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13 - Boys Interrupted: Sex between Men in Post-Franco Spanish Cinema

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2017

Santiago Fouz-Hernández
Affiliation:
Durham University
Santiago Fouz-Hernandez
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

The history of male same-sex desire in Spanish cinema has been widely documented in a plethora of articles, PhD theses and books published in the last twenty-five years or so, starting with Smith in 1992 and culminating most recently with dedicated monographs by Melero Salvador (2010), Perriam (2013) and Berzosa (2014). As these studies convincingly argue, we have come a long way from what Alfeo Álvarez, writing in 2000, called ‘veiled representations’ during the Francoist period. Indeed, authors including Llamas (1995) have talked about a certain over-exposure of gay men and especially gay male bodies in Spanish films since the 1990s. This new visibility, however, has not necessarily brought about sexual fulfilment for gay male characters on screen. While male nudity has become commonplace in recent Spanish cinema (although full frontals are still somewhat taboo), actual sex scenes between men are still relatively rare, obliquely represented or extremely short, often interrupted halfway through. Interruptions, of sorts, are by definition part of what differentiates erotic cinema from pornography. As Tanya Krzywinska has argued, films aimed at broad audiences have to find ways ‘of suggesting sex without actually showing it’ (2006: 29). Some of these ‘ways’, as she goes on to explain, include ellipses, cutaways or visual barriers (27–31). One of the main points that Linda Williams makes in Screening Sex is precisely about the double meaning of the verb ‘to screen’ ‘as both revelation and concealing’ (2008: 3), a tension that is productively explored throughout her book. The remit of this book is to study Spanish erotic cinema, not pornography. In that sense, it is perhaps to be expected that in the films I am about to discuss, sex between men will not be represented in overtly explicit ways. It is worth noting that when discussing the ‘concealment’ of sex both Krzywinska and Williams are referring mostly to either family-friendly mainstream films or films produced within certain censorship or commercial boundaries. The films that I will discuss in this chapter were all released after the abolition of censorship in post-Franco Spain and, especially the more recent ones, are aimed at GLBT or GLBT-friendly audiences. It is the persistence of abrupt, awkward and sometimes violent disruptions of erotic scenes involving sex between men that concerns me here, especially when these occur in sharp contrast with heterosexual sex scenes.

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Spanish Erotic Cinema , pp. 219 - 238
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2017

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