Customer Reviews

Federico Garcia Lorca a Life

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this book years ago from cover to cover and I had never even read any Lorca. This book is huge! (500 pages!) But I completed it all.

I think that those interested in the lives of pre-Stonewall gays will find this especially enlightening. Lorca uses Freudian, problematic reasoning for explaining his gayness. Like Gide and many other insecure gays, he harps on feminine gay men. Like Langston Hughes, Yukio Mishima, and again Andre Gide, he was inspired by the homoerotic poetry of Walt Whitman.

In this book, it is implied that Lorca loved Dali and Dali was both repulsed and intrigued by that love. So that scenario of gay man having unrequited love for straight man is played out here. However, in the documentary "Split," the viewer sees Dali courting a she-male. In Manrique's "Eminent M*r*c*n*es," he states that an American man, later in his life, admitted that he and Dali had a sexual relationship. So Gibson's portrayal of Dali as exclusively heterosexual may be inaccurate.

In Lorca's last days, the fascists were taking over Spain and they may have killed him for prejudiced reasons. Now, Spain has a Socialist president who is seriously considering legalizing gay marriage. This book will help to track progress. Lorca may be to Spanish gay men what James Baldwin is to American ones.