Breve historia de la literatura gay y lésbica en español

The concept of homosexual literature emerged in Europe during the last third of the 19th century. At that time medical, criminological and legal discourses were imposed that, under pseudoscientific varnishes, came to consecrate homosexuality as a disease or a perversion. As a result, some enlightened homosexuals tried to legitimize their way of feeling by seeking cultural references from the past, especially by elaborating a homoerotic tradition written by homosexual men and women. Subsequently, investigations would be carried out to reconstruct the history of that literature, which had gradually proliferated in all languages. The first studies on writing in Spanish were carried out by external authors, mainly Anglo-Saxon, and it was not until the late 1990s that Spanish-speaking researchers began to reconstruct the history of gay and lesbian literature written in Spanish. Since then, much progress has been made, but most of the existing works do not address the whole of the homoerotic literature in Spanish, since they have limited themselves to conducting sectorial studies, either in Spain or in Latin America. The work that we present here would be the first attempt to collect, in a single volume, the entire compendium of homoerotic narrative, both male and female, written in Spanish. The research carried out has made it possible to locate hundreds of novels and stories written by brave men and women, at a time when doing so may not be safe. In addition, the author, fleeing from the abstruse language typical of academic works, has achieved an accessible work for the reader interested in the recovery of LGBT memory in the field of literature, and that, at the same time, can serve as helps the academic researcher. The historical period studied, which covers all the countries whose official language is Spanish, is from 1867 to 1990, the year from which in many places the emergence of gay and lesbian literature occurred, although in some of the countries studied it is necessary to enter almost in the second decade of the XXI century to find gay literature of local production.