Invertidos y Rompepatrias/Queers Wreck the State: An Interview with the Author

Published on The Commoner, 15 February 2024

Your book, Invertidos y Rompepatrias (“Queers Wreck the State,” 2019), presents an impressive panorama of sexual and gender dissent in the Spanish State during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although you cover LGBTQ+ history during the Second Republic (1931–9), the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), and the Franquist dictatorship (1939–1975), the majority of the book’s chapters have to do with the “Transition” to formal democracy (1976–1982) following Francisco Franco’s death. There are also additional chapters available on your blog about more recent history, covering themes like anti-fascism, lesbian feminism, HIV/AIDS, and new films and literature.

Could you tell us about your hopes and dreams for the book?

Piro: The first thing that I should clarify in response to this question is that my personal life and political militancy in anarchist spaces, and in spaces of sexual and gender dissent, have played a very important role. I keep this in mind for almost everything I do.

Beyond this, my life’s passion is history, and to analyze and investigate it has always served me well.I believe that it is super-important that we know our history, as it is vital for the strengthening of the present. Moreover, it helps us to have solid references to focus on, so as to press on with our own lives and struggles. It’s not the same if you think that you are alone in the world, carrying on a given struggle, when other people are also involved in a similar way. Equally, it’s not the same if you know that other people—who are very similar to you in terms of sexual orientation, gender identity, and political ideology—struggled along the same lines in the past in your very territory, or in others with which you have certain cultural empathy.

All of this, applied to LGBTQ+ politics in the Spanish State, implied taking on this book project, given that this intersection had been under-investigated, and considering that this relationship is essential for understanding our present. This lapse is due to the fact that the majority of Spanish LGBTQ+ historiography has been monopolized by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which is the main social-democratic (or post-social-democratic) party in Spain. Furthermore, the PSOE is one of the parties which made a deal with the Franquist elites at the end of Franco’s dictatorship to ensure the Transition Agreement—the very source of the political regime that we have lived and suffered in the Spanish Kingdom since 1978. Given this trajectory, it would be easy for those who don’t know Spanish politics very well to overlook that this party has very specific interests when it comes to historiography. What is more, since the 1990’s, the PSOE has dedicated itself to infiltrating, capturing, and manipulating important parts of the mainstream LGBTQ+ movement. This has granted it a hegemony which it has used to discredit, hide,and even expel from its ranks individual or collective proposals to lay out sexual and gender dissidence from anti-capitalist perspectives.

Applied to Spanish LGBTQ+ historiography, this means that—although it seems to me essential—we missed having a detailed description of the process whereby Marxism and anarchism in Spain passed within 3-4 years or fewer from being overall homophobic to being driving forces for vital changes in the struggle for sexual liberation. These radical mechanisms of social change have been much more important than the PSOE, which after all ended up taking on a leadership role. In the same way, within the construction of LGBTQ+ historical memory, the PSOE’s hegemony has marginalized the collectives and proposals that recommended the deepening of the then-ongoing social revolution, rejected any compromise with Franquism, and openly acknowledged that sexual liberation and capitalism are incompatible.

In this sense, my objectives in writing this book always were, and continue to be, to illuminate and make visible all these political proposals and complicated processes that have led up to the present, and to indicate which forces have been able to manipulate history, and toward what ends, while offering some solid and admirable references to those people who at present continue the struggle against capitalism and heteropatriarchy.

Please tell us a bit about the LGBTQ+ history of Barcelona, which is known for being and having been something of a European capital for the community.

Is this an older, Mediterranean San Francisco?

It’s not wrong to call Barcelona a “San Francisco” of the old age, given that there’s no doubt that it was the main space for sexual dissidence in Europe. This is well-supported by the press and historical testimony. Sadly, Berlin is my witness, given that the enormous environment for sexual and gender dissent in this city (much greater than in Barcelona) was assaulted and destroyed in the first months of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

During the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–30), despite the fact that homosexuality was criminalized in 1928, one-off parties took place in the Barrio Chino (“Chinese Quarter”) of Barcelona and in bourgeois homes on the periphery of the city, while in 1926, La Criolla, the main café for gays and cross-dressers, opened its doors. After 1931, with the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic, the number of spaces that accepted drag shows, cross-dressing sex-workers, and the presence of dissent in the streets exploded, such that two more spaces opened: Cal Sagristà, and Barcelona de Noche.

This doesn’t mean that the Republic favored sexual dissidence, as is sometimes suggested in the historiography. In reality, this was a regime that promoted homophobia, criminalized non-reproductive sexual relations in its penal code, and approved special laws that could be used (and were used) against homosexuals. This includes the Law on Vagrants and Criminals, which was subsequently employed by Franco. In the case of Barcelona, city hall prepared an urban plan to destroy the whole neighborhood of Raval (otherwise known as the Chinese Quarter), rationalizing this course of action with reference to the degeneration that supposedly existed there. Plus, the police units of the Republic and of the recently created Government of Catalunya carried out homophobic raids in the neighborhood.

Even so, the Republic did see a relaxation of repression at all levels, including sexual, given that in the preceding decades, such repression had been overwhelming, with the Catholic Church in charge. Given the Republican abolition of a multitude of monarchical laws, the displacement of the Church as the political leadership, and the hopes for freedom held by a great deal of the population (many concentrated in Barcelona), the creation of public spaces and new dynamics of sexual and gender dissent took off. Despite public condemnation in the press, emanating from all political actors, this progress could not be held back by the regime.

Furthermore, the fact that Barcelona is a port city had some influence, too: the Chinese Quarter is very close to the port, and we know that sailors need sexual contact when they disembark in cities, and they often pay for it, even and especially when (as it often was) not heterosexual. Photos including sailors are habitual finds in the visual documentation of the Barcelona context. Also, although this is more difficult to research, there was migration to Barcelona on the part of many European sexual dissidents from France, Italy, Britain, and particularly Germany after 1933. Many of them had pertained to left-wing organizations and joined their equivalents within the Catalan context. Some spied on groups that supported Nazi Germany…

Equally, following the approval of the Law on Vagrants and Criminals in August 1933, the Barcelona environment became reduced, and there were people who had to flee to other cities of the State, such as Valencia, given that in these locations, there was less repression and, indeed, some gay-friendly spaces. In 1934 and 1935, the right wing governed the Republic, and this meant greater social and political control in Barcelona, which translated to the persecution of homosexuals and sex-workers in the Chinese Quarter, with more raids… Then, this repression was eased with the arrival of the Popular Front in February 1936, not only because its politics were less restrictive, but also because its victory was seen as the moment in which social, sexual, and general revolutions would have to be made. Although LGBTQ+ people often didn’t fit into this project, to subjugate them was not a priority. The same year, actually, Barcelona de Noche opens its doors. But this only lasted for a bit, given the start of the Spanish Civil War, the worsening of inflation and hunger, and the beginning of the decline of the gay bars and overall environment. The Chinese Quarter was punished for this reason. In fact, the fascist air forces often targeted it, and during one of these air raids in 1938, La Criolla was bombed and entirely destroyed. This is not to mention that, with the arrival of the fascist troops at the beginning of 1939, this European experience died off, only to be reborn some years later with new spaces, dynamics, and locations. Still, the Chinese Quarter continued to be, as it is today, a reference-point for sexual and gender dissent.

I was a bit surprised to read in Invertidos y Rompepatrias about the pathologization of homosexuality by many Iberian anarchists, who supposedly supported free love (28, 52–6). Frankly, I find it incredible that certain anarchist luminaries have stigmatized non-heterosexual dimensions of the libido as a central focus of their eugenicist campaigns to achieve what they considered to be “public health.” Likewise, the Mexican anarcho-communist Ricardo Flores Magón despised LGBTQ+ people, despite being considered a feminist at the same time.

Demonstrators protesting during the Day of Struggle against Repression, June 25, 1978. The banner reads, “Although the Church rejects us, God loves us. He created us for a reason!”

Without contemplating the cross-over with the homophobia incited by hegemonic Spanish traditions, both monarchical and religious (20), it is almost as though these “freedom-fighters” agreed with present-day tendencies that promote the ill-named “conversion therapy,” which constitutes psychological and sexual torture of queer people.

I think we should contextualize these proposals within their historical times, given that these “conversion therapies” (which I believe began to be called this way in the 1950’s and 1960’s, at the peak of the popularity of behaviorism in psychology) were the most progressive option on hand in Europe a century ago. The alternatives promoted by the Church and the conservative (and not so conservative) political class were detainment, imprisonment, murder, or social isolation, such that these leftists used the tools available to them, applying them to what was considered a social problem. We have to consider the context of viewing science, including medicine and psychiatry, as liberatory elements within the context of societal secularization and liberation from the overwhelming power of the Church. Nowadays, it might be more difficult to understand this position, because science doubtlessly serves power, having little liberatory potential, but then, it was seen as a counter-power to the traditional elites, who accordingly opposed its spread among the proletariat and in political debates. At this time, science had not yet been adapted and integrated to serve ruling-class interests, as would occur in the following decades.

Certainly, I do not wish to rationalize these reformers’ disregard for homosexuality. There were people at this time, who—it must be said—were involved in anti-capitalist, anarchist, and Marxist movements in Europe who openly supported homosexuality and its decriminalization, without calling for psychiatric or medical intervention. This took place more in Central Europe than in the Iberian Peninsula, although such voices were heard here, and such views were also held here, although less frequently and more covertly.

Ultimately, what I want to say is that the combination of eugenicist, psychiatric, and medical proposals as the most progressive alternative at the time, on the one hand, and the lack of eminent voices supportive of homosexuality on the other led to this disastrous mix of pathologizing and therapeutic proposals to cure homosexuality as the most advanced option then available. It may seem absurd to us now, but to say anything along these lines then implied that you would be accused of being gay and insulted, because you were requesting decriminalization, and of course, that’s something for queers. At this time, the right and far-right were less focused on trying to cure homosexuality.

In the case of anarchism, the idea that the State can never improve matters, but rather always worsens them, entered the fray. In other words, the assumption was that criminalizing homosexuality exacerbated the situation, thus creating more homosexuality and more gays. Plus, the eugenicist theories that were then blowing up came hand-in-hand with naturism (then all the rage in the anarchist world) and free love. These were the best alternative then accessible to libertarians, who mostly followed the opinions of established Iberian doctors, rather than those of Èmile Armand, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, or the Institute for Sexual Hygiene in Moscow.

Feminists at this time did not present themselves as allies of homosexuals in the least, and the fact that Flores Magón had declared himself a feminist while demonizing homosexuality and wielding homophobia against political rivals (something that was regular practice at the time in Mexico and throughout much of the world) does not really surprise me.

Read the rest, about anarchism, queerness, Spanish colonialism and Nationalism, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, and Federico García Lorca’s tragic love life, on The Commoner.

“South Africa’s Untold Tragedy of Neoliberal Apartheid” by Jérôme Roos

In light of the recent death of Nelson Mandela, the “father” of post-Apartheid South Africa, I am reposting this excellent reflection by Jérôme E. Roos on a recent trip to the country.  The essay was originally published in Reflections on a Revolution (ROAR) on 12 November 2013.

Twenty years after apartheid, the old freedom fighters of the ANC have come to reproduce the same structures of oppression against which they once arose.

We were driving down the N3 highway on our way back home from the Eastern port city of Durban, passing by the endless lines of improvised shacks that constitute the Katlehong township just outside Johannesburg, when we saw the flashing blue lights of a police car in the distance. As we approached, a horrific scene revealed itself. A local slumdweller, probably somewhere in his thirties, lay dead on the side of the road, his body awkwardly twisted into an impossible position, his eyes still wide open. Some two hundred meters ahead, a car had pulled over on the curb, its driver casually leaning on the vehicle while talking to a policeman. No one had even bothered to cover up the body. This man just lay there like a dead animal — another road kill in endless wave of needlessly extinguished lives.

Every year, more than 14.000 people are killed on the road in South Africa, an average of 38 per day — nearly half of whom are pedestrians. Of the other half, many die as overloaded buses, micro-vans or so-called bakkies crash during the daily commute from the townships to the city to work as waiters, clerks or house maids. Just today, a bus full of commuters slammed into a truck on a narrow and potholed road to Pretoria, killing 29. But in the aggregate, tragedies like these are only numbers in a cold statistical series. The front pages of the country’s newspapers remain splattered with horror stories and graphic photos of brutal killings, as fifty people are murdered daily. Another 770 people die from AIDS every day. A total of 5.7 million, or 18% of South Africans, is HIV/AID infected, the highest infection rate in the world. Needless to say, one of the bloody red lines that runs through the broken social fabric of this heartbreakingly beautiful country is that human life is accorded shockingly little value.

“They Only Care About Power, Not People”

All of this became painfully obvious in August last year when militarized police forces violently cracked down on a wildcat miners’ strike in the platinum town of Marikana. In the ensuing bloodbath, the most serious bout of state violence since the Sharpville massacre of 1960 and the end of apartheid in 1994, 34 workers were killed after being peppered with machine gun fire at close range. Needless to say, the Marikana massacre brought back painful memories of police brutality under white minoritarian rule. This time, however, the policemen and politicians responsible for the massacre were mostly black and represented the same party that had once led the struggle against racial oppression: the ruling ANC of President Jacob Zuma and the iconic freedom fighter Nelson Mandela. The Marikana massacre was the most powerful expression yet that little had changed below the surface. The violence of the state simply reasserted itself anew under the ANC.

Today, the ANC faces a growing crisis of legitimacy. While it is still on course to win next year’s elections, disillusionment with the party and its leaders has become widespread even among its traditional support base: poor people living in the shantytowns. “The ANC today is all about power, not the people,” union organizer Teboho Masiza said during the one-year commemoration of the massacre in August this year. “They are supposed to be here to listen to the problems of the people of South Africa. But they are nowhere to be seen. They only look after themselves.” Andile Nkoci, a young miner from the East Cape, said he felt betrayed: “They have abandoned us. They are only looking to make money for themselves.” Another miner, Alton Dalasile, more recently echoed the exact same frustration: “They have abandoned and betrayed us. The ANC is no longer the party of the poor man, the working man. They care only about enriching themselves.”

The Authentic Tragedy of the World’s Liberal Conscience

The story of South Africa over the last 20 years must qualify as one of the most authentic political tragedies of our era. Once upon a time, not very long ago, the country was held up as an example to the world. In 1994, when the apartheid regime finally came to an end and South Africans overwhelmingly elected Mandela as their first democratic President, the world looked to South Africa with a mix of hope and expectation. In this new era of globalization, the Rainbow Nation seemed destined to break down the lines between social and racial divisions. Legal scholars hailed the country’s new constitution as the most progressive in the world. Truth and reconciliation committees were to set up to transcend old grudges and to come to terms with the country’s racist past. The new South African flag, combining elements of the ANC’s party flag and the national flags of Britain and the Netherlands, was meant to symbolize a new harmony converging from racial segregation into “unity-in-diversity”. The new anthem combined elements from the Xhosa and pan-African liberation hymn Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa) with the old Afrikaner anthem, Die Stem van Suid-Afrika (The Voice of South Africa).

But don’t forget: these were the halcyon days of a triumphant neoliberalism. The Cold War was over, communism had been defeated, the Gulf War had reasserted American hegemony in the world, and Francis Fukuyama had just thrown the doors of the radical imagination shut by publicly declaring the End of History. From now on, global capitalism and liberal democracy were to reign supreme. South Africa, as it emerged from the depths of institutionalized racism, became a progressive beacon of this new world order — and Mandela its very conscience. In this brave new world, Mandela was a former revolutionary turned philosopher-king; an elder of the global village who came to represent not only the suffering and aspirations of black Africans, but also the hopes and desires of Western progressives. Mandela mingled with world leaders, the European royalty and multi-billionaires; he hung out with popstars and sports legends, but he also maintained a close friendship with Fidel Castro and Muammar Khaddafi. Father Madiba, in a way, was above politics. Or was he?

The Post-Racial Apartheid of Neoliberal Globalization

Today, both the revolutionary narrative of the ANC militants and the liberal narrative of the world’s progressives ring increasingly hollow. Racial segregation may have been institutionally lifted, but the socio-economic segregation that undergirded it continues unabated. South Africa is still one of the most shockingly unequal places in the world, ranking second (after Lesotho) on family-level inequality. In this middle-income country, forty-seven percent of the population still lives in poverty, which is actually two percent more than back in 1994. Unemployment formally stands at 25 percent, but the rate goes up to 50 percent for young black men. Twenty years later, blacks on average still earn six times less than whites. While a couple of pejoratively called “black diamonds” have made it to the top, crafting a small indigenous elite that slowly takes up residence in the old vestiges of white privilege, for the vast majority of South Africans nothing has really changed.

Of course, there are good reasons for this. Apartheid fell as neoliberalism rose, knocking down old walls on its quest for globalized market access but forever erecting new ones in its concomittant quest for cheap labor and natural resources. Samir Amin once wrote that “the logic of this globalization trend consists in nothing other than that of organizing apartheid on a global scale.” Apartheid here is not meant as a metaphor; it is what a philosopher might call anontological category of the neoliberal world order. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, “the explosive growth of slums in the last decades … is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times.” Shantytowns continue to arise around South Africa’s cities and mines as workers migrate in the hope of securing a humble living, even as new gated communities and shopping malls protected by private security guards bearing assault rifles spring up to cater to the consumerist desires of an emerging interracial elite. The Rainbow Nation may be blind to race at the top; but it still reproduces apartheid-era segregation at the bottom.

The Oppressive State and the Political Philosophy of Rights

None of this is a coincidence. In a way, the tragic outcome of the ANC’s liberation struggle was encoded into the very DNA of the party’s vanguardist strategy. First of all, the ANC decided to take over existing institutions — political and economic institutions that were based on systematic exclusion and massive inequality — and thereby ended up unwittingly reproducing these same oppressive structures with a new elite formation. Secondly, as Lawrence Hamilton explains in his book The Political Philosophy of Needs, the ANC leadership deliberately embraced a particular ideological vision of how to “transform” the country: a vision he refers to as the “political philosophy of rights”, in other words: liberalism. South Africa’s new constitution was the clearest manifestation of this: everything was put to work to secure the rights of individuals to vote and be represented, to own property, and to not be discriminated against in any way. Little attention, however, was given to questions of political participation, genuine popular sovereignty, and the satisfaction of basic human needs.

This state-centered and rights-based approach never truly broke with the legacy of apartheid; it merely extended the franchise while keeping the structural logic of separation between people and power, between property-owners and wage-earners, intact. Partly because of the reigning neoliberal ideology of the time, and partly out of fear of reproducing the Zimbabwean experience where Mugabe’s violent land expropriations had led to a white exodus and economic collapse, Mandela and the ANC opted for a gradualist approach that actually ended up turning the ANC into an agent of apartheid itself. Legally, the property rights of white landowners took priority over the human needs of local shackdwellers. Workers’ rights were increasingly hollowed out as the right to unionize gave way to the “right” to be “represented” by a corrupt and ANC co-opted union leadership. The state-oriented approach and the political philosophy of rights thus locked poor South Africans into a logic of representation and top-down decision-making whereby human needs, social autonomy and political participation came to be subordinated to the formation of a new political and corporate elite of former ANC revolutionaries.

Towards Autonomy and a Political Philosophy of Needs

But there are signs that things may be changing. In 2005, a completely different type of movement burst onto the scene when a large group of poor shackdwellers set up a roadblock in Durban to protest against the eviction of an informal settlement. The so-called Abahlali baseMjondolo, or shackdwellers’ movement, has since spread to Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. With tens of thousands of members, Abahlali now constitutes the single largest grassroots organization of poor South Africans. Unlike the reactionary maverick, corrupt multi-millionaire and former ANC youth leader Julius Malema, who is now contesting the ANC on a Chávez-inspired populist platform, Abahlali stresses its autonomy from state institutions, political parties, businesses and NGOs, and rejects both the ANC and its principal rivals in the opposition, drawing instead on self-organization and direct action to secure improvements in living conditions, to defend communities under threat of eviction, to reclaim urban land for social redistribution, and to democratize society from below.

The ANC and all other so-called revolutionaries betrayed the poor the moment they made it their aim to take over the institutions of apartheid and reproduce them in a different form. But with the ANC’s crisis of legitimacy deepening following the Marikana massacre, more and more people who do not feel represented are being driven towards the only sensible conclusion. Earlier this year, in March, one thousand shackdwellers stormed a piece of land in Cato Crest in Durban, occupied it, and called it Marikana in honor of the slain miners. The action was just one more expression of the dawning realization around the world that, in these times of universal deceit, only an insistence on radical autonomycan take the revolution forward. In South Africa, the only way to overcome the social segregation that continues to needlessly kill hundreds every day, is to embrace a political philosophy of needs that focuses on the empowerment of communities; that operates through democratic participation and militant direct action; and that — instead of trying to ‘emancipate’ South Africans by becoming more like their former oppressors — actively breaks out of the cycle of exploitation by building interracial autonomy from below.