Culture is a reflection of society. And society has changed a lot in recent years. Especially with regard to the inclusion of gender and sex. Freedom and sexual diversity have gained ground in all walks of life and have been moving little by little in literature, as well as in audiovisuals and cartoons. To celebrate Pride Day today, La Vanguardia takes stock of the current state of LGTBIQA culture.
The collective is increasingly represented in series and films. The percentage of main characters in the collective has increased in 2022 to 70% (in the cinema it is 73.6% and in series 68.9%) compared to 57.5% the previous year. This is clear from the latest report from the Spanish Audiovisual Media Diversity Observatory, published yesterday. This shows that “when an LGBTIQA character is introduced, it is to give it weight in the plot and explore its narrative possibilities,” the report points out, which is interpreted as highly positive data.
For the elaboration of the dossier, a total of 99 films and 61 seasons of 59 fiction series have been analyzed, all of them corresponding to the year 2022. Among its main findings, it stands out that, although the percentages of LGBTIQA representation remain similar to those of last year (the characters in the collective are equivalent to 9.2% of the total characters analyzed) the industry continues to be highly polarized.
One of the next films on this subject is I am loving you madly, directed by Alejandro Marín and framed in the Andalusian LGTBI movement of 1977. The film, which will hit the screens on July 6, stars Ana Wagener and Alba Flores, heralds of Pride 2023 in Madrid. After co-directing the successful television series Maricón perdido (2021) with Bob Pop, Marín makes his feature film debut with this story that addresses how a mother was able to overcome her prejudices for the love of her son at a time when in Spain homosexuality was a crime.
I’m loving you madly has been seen recently at the Mostra Fire!! de Barcelona, ??the LGTBI film festival that has closed its 28th edition with an excellent attendance rate and programming pieces that have caught the attention of the public. Like Eismayer, who tells the true story of a feared second lieutenant in the Austrian army who led a secret gay life, or the Spanish Alteritats, by Alba Cros and Nora Haddad, a documentary that gathers the voice of different lesbian experiences of four generations residing in Catalonia. .
Pedro Almodóvar, one of the filmmakers who has contributed the most to the collective’s visibility, has garnered excellent reviews with his medium-length film Extraña forma de vida, a gay western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal that received great applause at its world premiere at the Cannes festival. and available on the billboard.
20,000 Species of Bees, the debut feature by Basque filmmaker Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren about the reality of a trans girl, won the Silver Bear for best performance for little Sofía Otero at the Berlinale and the Golden Biznaga and the award for the best supporting actress for Patricia López Arnaiz at the Malaga festival. “I wanted to approach this reality in a way that would provide an opportunity to understand, fleeing from the stigma and the dark and gray representation that these stories have sometimes had in the cinema,” the director told this newspaper.
And another film as delicate as it is devastating that looks at childhood is Close, by the Belgian Lukas Dhont, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year. The director narrates how a lifelong friendship between two 13-year-old boys goes awry when they are accused of being homosexual at school. The Argentinian Mariano Biasin raises the age of the two leading friends in Sublime to 16, another recent film on youth homosexuality available on Filmin.
The Pakistani Saim Sadiq also draws in Joyland, released last February, a sample of contemporary queer cinema. Coming from Uruguay, the arrival of Nina is expected
When Mili Hernández and Mar de Griñó opened the doors of Berkana in Madrid, they did so out of necessity. It was 1993 and there were no LGTBIQA bookstores in Spain or in Latin America. “In the beginning, the books were placed facing each other on the shelves to make them occupy more space because there were not enough, to the point that they ended up creating their own publishing house, Egales, to create and rescue titles. Today there are many titles that come to us for all ages, not only from specific labels but also from large publishing groups,” bookseller Carlos Valdivia explains to La Vanguardia.
An example of this is the new book by Inés Martín Rodrigo, Una homosexualidad propia, which has just been published by Destino. The winner of the 2022 Nadal Novel Prize offers an account of the discovery of sexual orientation. In short, “the book I was looking for in my teens and never found.” At the end of April, the same publishing house published Los elegidos, by Nando López, which makes visible the cultural and collective struggle against Francoism.
Fernando Olmeda also talks about the struggle in the regime in his essay El látigo y la pena, which has a prologue by filmmaker Bob Pop and is published by Dos Bigotes, as is the novel El verano que nos queda, by Giulia Baldelli, a story of friendship and desperate love reminiscent of the saga ‘Dos Amigas’ by Elena Ferrante. The same label features Flowers for Lola, which offers a queer look at La Faraona on the centenary of her birth.
Equally noteworthy are Javier Fuentes’ debut, Países de origen (Letras de Plata), which tells the love story between two young people from very different worlds; the experience of Abel Arana, former producer of artists like Kylie Minogue, Cher or Santana, in Maricón at fifty (Egales); the memoirs of transgender actor Elliot Page, Pageboy, which hit bookstores thanks to Ediciones Urano; or La mala habitura (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero, which covers the adolescence of a girl trapped in a body that she does not know how to inhabit.
In Catalan, name Les altures (Empúries), the last work of Sebastià Portell, which brings the painter and sculptor Ismael Smith out of the shadows; The smile of the dolphins (Columna), Francesc Soler’s debut novel; or all the preserved poems of the legendary Sappho of Lesbos in I desitjo i cremo (Proa).
Another factor to take into account is the increasing number of children’s and youth literature titles that have reached bookstores in recent years. Some of the most recent are the new version of the classic A brave and different little hood (Mill) or Solitaire (Planet), by Alice Osman, the novel that gave rise to the Heartstopper youth phenomenon.
The world of comics and graphic novels directly celebrate June 28 with two superhero anthologies. Those of DC are in Pride 2023 (ECC Comics), in which there are stories of Batwoman, Harley Quinn or Poison Ivy and newcomers to the LGTBQ collective such as Jon Kent or Tim Drake. Those of Marvel in Marvel Pride 2023 (Panini), with couples like the one formed by the Guardians of the Galaxy Hercules and Noh-Varr.
But there are many other everyday superheroes in current comics, such as the story of the Galician Elisa and Marcela (La Cúpula), who at the end of the 19th century lived an unlimited passion and managed to get married in church in 1901, posing as Elisa. a man, in what the press of the time called a ‘marriage without a man’ and whose story is now drawn by Xulia Vicente. Maurane Mazars portrays in Dance! (Salamander) the story of Uli, a young dancer from post-war Europe who dreams of Broadway, a celebration of the freedom to dance and love that was a revelation in Angoulême. From Another Planet (Sapristi), by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer, portrays the free life of writer Patricia Highsmith. And Broody Hen (Sapristi) by Alicia Pena narrates the journey of a couple of women to maternity through assisted reproduction.
Although it is undoubtedly the world of manga that is hitting the hardest with gay stories in the Boys Love (BL) genre, to which many publishers have signed up successfully. A genre about beautiful love stories between boys initially intended for young readers – it appeared in their magazines in Japan – which they now read too, there, in the US and in Spain, says Catalina Mejía, editor of Distrito Manga, which publishes Joy, Barriers of the heart or Sunny orange.
Editorials such as Planeta (All or Nothing, Minato’s Laundromat), Norma (Hyperventilation, Nomi x Shiba, Yoru and Asa’s Song) and Milkyway (Therapy Game, Blue Sky Complex, Given). For lesbian girls there is manga in the yuri genre and works like Whispering you a love song (Planeta Comic) or The moon on a rainy night and 5 seconds before the witch falls in love, both in Manga District, which also publishes How I Met My Husband, an autobiographical story of Japan’s first recognized gay marriage.
