GLR November-December 2024

§ S URREALIST PAINTER S ALVADOR D ALÍ joined the Residencia in 1923. Desperate for attention, he let his hair grow and glued it to his skull with varnish and used his mother’s eyeliner to make himself look like Rudolph Valentino, the silent movie star who represented the ideal of male beauty at this time. Lorca was daz zled by Dalí’s eccentricity and enigmatic allure. The fascination was clearly mutual. After Dalí first laid eyes on Lorca, he wrote: “The ultimate poetic phenomenon suddenly emerged before me in sublime flesh and blood vibrating with a thousand fireworks.” Despite their divergent personalities—Dalí was very shy, while Lorca was described as “a fountain of laughter and music”—and even though Lorca was 25 years old and Dalí just nineteen, they became instant friends, united by shared passions and struggles. They were both anticlerical, champions of social justice, and artistically ambitious. And both had a rather com plicated relationship with their sexuality. Dalí’s favorite place on earth was his family home in the idyllic Catalan seaside town of Cadaqués. Dalí invited Lorca to join them during 1925’s Easter break. Dalí’s parents and his sev enteen-year-old sister Anna Maria embraced Lorca with the kind of love that he never received from his own family. Then the unexpected happened: Lorca fell madly in love with Dalí. The infatuation was apparently mutual, as Dalí’s paintings from that period depict Lorca obsessively. Lorca was convinced that Dalí was also gay but afraid to ac cept it. He tried to seduce Dalí with a long poem titled “ Ode to Salvador Dalí ” (1926) in which he addresses him as “Dalí of the olive-skinned voice” while imagining them living together as a couple. In his letters, Dalí calls Lorca “His little Federico” and signs them: “With all the tenderness of your little child Dalí.” Few letters from Lorca to Dalí remain, alas, because Dalí’s fu ture wife Gala destroyed them out of jealousy. The photo in which Lorca places his hand lovingly on Dalí’s knee, however, leaves no doubt about the intimate nature of their relationship. To understand the complexity of this bond, we need to ad

Salvador Dalí. Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Piano , 1934.

He painted many homoerotic images and was, according to his inner circle, attracted to men, the more androgynous the better. Gala was his shield against the specter of homosexuality, which he vehemently rejected in public, among other reasons because the leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, consid ered homosexuality to be an abomination. He was flattered by Lorca’s attention and constantly remarked on how handsome his friend was, but he recoiled from the physical intimacy that Lorca sought. In a famous interview, Dalí declared: “Lorca tried to have sex with me twice but I resisted because it hurt.” Maybe that’s what his “gay panic” painting is all about. § T HE EXTENT AND SIGNIFICANCE of Lorca’s homosexual orienta tion has come to light only slowly, long after the poet’s demise.

Ian Gibson, a leading authority on the poet, revealed in his 1989 biography that until quite recently, Lorca’s fam ily denied access to his archives to any researcher who wanted to explore Lorca’s sexuality. The poet’s siblings Francisco and Isabel published books about their brother avoiding any refer ence to his sexuality or to his explic itly queer work El público (1930). They also stopped a family friend from publishing letters revealing Lorca’s sexuality. After his death, the excuse was always the need to “protect his reputation” and “respect his privacy.” The second phase of the erasure was to pretend that his homosexuality had nothing to do with his work, stating that it was “irrelevant” and “morbid” to discuss it. While Lorca rarely expressed his sexuality wholeheartedly in his poetry,

dress Dalí’s ambiguous and elusive sexuality, which found frequent ex pression in his paintings. His fear of sex started in childhood. His father left books around the house showing macabre photos of people with vene real diseases, which traumatized Dalí and made him terrified of physical con tact and of the female genitalia. He portrayed himself in public statements as impotent and a virgin when he met Gala. “I tried sex once with my wife Gala,” he reported. “It was overrated.” He began living with Gala in 1929, the year that he created his iconic painting The Great Masturbator, which reflects how, since he was a teenager, Dalí used masturbation as his sexual outlet “be cause it was more peaceful than mak ing love,” always followed by tears. Beneath its heterosexual veneer, Dalí’s art simmers with possibilities.

Salvador Dalí. The Anthropomorphic Tower , 1930.

TheG & LR

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