FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA,
Spanish poet, lyricist and dramatist (d. 1936); a Spanish poet and
dramatist, also remembered as a painter, pianist, and composer. An
emblematic member of the Generation of ‘27, he was killed by
Nationalist partisans at the age of thirty-eight at the beginning of the
Spanish Civil War. Born in Fuente Vaqueros, province of Granada, on
June 5, 1898, Federico García Lorca is internationally recognized as
Spain's most prominent lyric poet and dramatist of the twentieth
century. His poetry and plays have been translated into dozens of
languages and have been the object of study by critics all over the
world.
Since his murder in 1936 at the hands of Spanish fascist forces,
Lorca has become a legendary tragic hero. One cannot help speculating
about Lorca's unfulfilled projects, the many more works he had planned
to write and would have written had he not been the victim of a death
that to this day is still clouded with controversy.
Equally controversial are the thinly veiled homoerotic motifs and
themes present in Lorca's work that have long been intentionally
silenced and overlooked by those wishing not to "soil" the reputation of
one of Spain's most respected bards; among them, the Franco regime, the
Lorca family, and homophobic Lorquian scholars who have dedicated their
lives and careers to Lorca's work yet refuse to acknowledge a line of
criticism that takes into account homoerotic desire.
In 1919, Lorca went to study at the University of Madrid and lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes--a
student residence founded in 1910 as a center of intellectual life for
gifted students. Among the students at the "Resi," as it was familiarly
known, were Spain's most talented young artists and writers. The
surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, with whom Lorca fell deeply in love,
and Luis Buñuel, later famous as a film maker, became close friends with
Lorca, whose room soon became a popular meeting place for intellectuals
around Madrid.
For a marvelous treatment of these relationships, see the film
Little Ashes, directed by Paul Morrison. With Javier Beltrán, Robert
Pattinson, Matthew McNulty. After what has been generally described as a
"mysterious emotional crisis" (in fact, a depression brought on by
Dalí's sexual rejection as well as by a stormy relationship with a young
sculptor, Emilio Aladrén Perojo), Lorca traveled to New York City in
1927. This trip inspired some of his most singular poetic pieces, later
collected under the title
Poet in New York (1940).
After leaving New York City, Lorca spent three months in Cuba, a
place he had dreamed of visiting ever since he was a child and where he
spent, according to his own account, the happiest days of his life.
Following his stay in New York City and Cuba, Lorca began to be more
daring in the representation of homosexuality.
Far away from his family and conservative Spanish values, he was
able to conceive and begin writing his most openly homosexual work: "Ode to Walt Whitman," the dramatic piece The Public, and the unfinished The Destruction of Sodom. "Ode to Walt Whitman,"
published in Mexico in 1934 in a limited edition of fifty copies, but
never published in Spain during Lorca's lifetime, reveals the poet's own
contradictions concerning homosexuality. The ode takes on a moralistic
tone by marking a clear distinction between a pure and de-sexualized
homosexual love, epitomized by Whitman the lover of nature, and a
debased sexuality, associated with the "maricas" or faggots (effeminate
homosexuals).
The Public, which with the exception of
two scenes published in a Spanish magazine during Lorca's life was not
published until 1978, and even then in an incomplete version, presents
an examination of repressed homosexual desire as well as a defense of
the individual's right to erotic liberty.
Lorca categorized The Public, his most experimental play, as belonging to his "impossible theater." Also belonging to the impossible theater is The Destruction of Sodom,
of which Lorca apparently wrote one act, although today only the first
page of the piece survives. The theme of this play, according to Ian
Gibson, was to be "the pleasures of the homosexual confraternity, who
have made such a contribution to world culture."
