Federico Garcia Lorca may have been the quintessential artist - fluent in words, pictures, and sounds - but his sensitivity came, as these things so often do, at the price of his peace of mind.A person of great beauty born into a time of even greater tyranny, his words and pictures and sounds so frightened El Caudillo he was ordered shot by Falange thugs, then dumped into an unmarked grave. His killer, Juan Luis Trescastro, is reputed to have said 'I fired two bullets into his arse for being a queer.'
His most explicitly gay works, Ode To Walt Whitman and The Destruction of Sodom (an unfinished play), have long been suppressed, as Spain, the Lorca family, and society in general have come to learn how not to hate their favourite son for who he loved. It gives me great pleasure to unsuppress at least one of them on this, his 112th birthday.
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Oh, I love Lorca - thank you so much for keeping his memory alive on your blog! His plays - particularly "The House of Bernarda Alba" - had such an enormous influence on me, and I think he is one of the great writers of the 20th Century.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much for the kind words Walter; rescuing the obscure from obscurity is one of the things we love to do most around here.
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