EDITORIAL.- There are many treatises, studies and articles that have been written about the situation of homosexuals in Spain during the Franco period. Recently the digital magazine "Jot Down" He has published an excellent series of texts on the way in which Franco's dictatorial regime used morality and sexuality as a weapon of submission and indoctrination.
One of them deals with the situation lived by gays, lesbians and transsexuals in that period, but only a couple of paragraphs deal with lesbianism because simply the ideologists of the regime decided that it did not exist. As Empar Pineda points out, "Sex between women was not persecuted because for the regime it could not exist".
Women in general should be asexual and both the norm that endorsed relationships within the marriage for reproductive purposes and their transgression (all others were whores), were part of a heterosexual concept. Even male homosexuality, because the gays were assimilated to women and as such treated with disdain. Pleasure was denied to women and should even upset their own husbands because it was an indication of undesirable vice. In this regard a distinguished rector of the Complutense University of Madrid, Bottle Llusiá, Ana Botella's uncle by the way, states that "the women who enjoy are not women, but tomboy and even the excitement of the libido in the woman is a masculine character. "
In that context, it was about not recognizing lesbians, not talking about them, not considering the existence of a sexuality alien to male control possible. They were outside the model and that made in most cases free of repression, only the most dilapidated ended up in detention centers dependent on Pilar Primo de Rivera, who always suspected his preference for women. In those concentration camps administered by nuns, the inmates were shaved and administered castor oil to cleanse their body and soul. Subsequently, the
to "refeminización" based on tasks considered feminine and in the prayer.
In rural areas, many lesbians sought the convent as an alternative to marriage, although most of them evade the Church as an institution and are masked in urban societies more generally tolerant of coexistence among women. They create their networks of friends, they organize parties that were well-seen by the neighbors because they did not come boys, they generate a slang of recognition (among them they were called "libreras" to identify themselves), they organize excursions and exits, but they live under the cover and the denial. It is a matter of not showing off, never acknowledging your feelings in public, under penalty of accepting high fines or the dreaded entrance into institutions to be rehabilitated. It is curious that in the Spanish penitentiary centers the use of trousers was prohibited to the inmates until the end of the 60 years for fear that that garment fomented the lesbianism.
It is often frivolized about the situation of lesbians under the Francoism saying that they had it easy, that they were not even affected by the "Law of bums and crooks" or "Social Danger", who were not victims of the aberrant treatments and aversive therapies with electroshocks, emetic, hormonal or lobotomies. In the first place that was not the case in all cases and secondly, the mistreatment suffered by any woman under the regime, the lesbians added the grievance of not existing, of being denied in its most basic essence, of being covered by a dark mantle of silence that in no case was about forgetfulness or tolerance, but rather a structured plan that had as its ultimate objective the negation of female sexuality. And that for decades in a long period of time that would extend well into the transition.
Editorial Gayles.tv
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