El rey de bastos

This anthology rescues eight relevant stories from the Spanish gay counterculture of the 1970s, which were born with the clear intention -like much of what its author, Alberto Cardín did- to subvert values, question them and place the marginal in the center. The city of Barcelona, that libertarian city before AIDS and the Madrid movement, is the protagonist of some of the stories, which constitute a true magical guide to its environment, as well as a casual sociological study of the rogue and promiscuous world of city in those years, populated by crazy women, pimps and transvestites. Other stories take the reader to distant lands -Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, Sub-Saharan Africa-, a reflection of the Asturian writer's interest in exotic homosexualities and relationships between men from different ethnic groups, social backgrounds and cultures. But they all ooze a lucid and incisive sense of humor, and are developed under a parodic, corrosive, irreverent and funny look, which extols the marginal and laughs, mercilessly, at many archetypes and cultural and political models, which, after death of the dictator, were in force during the Spanish transition. As the reader will see, these lewd texts, extremely entertaining and fun to read, also allow us to verify the wide culture that their author possessed, who sowed them with film, ethnological and camp references that make them a library of the dilettante, the bizarre and marginal, but also erudition.