«No es ningún icono LGTBI»: camp kitsch and queer in Sarassas Music

Abstract

Fabio McNamara has been considered one of the icons of la movida that exemplified better the new democratic situation in Spain in the eighties by showing a non-normative gender identity. For this reason, he has usually been considered an LGBTI activist, which is contradictory to his shift, in recent years, to a right-wing and ultra-Catholic ideology. McNamara uses camp combined with kitsch, labled as «Pop camp» (Ross, [1989]1999) or «camp kitsch» (Holliday & Potts, 2012), which, according to Alberto Mira (2004), is one of the main features of la movida. This aesthetic has survived in other projects, such as Fanny y los + or Sarassas Music. This article analyzes McNamara's work in Sarassas Music, which belongs to the time in which he changes his political thinking.

Sarassas Music presents a discourse clearly linked to camp kitsch, whose aesthetic codes come from the gay community. Through an interdisciplinary methodology, it will be examined how Sarassas Music articulates camp and its understanding of the homosexual man as effeminate, whose otherness is mixed with issues of class, nationality, etc. The examples of «Requiebros de mujer en el burlaero» and the cover of «Quién es ese hombre» have been taken to see how Sarassas Music articulates what Lidia García (2016) calls «camp cañí» and the possible queer characteristics of their work. Likewise, the connection between kitsch and the aesthetics of totalitarianism and Catholicism is explained in order to reflect on whether the whole camp is subversive in terms of gender, or if, on the contrary, in cases such as McNamara this may be in question.