Sex-generic dissidence in “ascetic type towns”. Everyday lives out of the nationalcatholic norm during late Francoism in Zamora

Abstract

Daily lives of sexual or gender dissident people have not yet been studied in small provincial cities. This work tries to fulfill this historiographical void referred to Zamora city, where the lack of these works is clear. In order to approach this task, we have consulted social dangerousness files emitted by the Francoist justice and we have done some personal interviews with sexual dissidents who lived in this city during the last period of Franco regime. So, the resultant historiographical account explains the characteristics of dissident people´s daily lives in the Zamora of the last Francoism, highlighting the coercion of sexual moral from school, and to go on analyzing the judicial repression and its relationship with social class. This text also refers to strategies such as sexual migration or “sexile”, and it focused on families, not only as a discriminatory element but also as a determining factor in the decision of the homosexual people on whether to stay in the city. Finally, it is the beginning of a kind of the inquiry of a “golden ghetto”, which started to be formed in the city when the dictator Francisco Franco died. Anyway, socializing processes took place in bars and not at the front of demonstrations as it happened in the big cities before the demobilization owned to disenchantment.