaigns during Franco's era, when a stereotypical image of Madrid
became an international icon for Spain. Modernization, on this level, appears as an
effect of a debate and a transition between tourist imageries and their political
agendas.
This transformation is repeatedly described as a sudden occurrence of
modernity and as an event that no one could anticipate: "Former Catholic guilt
changed overnight to a joyous freedom.""" The "overnight" change indicates an
acceleration of history in which tradition, seemed to have been firmly established.
Madrid becomes a city of duplicity and delusion, where historical eras coexist in
contaminating immediacy. This duplicity affects especially the urban visibility of
gay people. What becomes visible in Madrid is a matter of struggle between old
and new tourist images of the city. Another travelogue, Frotntner's Gay and Lesbian
Etirope, stages this conflict of imageries by nairating the writer's arrival in Madrid:
As my cab pulled into Madrid in the wee hours of a Sunday morn, I was
struck by all the sexy young guys waiting for buses and taxis in the dawn
light. How sweet, I thought, they're going to mass. I smiled as some
beatific Church Lady, thinking I had my opening sentence nailed down:
"Despite all the advances in Spain's economy and society, the institutions
of family and church are what remain at the heart of this charming land."
Then I realized the truth: These cute (if slightly shopworn) guys
aren't going to church. They are going homeafter a night of depravity
and drugs in the clubs.'^
A travel writer's task is not easy, especially in the half-light of a Sunday dawn in
Madrid. There the eternal dilemma of a beginning is further complicated by a

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mirage of overlapping cities. The adjustment of our traveler's vision displays history as a trompe l'oeil. The same image (boys waiting) belongs to two different
cities and two opposite eras. Madrid embodies a reversibility between modern
excess and rigid tradition; its double face reveals less its nature than the speed of
its repositioning in history. An adjustment of the visiblethe visibility of an
excess that includes gay lifeis the enactment of Spain's recent history, which,
due to its celerity, can be apprehended in the blink of an eye: an imaginal clip. An
overlapping of past and present, or a sudden reversal of past into present, occurs:
Madrid's history seems to run under the effects of a "fast-forwarding" force. And
then "what was once a dusty old-world capital has become a major international
city of note, on a par with Paris, London, and New York."'"
The troubled writer, after adjusting his historical lens, finds the proper way
to describe Madrid: "So let me rethink that lead sentence. How about: 'The only
shrine most young Madrilefios worship at these days is that of the holy trinity of
clothes, clubs and cash. Heady, hedonistic, and very hot, modern Madrid is every
bit as dizzy and daring as an Almodovar film'?"'^
From the city of God to the city of sin: young Madrilefios embody the
mockery of the Catholic tradition and the celebration of capital and hedonism.
That movement between versions of Madrid is also a movement between tourist
imagery, from the tourist images of Franco's erathe repertoire of flamenco dancing and bullfightingto Pedro Almodovar, whose movies construct a modern
Madrid for Spaniards and especially for foreigners. The mention of Almodovar in
the gay travelogue is not casual. In his movies cultural production and tourist
imagery exhibit some permeability, and Almodovar recognizes himself as an
"exportable" product of contemporary Spain. In that gesture Almodovar provides
a discursive site to recognize and describe Madrid's new times: his movies offer a
locus from which to enunciate the temporal echo between Madrid and sites of
modernity.20 Tourists, according to the guidebook quoted above, travel through
Almodovar's moviesthrough their desire for modernity and through their camp
parody of that desireto find themselves, finally, in modern, present-day, European Madrid, where the gay territory comes to light.

Visihie Bodies in the Urhan Map


. . . in these little capitals of people watching.
-Dean MacCannell, The Tourist
To look at the map of gay Madrid is to notice immediately the contrast between the
high concentration of gay services in Chueca, the gay quarter, and the lack of a

TRAVELERS. VISIBILITY. AND GAY IDENTITY

visible gay presence in the rest of the city. That is why Chueca quickly became
famous for having the "highest concentration of gay life in Europe," according to a
tourist brochure on tbe Web. "Everything is gay in this neighborhood now," adds a
Passport report. Chueca is turning into an example of high density in matters of
gay visibility, an aggregate of the urban concentration of gay life and the visual
impact of a landscape suddenly occupied by gays: "Take a peek at the gay afterdark center, Chueca, any day of the week and you'll see what I mean."^' A promise
to the eyes: wonders push the limits of language in the tourist's discourse; they
work, as MacCannell puts it, at the limit between signifying and showing.22 Tourist
discourse is, in this sense, a realm of the visible in language; it praises the power
of the eye by testing the limits of words. Gay tourism, however, twists positions: it
offers visibility itself as a sight, interchanging the place of the subject and the
object by making both of them "sights" and returning the gaze to the tourist, thus
rendering gayness as much a social spectacle as the domain of a subjective experience. In Chueca "you'll see" and you'll "be seen"that is the tacit promise and
the contract between the gay guidebooks and their readers. That reciprocal gaze is
the enactment of gay identity in a public staging that expects and somehow
induces visibility as a result of the encounter between the tourist and the site. Visibility is thus the theme of gay tourism, the discursive axis from which it portrays
sites, designs subjectivities, and tells bistories.
In Chueca visibility is mainly associated with the night scene. The legendary lateness of Madrid's nightlife is reinforced here by tbe sight of crowds in
the gay area: "The crowds are so throbbing at night"; "at 3 am you still see a
crowd."2-' "The area is basically queer so eighty percent of the people having a
beer or ice cold sangria will be one of us." A sense of communitarian visibility is
accompanied by this hyperbolic apparition of otherwise hidden multitudes once
the border is crossed: "A few may be coy about their sexuality outside the gay
quarters or at work, but once they get to Chuecawell, you'll have to see it with
your own eyes."^* Any urban gay quarter functions, in many ways, as a "shifter" of
visibility: once inside the territory, the bodies in circulation tend to be codified
and perceived by reference to gay identity. In the case of Chueca, as it is depicted
in these discourses, the hyperbolic density of gaynessthe crowds, the percentage, the "wholeness"makes it an experience of gay identity as much as a tourist
sighl. As a site of national and transnational circulation, Chueca makes these two
positions reflect into each other.^s
Once translated into the imagination and discourse of gay travel, "sightseeing" tends to resonate with cruising, particularly if the trip opens actual or
imagined occasions for sexual pursuit (as it frequently does). But sight-seeing

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becomes richer and more ambivalent if we associate it witb the experience of visibility and identity as tbese turn into tourist attractions. Gay tourism, in this sense,
can be seen as another, perhaps newer genre of the coming-out narrative, offering
access to visibility in foreign lands. A trip to tbe gay destination, where visibility
is dense and, in a way, unavoidable (as it might be in Chueca, if we believe the
guidebooks), is thus a means of engaging the coming-out narrative of invisibility/visibility in terms of transnational mobility. Strongly attached to the internationalization of Madrid, the gay territory is deeply shaped by the gaze of the
tourists, and the degree of visibility so praised by the travelogues reflects that
moment of transnational encounter.26
So Chueca, like other sites of highly concentrated gay visibility, reworks
some of the articulations between the local, the national, and the transnational. Its
borders are territorial as much as identitarian, such that identity projects itself
onto the urban territory and defines a code of visibility through which people circulate. Visibility becomes an experience connected to a circulation across maps of
changing scales, and the pilgrimage to visibility can be taken from remote countries, from the next neighborhood or the nearest Spanish province. From this point
of view, Chueca reinscribes national or regional differences by organizing gay
identity in terms of a passage zone that attracts locals and visitors, somehow defining almost all of them as tourists, in the sense that they experience visibility as an
effect of the territory. This does not mean, of course, that national or regional identities are instantly meaningless once people enter the reign of gay visibility; on the
contrary, in transnational scenarios, nationality is constantly alluded to and sometimes reinforced. Rather, the sign of gayness becomes privileged ground for recognition and identification, ground that attaches national signifiers to gayness as the
privileged identification. The boundaries of the gay area define identity as territoriality: inside an area more or less defined and recognizable, gayness becomes a
privileged mediator of identity, the signifier that articulates perceptions and negotiations of meaning. In this landscape the tourist, to a certain extent, epitomizes
this experience of identity as it is produced in terms of territoriality and circulation.27
Of course, circulation never goes unmarked. Various trajectories, experiences, and passages through visibility can be counted and imagined, each exposing a different arrangement of location, travel, and sexual secrecy or openness. A
major contrast would be found between the trajectories of any of the gay destinations, as well as between them and areas with no or less visible gay life. Also, different gay travel experiences can be framed within the tension between metropolis
and periphery and reveals that the tourist, as a metaphor for access to visibility, is

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY. AND GAY IDENTITY

grounded on diverse restrictions that determine the journeys to and through gay
identity. Nevertheless, Chueca, as a tourist site and a gay destination mediated
and somehow (re)invented by gay travelogues, becomes a scene in which visibility
is connected to travel and to a touristic circuit of other gay centers, a circuit in
which identity and visibility depend on, and are imagined through, access to
mobility and travel.
Chueca, like other metropolitan gay territoriesfragments of the discourse of global mobilityprojects a sense of cosmopolitanism and erasure of differences that is soon revealed as highly problematic. If the imagination of tourism
somehow shapes the connection between visibility and circulation, the limits and
the rules of that visibility become more obvious when the lesbian body traverses
the scenario.
For instance, "Everything is gay in this neighborhood now" applies only
when gayness is reflected in male tourists. Gay visibility in the travelogues, as in
many other aspects of gay culture, seems haunted by lesbian invisibility or by tbe
intermittent visibility of the lesbian body in travel. In the material I reviewed, the
lesbian tourist appears as a supplement, a formally corrective addendum to discourses and information produced by and for gay male tourists. As such, lesbian
(in)visibility represents the deconstructive return of gender to the all-inclusive
imagination of travel and global mobility. "And the sisters of Sappho will go ga-ga
over las chicas," adds Frotnmer's in an introduction in which boys, saunas, and
muscles are the main focus; lesbians appear only as footnotes.2" In this sense, gay
and lesbian travel seems very much to reproduce the gendered restrictions of travel
in general terms. The crowds of Chueca are genderless, so the lesbian apparition,
more than referring to a visible presence in the gay territory, seems to fill a gap in
the representation.

Africa Borders Chueca: Maps and Landscapes of Glohal Geography


In the rhetoric of tourism, through its explicit and implicit gaps, transnational visibility emerges as a contested arena where bodies and maps intersect in conflicting ways. If the lesbian traveler articulates a tension inside the imagination of
tourism, other travelers bring to it an outside, or a limit, that is also a silence. The
inscription of illegal immigrants in the urhan landscape demarcates an outside
limit of the celebrated mirroring between gay territory and global mobility.
The strengthening of Spain's democracy has been accompanied by an
astonishing economic growth {Frotntner's observes that "Spain has now one of the
10 largest GNP's in the world"), which makes Madrid not only a gay destination

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but a metropolis where immigrants represent a crucial economic and cultural


force.29 The new Spain enters the landscape of an era in which transnational
tourism and immigration epitomize displacement, one being the reverse of the
other (although multiple contaminations and identifications between the two can
be imagined).''0 What histories are told when Chueca not only reflects the enlighteningand wealthyface of the tourist but registers the figure of the immigrant?
Gay tourism discourse does not seem to answer this question, perhaps
because, as noted above, the immigrant is an economic and social counterfigure to
the tourist; also, social and racial tensions cannot fit easily into the imaginary of
tourism, which tends to keep unsaid the privileges of the leisure class. Or, last but
not least, perbaps the contiguity between tourists and immigrants immediately
evokes sex trade and sex tourism, information frequently absent from the gay
guidebooks. Whatever the reasons, the immigrant seldom makes it onto the postcards of gay tourismand when he or she does, it is under specific conditions. A
relationship to capital seems to be a determinant of differential relationships to
visibility.
In this sense, visibility does not simply oppose invisibility, as in the opposition between the apparent and the hidden. It involves less an actual perception
than a code of what is perceptible, in what terms, under what light, and for whom.
The invisible is not merely absent; rather, it is marked as invisible and registered
as a difference or a limit. Invisibility is then a contour, an edge, a distance. It continues visibility in another texture, in the same way that the "closet," as Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, refers not necessarily to a secret buried in the subject's fortified privacy but to a never fully definite knowledge, a labile pact of
silence. John Berger, in an examination of aesthetic perception, points out this
continuity: "It is very possible that visibility is the truth, and what lies outside
visibility are only the 'traces' of what has been or will become visible."" Visibility is here a focus demarcated by traces whose invisibility measures timethe
future or the past of the visible. Invisibility makes explicit a temporal limit, a contour, so that the visible body can be recognized. The visible, tben, is a matter of
time, of politics, of history. Transposing this dynamic of visibility and "traces" to
the metropolitan staging of gayness, the tourist's visibility and the immigrant's
invisibility become figures of time.
Describing Madrid as a city of immigrants, the Passport report praises the
sense that "our bonds with Latin America are stronger than ever, making the city
even more colorful. You'll see Cubans, Argentineans, Peruvians, and Colombians
here; and don't forget the North African contingent."''2 The "colors" that immi-

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY, AND GAY IDENTITY

grants bring to Madrid occasion a celebration of diversity in cultural terms, as if


the Third World were staging itself in a sort of urban spectacle. The dividing line
between labor migrants and tourists projects a map in which Latin America and
Africa provide workers and the United States (and, very likely, Europe) provides
tourists. Such a neat division of labor in transnational displacements exhibits the
extent to which the imagination of tourism structures itself on geographic, economic, and racial terms. In this case, the "colors" of Third World countries allude
not only to the diversity of cultures in metropolitan Madrid but to the racialized
bodies traversing the routes of neocolonial domination. As such, they present
Madrid as a crossroads of clearly differentiated travel circuits.
With these tensions around visibility in mind, I want to look briefly at a
novel in which visibility, immigration, and gay history are decisively articulated.
El gladiador de Ghaeca [The gladiator of Chueca], by Carlos Sanrune, is the fictional autobiography of a hustler in Madrid, a mix between/}tcare.sca and soft porn
in which Chueca is the scenario of a historical transition between homosexualities
in Spain. The reference to Chueca in the title is crucial, for it provides a locus for
storytelling, a site where homosexual stories are desired, told, and repeated. In
that landscape the protagonist aspires to become a legend by telling of the prowess
of a sexual warrior"gladiator"within the circuits of the gay territory.
The Chueca mentioned in the title, however, is not the Chueca featured in
the gay guidebooks. Since the plot takes place in the mid- or late 1980s, it portrays a neighborhood not yet gentrified by the gay community. If it was already a
gay area, it was also an area of drug dealing and immigrants. (Gay gentrification
sent drug dealing and immigrants, frequently together, to other areas of Madrid.)
That Chueca appears in the novel's title, however, indicates to what extent Chueca
epitomizes gay life in Madrid (and in Spain).-'-^ The text circulates and is read in
reference to present-day Chueca, although it portrays the immediate past of the
area. It thus performs the historical transition of Chueca and of the homosexual
cultures that Chueca made visible.
The fictional production of the text represents this transition: the narrative
results from an interview with the hustler that becomes a "face to face" between
gay culture and its past. We know, from a few of the hustler's remarks, that his
interviewer, who writes the novel and initially asks for the hustler's story, is a gay
man who frequents the ambiente where homosexuals are open about their desires.
On the opposite side, the hustler appears as a closeted homosexual who, to have
sex, needs prostitution as a screen and a camouflage. Even when he frequents gay
bars, he needs to pretend to be straight both to get clients and because he is a
closeted gay man (he is coming out in the interview). His "true" identity, his

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GLQ: A JDURIUAL QF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

actual belonging to the gay community, is his deepest secret; he explores the gay
areas from a subjective and historical distance.
The story of the hustler is a discourse of the past of the type that Michel de
Certeau says furnishes society with a present. He represents the immediately previous stage of homosexual life, the universe of secrecy and hidden desires that gay
visibility transforms into openness.''* The hustler's story is no longer a case for
doctors or criminologists or priests; he is not a pervert or a criminal but is material for a gay readership that extracts from his invisibility and fears an affirmation
and a legitimization of its own emancipation. The openly gay reader of the novel
can construct himself as a historical "progression" from the sexual culture embodied by the novel's protagonist.
As it develops, the narrative traces national and racial borders of gay visibility. Although closeted and old-fashioned, the hustler identifies himself with his
clientsand readers^since he is secretly homosexual. He represents a progression from secrecy to openness, a past phase from the point of view of contemporary
visibility, but he still belongs to the same narrative toward openness that culminates in present-day Chueca. This character is, in this sense, entirely different
from another hustler in the novel, Omar, an immigrant from North Africa. Omar
makes hustling into the scene not of homosexuality but of homophobia: be robs,
beats, and threatens clients, perhaps to punish them for luring him into unforgivable pleasures or to defend himself against what he may perceive as a colonial
trade (the novel does not inquire into his reasons, since the point of view is
focused on the protagonist). Omar initiates the protagonist into the secrets of hustling in Madrid. They get along and work together until one night, at Omar's apartment in Chueca, after trying to repress his desire for his friend, the protagonist
makes a pass at the moro [Moor]. The result is disproportionate violence: the moro
calls his other roommates ("y el Omar no se que hostias les diria en su idioma" [I
don't know what the hell Omar told them in their language]), and the four of them
beat and rape the hustler, thus "outed" as a maricon?^
Although in the Spain where El gladiador de Ghueca takes place the latent
peril of homophobic violence is always present, the fact that the only scene of gay
basbing and rape portrays moros as central figures shows to what extent cultural
difference and race embody a threat both in social and in sexual terms. The
enigma of the immigrant's sexual orientation (is a Moorish hustler gay? straight?)
is not solved but reinscribed as homophobia. Raping a man does not precisely
make it clear that the rapist is "straight"; on the contrary, it means that for him
any homoerotic desire has to be enacted as violence. The subject position in which
homoeroticism mixes with violence is the place occupied by the moro in this see-

TRAVELERS. VISIBILITY. AND GAY IDENTITY

nario projected from contemporary gay visibility. Violence is not related only to
social difference and poverty, or to the illegal immigrant as one of the typical faces
of social tension; it is also directly associated with cultural distance, a radical heterogeneity of gay identity that returns as a menace of homophobia and social violence.
The liminality of the immigrant in the gay territory is continued by his
expulsion from the national territory; eventually, Omar is deported because of his
illegal status. The illegal immigrant thus emerges as a limit or a border of both gay
visibility and transnational circulation. Interestingly, from the point of view of that
border, gay visibility and legal status exhibit an epistemological and political continuity, showing a new articulation between identity and mobility. After hearing
the news of Omar's deportation, the protagonist's good-bye to his ex-friend combines revenge, melancholy, and a strange geographic perception: "Y me alegro
mogollon, que se pudra en el desierto el muy hijoputa. Lo malo era lo buenazo que
estaba, y lo que a mi me molaba" [And I am very happy about it; I bope the son of
a bitch dies in the desert. The bad thing is how hot he was, and how much I liked
him] (131). The desert where Omar "belongs" becomes one of the borders of
Cbueca. Such a geographic sequence, as perceived from the spatial and juridical
limit embodied by the immigrant, articulates the gay territory in continuity not
only with the nation-state but with the megastate, the European Community.
"The present, the postulate of discourse," says Certeau, "becomes the
profit of the scriptural operation: the place of the production of the text is transformed into a place produced by the text."-^'' From "place of production" to "place
produced," Chueca is transformed into a scenario of stories and locus for storytelling: it claims the present tense in which gay narrativesgay histories and history from the point of view of gaynessare enunciated. If gay travelogues find in
Chueca the occasion for a continuous reference to the history of the Spanish
democracy, in El gladiador Chueca becomes the instance of an invention of its
own past and a selection of its antecedents. History demarcates the limits of gayness: while a naive, closeted hustler from the provinces enters as an antecedent of
gay identity (as an example of what the present times have overcome but what can
still be defined as past), the violently homophobic tnoro is literally kept at the border of gayness as a threat."
In this sense. El gladiador de Ghueca maps out the gay territory in its transition to the new times and demarcates a geopolitics in which Chueca deepens the
border and widens the distance regarding the routes of immigration at the same
time that gay travelogues open the territory for free circulation across national
boundaries in the figure of the tourist. Without attempting to conflate two hetero-

7/

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GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES


geneous and partial discourses merely to produce effects of causality that reduce
the complexity of the new landscape, I would insist on the "time effect," the gestation of a "present" in which a transition between conflicting visibilities and traveling bodies takes place. In the same moment that the travelogues start mirroring
Chueca in the eyes of the tourist to find the radiance of democracy and capital, in
El gladiador the body of the immigrant traces the route of a geographic and cultural distance. That route, traced on illegality, projects an interruption of cosmopolitan mobility, a gap in which the fantasies and realities of a sexual and
social threat simply, and inevitably, emerge.

Itnpossible Encounters
A hypothetical encounter between an illegal immigrant and a gay tourist might
show less a "face to face" between two economic and cultural worlds than the
impossibility of a reflection between the two, a sort of reciprocal opacity. The
inscriptions of Chueca I looked at in the gay travelogues and in El gladiador
exhibit this tension around gay identity in terms of a redefinition of who circulates
in and is recognized by tbe gay territory. In my reading Chueca appears as a field
of narratives and representations, an imaginary site made of travel narratives, foreign faces, and mobile figures whose combination produces effects that may reflect
actual regulations on bodies, desires, and displacements. On tbe one hand, tbe
discourse of gay visibility that founds and defines Chueca as a tourist attraction,
as a "sight" that is, most likely, representative of tourist discourse on transnational
visibility, unfolds the impulse to tighten the distance between Madrid and tbe
modern capitals. It binds travelers through a strategy of proximity and identification in time and space, as if tbat "continent" called the European Community
were literally shrinking in a geological metamorphosis. Precisely because Madrid
has so radically changed its position on the global map of modernity, it is a privileged scenario for the new inscriptions of gay identity in time and space, where
gay identity shows a deep resonance with discourses of modernity, of free market,
and of metropolitan identification.
On tbe other hand, in the moment in which gay identity officially defines
territories across nations, homophobia appears as a limit or a border. From the
point of view of gay identity as an equation between time and space ("condensed"
in gay territories like Chueca), homophobia does not only refer to local or national
reactions against gay life but is reframed in global terms, becoming available for
ambivalent uses. It designates, for example, a past that always threatens a return,
and/or an outside that always haunts the borders of those territories where gay life

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY, AND GAY IDENTITY

"flowers," thus intensifying political and historical hierarchies. The availability of


an immediate overlapping between cultural difference (marked in terms of race
and nation) and homophobiaas in El gladiador., where the moros represent a
continuum of social, sexual, and physical violence against gay peoplemay
become an undesired consequence of tbe increasing power of gay identity to codify people, territories, and mobility. Homophobia thus emerges as a dividing line
that echoes sexuality with cultural, racial, and social borders and deepens the gap
between modern, democratic, and cosmopolitan capitals and the backwardness
that haunts them.'^s
Gaynessthe culture, identity, and its relationship with visibilitynot
only narrates the aesthetics and the (micro)politics of the sexual secret; it also,
after becoming a sign of global circulation, sets in motion a narrative tbat locates
bodies in a geopolitical order, making them visible in some ways and determining
tbeir visibility under different conditions. Tbe gay identity that emerges in such a
landscape not only articulates tensions focused around the public and the private;
it also places diverse subjectivities in scenarios of transnational encounter, in
articulations between the global and the local, and in narratives about modernity
and its others. The transformations of old and new metropolises, and their power
to codify bodies and their circulation across nations, shape the new inscriptions
and perceptions of gay identity. The universe ofthe closet turns into a cartography
where desire and the world, subjectivity and transnational displacements, mirror
one another in strange, amplified ways. Tourists and immigrants, these bodies signaled by the borders of visibility as much as by their visas (or the absence
thereof), are the sites where the stories of gay travels and the travels of "gay" are
being written in a production that takes place, necessarily, in more than one (sexual) language.

Notes

I want lo thank Carla Marcantonio, Juan Marco Vaggione, and Jashir Kaur Puar for
their intelligent and useful comments on earlier versions of this text.
1.

Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York:
Schocken, 1976), 17.

2.

In a recent compilation focused on the globalization of gay politics, the editors present
this "journey" in political terms: "While full-fledged participation in the rights and
freedoms of liberal democracy has been increasingly realized, especially in northern
Europe, the struggle continues elsewhere against forces that continue to marshal preinodern rhetoric." The editors describe the geopolitics of gay and leshian movements

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GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUOIES


as an equation between democracy and modernity pitted against premodern forces, in
which gay and lesbian identities become (together with Jews and socialists) "symbols
of the modern." This viewpoint is crucial, hecause it places gayness in time as a sign
of time, of "new times," and thus able to ground narratives that claim the authority of
the present tense. Following this sequence, gayness emanates from the advanced
democracies of northern Europe, where "freedoms . . . [have] been increasingly realized," and travels from there to more recent democracies. The necessity of travel is
neither accidental nor merely related to any superficial notion of pleasure. Precisely
hecause gayness is a "symbol of the modern," and precisely because it works as a sign
of temporality, it also functions, in geographic terms, as a territorial mark that travels
from some areas to othersnot surprisingly, from the metropolis to the periphery
carrying with itself the spirit ofthe new times. "Within this general historical context,"
the editors conclude, "local conflicts play out within the 'game plan' bequeathed hy
Western tradition" (Barry D. Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Andr6 Krouwel, eds..
The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide
Movement [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999], 7, 6). For the connections
between tourism and modernity, a more recent elaboration can be found in Chris
Rojek and John Urry, eds.. Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory
(London: Routledge, 1997).
3.

Spain has led perhaps the most successful transition to democracy in contemporary
times, accompanied by impressive economic growth decisively supported by incorporation in the European Union. Franco's death signaled the beginning of the "Europeanization" (or re-Europeanization) of Spain in a process involving both a cultural
identification with northern European nations and the United States, on the one hand,
and, on the other, a strong redefinition of relations with the Third World, especially
Latin America, as Spain has turned into a political, economic, and cultural center.
Such dramatic changes have taken place in a surprisingly short time: Franco died in
1975 (Carlos Alonso Zaldivar and Manuel Castells, Espana, fin de siglo [Madrid:
Alianza, 1992]). For interesting perspectives on cultural and economic transformations
undergone by Spain in recent decades see Paul Julian Smith, The Moderns: Time,
Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000); and Eduardo Subirats, Despues de la lluvia: Sobre la ambigua modernidad espahola (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1993). For a history of gay and lesbian
movement in Spain see Ricardo Llamas and Fefa Vila, "Passion for Life: A History of
the Lesbian and Gay Movement in Spain," in Adam et al.. Global Emergence of Gay
and Lesbian Politics, 21442. For an analysis of Spain's "exemplary" transition to
democracy see Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and
Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-ComrnunLu Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY, AND GAY IDENTITY


4.

Without attempting to draw a neat line hetween the two notions, I use the designation
gay and lesbiati, instead o[ queer, for reasons that have to do with the transnational
circulation and (niis)encounters between sexual cultures. Gay {or gay and lesbian) is
clearly the category most widely used and appropriated by international travelers and
locals. In this sense, it is more properly official than queer, since it evokes the political, cultural, and social recognition of homosexuality in diverse areas of the world.
That recognition is, of course, increasingly mediated by and articulated through the
market as a globalizing force. Queer, if applied to transnational scenarios, connotes a
more fluid and negotiated arena of encounters and transactions between different sexual cultures in ways perhaps not so strongly or so decisively regulated through the
market. This transnational dimension of queer was highlighted almost ten years ago by
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: "At the same time, a lot of the most exciting recent work
around 'queer' spins the term outward along dimensions that can't he subsumed under
gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality crisscross with these and other identity-constituting, identity-fracturing discourses, for
example" ("Queer and Now," in Tendencies [Durham: Duke University Press, 199.3],
8-9). On the distance and continuity between homosexual, gay and lesbian, and
queer see Michael Warner, introduction to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and
Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), viixxxi; and David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Totvards a Gay Hagiography
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

5.

Caren Kaplan offers insightful comments on this differentiation in Questions of Travel:


Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).

6.

llomi K. Bhahha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 244. Regarding modernity, space, and colonialism, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992).

7.

The definition of the contemporaneous and the anachronistic is regarded as one of the
founding gestures of modemity, a discoui-se that authorizes itself by claiming contitil of
the present tense. Such a gesture measures space through time and ties metropolis and
periphery in a tension between the present and diverse pasts. Contemporaneousness is
not, however, homogeneously distributed in space: "hackwaixjness" is a common spectacle in the metropolis, just as the periphery exhibits the signs and the vocation of modernity. In any case, this revereal only reaffinns how deeply the notion of being contemporaneous, of sharing a temporality, can be based on imperial maps and calendars. See
Bhahha, Location of Culture; and Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side ofthe Renaissance:
Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: Univereity of Michigan Press, 1995).

8.

For the debate ahout the beginnings and the nature of globalization and transnationality see Paul Jay, "Beyond Discipline? Globalization and the Future of English," PMLA
116 (2001): 3 2 - 4 5 .

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GIQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUOIES


9.

Eric 0. Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2000), 51.

10.

Miguel Banon Penalba, "Madrid, City of Passion," Passport, winter 2001, 32; Rancho
Mirage Travel, www.ranchomiragetravel.com/madrid.html.

11. Ibid.
12.

Roland Barthes has described some aspects of the ideological foundations of tourist
guides. In Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995),
Barthes bases his comments about tourism on his analysis of the French Blue Guide (a
traditional French tourist guidebook) and its representation ofnot surprisingly
Spain. His analysis ofthe tourist discourse dismantles a rhetorical montage conceived
to support Franco's regime; it shows how travelogues build a mirroring between landscape and tourist, between "here" and "there," by creating zones of historical and ideological encounter.

13.

Rancho Mirage Travel, www.ranchomiragetravel.com/madrid.html.

14.

Gay Spain: Feel the Passion (Madrid: Spanish Tourism Institute, 1996), accessible
through Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana, www.pangea.org/org/cgl.guiae.html.

15.

Pefialba, "Madrid, City of Passion," 32.

16.

Ibid., 33.

17.

David Andrusia et al., Frommer's Gay and Lesbian Europe (New York: Macmillan,

18.

Ibid.

19.

Ibid.

20.

Almodovar is considered to have received more official financial support than most

1999), 592.

Spanish directors. That support came principally from the Ayuntamienlo de Madrid
[Madrid's City Hall], especially during the gestation ofthe movida madrilena in the
1980s. During the first years of the Spanish democracy, Madrid's official cultural politics exhibited a desire to become an intemational urban center; the movida reflected
that desire. For an interesting memoir of the movida and the support provided by the
city's mayor at that time, Tierno Calvan, see Jose Luis Gallero, Solo se vive una vez:
Esplendor y ruina de la movida madrileria (Madrid: Ardora, 1991). Some of Gallero's
interviewees regarded the role of gays in the formation of the cultural movement as
"emblematic": "La primera gran liberacion la producen los homosexuales" [The first
great liberation is produced by homosexuals], says Borja Casani, one of the movida's
participants (21). For a study of the figure of Almodovar in the context of post-Franco
Spain see Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris, "Introduction: Pedro Almodovar,
Postmodern Auteur" in Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almoddvar, ed.
Kathleen M. Vemon and Barbara Morris (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995), 1-24.
For an analysis of the image of Madrid in Almodovar's films see Martin D'Lugo,
"Almodovar's City of Desire," in Vernon and Morris, Post-Franco, Postmodern,
125-43.

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY, ANO GAY lOENTITY


21.

Pefialba, "Madrid, City of Passion," 33; Andrusia et al., Frommer's Gay and Lesbian
Europe, 594.

22.

MacCannell, Tourist, chap. 6. See also Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, "Tourism and
the Photographic Eye," in Rojek and Urry, Touring Cultures, 17695.

23.

Andrusia et al., Frommer's Gay and Lesbian Europe, 612.

24.

Penalba, "Madrid, City of Passion," 35, 33.

25.

Observers of contemporary Spanish gay life and cultures insist on the resistance of
Spanish homosexual cultures to public gay identities and wider visibility. Smith talks
about a "Spanish skepticism towards gay or lesbian identity" that impedes the formation of homosexual public spaces and thus favors homosexuality as a private practice
that remains outside discourse {Moderns, 135). The contrast with the gay guidebooks
could not seem sharper. However, both accounts can be read as complementary, since
the visibility of the gay territory does not necessarily grant more visibility to other
urban and social spaces. Most likely, in Madrid as in any city with a gay scene, the gay
area can be perfectly functional with the sociality of the closet. Focusing on many
other aspects of contemporary Spanish culture. Smith's book mentions Chueca only in
a footnote about the "regenerating" effects of gays and lesbians on a traditionally dangerous area {Moderns, 132 n. 46).

26.

Such a promoted visibility does not seem to provoke a major homophobic response.
Gay settlement seems not only allowed but welcomed: "It is interesting to see the old
people who have lived there all their lives being interviewed by TV reporters on Gay
Pride Day. These lifelong residents always seem so happy to embrace the community
that saved their borough from drugs and neglect" (Penalba, "Madrid, City of Passion,"
33). Gay community neutralizes homophobia by playing the role of urban rescuer:
gentrification is the due gays pay to society. Chueca is not, as might be expected, the
scene of an urban war between sexual cultures, between religious traditions and a
hedonistic modernity; quite the contrary, it exhibits a peaceful transition, almost an
embrace between the old and the new. It thus becomes the proof of social tolerance
and openness, the illustration of an exemplary political landscape. El pais semanal,
the Sunday magazine of a mainstream Spanish newspaper, published an article about
Chueca a few years ago that described the rapid change of the area and pointed out the
absence of conflicts with the old residents. One interviewee, an Australian man who
decided to become a resident after being a tourist (and thus possessed the authority of
intemational knowledge), highlighted the smoothness ofthe transition: "Parece mentira que anciaiios de la epoca de Franco no digan nada al ver a parejas gay besarse en
la plaza mientras los ninos juegan en los columpios. Lo aceptan. Es posible que a
alguno no le guste, pero en cualquier otro sitio la gente reaccionarfa, no dejarfa a la
pareja besarse, insultarfaii" [It seems unbelievable that old people from the Franco era
do not say anything when they see a gay couple kissing in the square, while kids are
playing in the swing. They accept it. It is possible that some of them don't like it, but

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GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN ANO GAY STUOIES


anywhere else people would react; they would not allow the couple to kiss; they would
insult them]. The reference to Franco frames the "public kiss" as the scene in which
the old and new residents face each other. The tolerance of the kiss, as witnessed by a
foreigner, is crucial to placing Chueca and Madrid on an intemational scale and to validating its new openness. The gaze of the ex-tourist and new resident is essential to
certifying visibility before the local readership. See Joseba Elola, "Chueca: El barrio
del Arcoiris," El pais semanal, August 1998, 50.
27.

On the connection between gay identity and tourism see Howard Hughes, "Holidays
and Homosexual Identity," Tourism Management 18 (1997): 3 - 7 .

28.

Andrusia et al., Frommer's Gay and Lesbian Europe, 610.

29.

Ibid.

30.

Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 58-59.

31.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology ofthe Closet (Berkeley: University of California


Press, 1990); John Berger, The Sense of Sight, ed. Lloyd Spencer (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 219.

32.

Penalba, "Madrid, City of Passion," 30.

33.

A recent report on Spanish gay literature highlights the coincidence between the
novel's title and the transformation of the neighborhood: "[El gladiador de Chueca]
had the good fortune to come out a few years ago just as the boom of gay establishments in Chueca was reforming the neighborhood" (Lawrence Schimel, "Letter from
Spain," Lambda Book Report, November 2000, 5).

34.

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1988), 89.

35.

Carlos Sanmne, El gladiador de Chueca (Barcelona: Laertes, 1992), 129. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

36.

Certeau, Writing of History, 90.

37.

The figure of the moro is certainly a central piece of Spanish culture, not only because
of the cultural and ethnic legacy Moors left after centuries of occupation but also
because of the constant, and in recent decades intensifying, flux of migrants from
North Africa to Spain. Of course, the moro is not only a figure of cultural and economic
value; he is traditionally also a privileged object of homoerotic desires and a sexualized gaze. Juan Goytisolo, a major figure in contemporary Spanish literature, has written repeatedly about this homoerotic bonding across races and nations, between
Spaniards and Moors, and places it at the margins of the increasingly hegemonic gay
culture. For an analysis of the tension with the gay and lesbian movement in Goytisolo's work see Brad Epps, "Estados de deseo: Homosexualidad y nacionalidad (Juan
Goytisolo y Reinaldo Arenas a Vuelapluma)," Revista iberoamericaria 62 (1996):
799-820.

38.

This does not mean, of course, that homophobia is merely an effect of racism and class
divisions. It means that, in contexts of high mobility and cultural diversity, the threat

TRAVELERS, VISIBILITY, AND GAY lOENTITY


of homophobia appears in a field in which the social including race, class, visa status, cultural identities, and so onand the sexual can be read in continuity (typically,
for instance, the scene of prostitution, as in El gladiador de Chueca). How to understand the connection between social and sexual violence in such a context requires an
analysis not only of the nature of the desires but also of the politics of location and the
chronologies in which homophobia emerges as a political and social issue.

79

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