GLR November-December 2024

he found an outlet in his drawings. His friend Gregorio Prieto said that “poetry was Lorca’s loyal boyfriend, but his drawings were a secret lover he was irresistibly attracted to.” There are al most 400 cataloged drawings. Most are small; many appeared in letters or books; some were gifts made for friends. Lorca said: “I feel clean, comfortable, happy, like a child when I draw.” He had no education as a painter and, while his images are unso phisticated, they project the same lyrical emotion and refined invention that his poetry exudes. Lorca’s drawings, each line a whispered confession of his un spoken desires, are essential to understanding his poems and plays. Sometimes they express the germ of an idea that he would later elaborate in his literary work but the drawings always achieved full artistic autonomy. He manifested his homosexual ity in drawings of marginal characters and victims of persecution like him, such as gypsies. He drew endless images of sailors, a popular trope for queer artists. They represent the underworld, characters who, after being on a ship for weeks, release their sex uality with absolute abandon. His sailor drawings envision a utopian world in which love between men occurs. The word “amor” (love) as well as an alluring bedroom appears in many of them. In one of his best-known images, a sailor oozing sadness holds a rose, reflecting Lorca’s absence of sexual expression. Lorca joined the lineage of artists who used the myth of Zeus and Ganymede as a means to portray homoerotic images. He did it in a strikingly original way, linking this myth to his sailor im agery. He created an astonishing drawing while he was in New York in 1929 in which a young, androgynous Ganymede-cum cabin boy is grabbed by a rough Zeus/sailor while a woman screams at them, scandalized. Defiant images such as this that clearly embody Lorca’s homosexuality were a rarity in the Span ish artistic landscape of those years. He also painted androgy nous harlequins, saints, and angels. When he painted a local sculpture of San Miguel as an ephebe dressed in lace to represent the city of Granada (in 1932), he received a huge backlash from city officers and friends such as Buñuel. San Sebastián became a crucial reference in the creative di alogue between Lorca and Dalí. Dalí admired the saint’s erotic exhibitionism and masochistic desires. Lorca called it “the most beautiful figure of all the art that is seen with the eyes.” He sent Dalí two homoerotic drawings and a photograph of himself evoking this saint. Dalí responded with a cruel letter saying “Tied to a tree, Saint Sebastian’s ass doesn’t have a single wound,” alluding to their frustrated sexual encounter. Saint Se bastian became the homoerotic symbol of Lorca’s unfulfilled sexual longing. One of Lorca’s most revealing drawings , The Kiss (1927), shows his self-portrait above which he includes Dalí’s likeness, their lips kissing. This is the clearest expression of Lorca’s de sire for Dalí at a time when, not only was his love unrequited, but Dalí was moving to Paris to be with Buñuel, a fellow sur realist. Buñuel, who was fanatically jealous of Lorca and Dalí’s relationship, had finally succeeded in separating them. And if that wasn’t enough, Dalí started a relationship with his new muse Gala, which devastated Lorca. Dalí even publicly criti cized Lorca’s poetry. The two would not speak again until a brief meeting in 1935. Deserted by Dalí, Lorca began a fleeting relationship with the young sculptor Emilio Aladrén. Though ostensibly hetero November–December 2024

Books on essential queer albums

Short books about music.

www.bloomsbury.com/33-13-hub

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