The research project Cruising Torremolinos, financed by the Vice-rectorate for Research of the University of Malaga during the 2019-2021 biennium, presents the first publication resulting from his work in the last two years. This collective book has been edited by Javier Cuevas and Ángelo Néstore, directors and researchers of the project, and includes the construction of a queer genealogy of Torremolinos/Málaga from the 1960s to the present. The research is carried out with an interdisciplinary methodological approach that includes the disciplines of art and architecture history, history, film history, artistic practices, visual culture studies and translation.
Last Saturday, April 23, coinciding with the celebration of Book Day, the publication was presented at the Grant bookstore in Madrid, in an event presented by Javier Cuevas, one of the book’s editors and principal investigator of the research project that the book comes out, and Alberto Berzosa, a researcher at the Higher Center for Scientific Research (CSIC) and author of one of the book’s chapters. The presentation of the book was broadcast live through the bookstore’s Instagram account.
The LGTB history of the Malaga municipality
The publication investigates from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes the history of art and architecture, historical research in judicial archives with files for homosexuality, the history of cinema and artistic practices, around a central idea: the leading role that Torremolinos had throughout the last 60 years.
In the 1960s and 1970s, firstly as a destination for the LGBT/queer community during the dictatorship, secondly as one of the spaces in which the repression worked after the approval of the Dangerousness Law, as evidenced by the events of the great raid (August 1971) and, thirdly, as the first place where the Andalusian homosexual liberation movement was founded (the Democratic Union of Homosexuals, January 1977), months before the first demonstration for the repeal of the Dangerousness Law, and considered the first manifestation of LGBT pride in the Spanish state, in Barcelona in June 1977.
Authors and themes
The book travels through the last six decades through the history of the Malaga town, with a total of nine essays by Javier Fernández Galeano, Geoffroy Huard, Elo Vega, Alberto Berzosa, Lidia García, Antonio Navarro, Fernando Bayona, Alejandro Martín and Alicia Navarro, in addition to the introduction of Javier Cuevas and Ángelo Néstore.
All of them address issues such as eroticism in Torremolinos compared to the rhetoric of the Franco regime, homosexual emigration during the dictatorship, the architecture of relaxation and the influence of tourism, the cinema shot during this period, cultural policies, the practice of cruising, the “flamencamp” and the copla, or artistic production and social sensitivity as a method for the recovery of historical memory.