“El matiz viene después”: stories of the Sapphic experiences in Franco’s Madrid

Abstract

A criminal record is a document that is rough, both to the touch as to the reading. Its analysis implies a confrontation with an institutional language, which seems limited to processing human experience through technicalities and police procedures. In this article, on the contrary, I propose an approach to everyday experience through the worlds suggested in several judicial processes opened against Sapphic women. Each one of these stories captured a punctual moment in the trajectory and life of a person accused, according to the authorities, of a crime of «sexual inversion». I will use the only five cases I have been able to identify in the Vagos y Maleantes court records of the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA) in Madrid against women. The AGA holds thousands of cases opened between 1954 and 1971, filed in no particular order and with no clear categorization. Most of the "inversion" cases involved one or more individuals, whose body was understood by the regime as male and further labeled by the regime as male homosexuality. For this reason, the five cases analyzed should not be taken only as an exception in the documentary silence regarding sapphic experiences, but as a tangible sample that allows a glimpse into an apparently non-existent world, revealing invisibilized ways of life lost in the official history.