Culture is a reflection of society. And society has changed a lot in recent years. Freedom and sexual diversity are gaining ground in all areas of life and are in literature, the audiovisual world and cartoons. For Pride Day, La Vanguardia reviews some of the latest developments in LGTBIQA culture.
The collective is increasingly represented in series and films. The percentage of main characters has increased in 2022 to 70% compared to 57.5% the previous year. It follows from the latest report of the Observatory of Diversity in the Audiovisual Media of Spain, published yesterday. It shows that, “when an LGBTIQA character is introduced, it is to give weight to the argument and explore its narrative possibilities”, explains the dossier, which, however, highlights that the audiovisual industry is still very polarized. One of the upcoming films on the subject is Te estoy amando locamente, by Alejandro Marín and framed in the Andalusian LGTBI movement of 1977. The film, which will hit the screens on July 6, features Ana Wagener and Alba Flores , announcers of Pride 2023 in Madrid. After co-directing with Bob Pop the successful series Maricón perdido (2021). Marín makes his feature film debut with this story, which addresses how a mother overcame prejudice for the love of her son at a time when homosexuality was a crime in Spain. Te estoy amando locamente was recently seen in the show Fire!! de Barcelona, ??the LGTBI film festival that has programmed pieces such as Eismayer, which tells the true story of a feared sub-lieutenant in the Austrian army who led a secret gay life. Or the Spanish Alteritats, by Alba Cros and Nora Haddad, a documentary that collects the voices of different lesbian experiences of four generations resident in Catalonia.
Almodóvar, one of the filmmakers who have contributed most to the visibility of this collective, has achieved excellent reviews with the medium-length film Extraña forma de vida, a gay western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal that was widely applauded at Cannes. Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s first opera about the reality of a trans girl also won at the Berlinale and at the Malaga festival 20,000 species of beejas. And another delicate and devastating film that looks at childhood is Close, by Lukàs Dhont, grand jury prize winner at Cannes. The director narrates how a friendship between two 13-year-old boys is twisted when they are pointed out as homosexuals at school.
Argentinian Mariano Biasin raises the age of the two protagonist friends in Sublime to 16, another recent film about youth homosexuality. Nina is expected to arrive from Uruguay
When Mili Hernández and Mar de Griño opened the doors of Berkana in Madrid, they did so out of necessity. It was 1993 and there were no LGBTIQA bookstores in Spain or Latin America. “In the beginning, the books were placed face-to-face on the shelves so they would take up more space, because there weren’t enough of them, to the point that we ended up creating our own publishing house, Egales, to create and rescue titles. Today, we receive many titles for all ages, not only from specific labels, but also from large publishing groups”, bookseller Carlos Valdivia explains to La Vanguardia. An example is the new book by Inés Martín Rodrigo, Una homosexualidad propia, which has just been published by Destino. The winner of the Nadal prize offers an account of the discovery of sexual orientation, “the book I was looking for in adolescence and which I 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.
The struggle during the regime is also discussed by Fernando Olmeda in the essay El látigo y la pluma, with a foreword by the filmmaker Bob Pop and published by Dos Bigotes, like the novel El, by Giulia Baldelli, a story of friendship and desperate love reminiscent of Elena Ferrante’s Dues amigues saga. The same label has Flores para Lola, which offers a queer look at the Faraona for the centenary of her birth.
Javier Fuentes’ debut, Países de origen, is also noteworthy, which tells the love story between two young people from very different worlds; the experience of Abel Arana, ex-producer of artists such as Kylie Minogue, Cher or Santana, in Maricón in the fifties; trans actor Elliot Page’s memoir, Pageboy (Ediciones Urano); or La mala costumbre (Seix Barral), by Alana S. Portero, the adolescence of a girl trapped in a body she does not know how to inhabit.
In Catalan, Les altures, the last work of Sebastià Portell, which brings the painter and sculptor Ismael Smith out of the shadows; The smile of the dolphins, Francesc Soler’s introductory novel; or all the preserved poems of the legendary Sappho of Lesbos in I desire and cremo.
The comic book world celebrates June 28 with two superhero anthologies. The DC ones are in Orgullo 2023 (ECC Comics), with stories of Batwoman, Harley Quinn or Poison Ivy. Those from Marvel at Marvel Pride 2023 (Panini), with couples like the Guardians of the Galaxy Hercules and Noh-Varr. But there are many other everyday superheroes in today’s comics, such as the story of the Galician women Elisa and Marcela (La Cúpula), who managed to get married in the church in 1901 in what the press of the time called marriage without man and whose story Xulia Vicente is now drawing. Maurane Mazars portrays ¡Baila! (Salamandra) the story of Uli, a young dancer in post-war Europe who dreams of Broadway, a celebration of the freedom to love. De otro planeta (Sapristi), by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer, portrays the free life of the writer Patricia Highsmith. And Gallina clueca (Sapristi), by Alicia Pena, narrates the journey of a couple of women towards motherhood through assisted reproduction.
Despite the fact that, without a doubt, it is the world of manga that treads the hardest with the stories of the Boys Love (BL) genre, to which many publishers have signed up. A genre with beautiful love stories between boys initially aimed at young readers who are now reading them too, explains Catalina Mejía, editor of Distrito Manga, which publishes Joy. A genre, the BL, which is also addressed by publishers such as Planeta Cómic ( Todo o nada , Norma ( Hyperventilation ) and Milkyway ( Therapy Game ). For lesbian girls, there is the world of yuri manga and works such as Whispering you a love song (Planeta Cómic) or La luna en una noche de lluvia and 5 segundos antes de que la bruja se enamore, both in Distrito Manga, which also publishes Cómo conocí a mi marido, the autobiographical story of the first recognized gay marriage in Japan.
