Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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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.
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?
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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.
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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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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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.
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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-
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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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
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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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).
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.
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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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.
14.
Gay Spain: Feel the Passion (Madrid: Spanish Tourism Institute, 1996), accessible
through Coordinadora Gai-Lesbiana, www.pangea.org/org/cgl.guiae.html.
15.
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.
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.
24.
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
77
78
On the connection between gay identity and tourism see Howard Hughes, "Holidays
and Homosexual Identity," Tourism Management 18 (1997): 3 - 7 .
28.
29.
Ibid.
30.
31.
32.
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.
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
79