Two forms of homosexual spatiality through the plastic work of Gregorio Prieto and Federico García Lorca. From dream spaces to areas of sexual encounters between men

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the role played by spatial projection in the representation of incipient homosexual identities in Spanish art in the 1920s and 1930s. Through the analysis of some photographs and paintings by Gregorio Prieto and some drawings by García Lorca we will see how both authors propose two resolutions of different sign when dealing with homosexual spatiality. In his paintings and photographs, Gregorio Prieto proposes spaces of reverie, utopian spaces that make homosexual presence possible. These "other spaces" in which the norm appears to be eluded are presented through the recourse to the invocation of a past time. In his work, the mythologised evocation of classical antiquity, as the enclave in which pederasty was a respected form of love, overlaps with the present time represented by sailors, the trope of homosexuality in the first decades of the twentieth century. By way of comparison, we will show how García Lorca's drawings, charged with erotic sensuality and references to his own life experiences, are a hint of an incipient homosexual subculture. The overflowing telluric eroticism of his drawings of forests and parks or the idea of loitering around tavern spaces linked to alcohol and sailors are metaphorical figurations of the sexual meeting places for men of the time, where cruising and prostitution could converge. These spaces took on special relevance for the author after his New York and Cuban experience.