Carlos Barea (Granada, 37 years old) is a writer and editor, but, above all, he is “archaeologist of dissent.” Its objective, which describes with a manifest passion, is to rescue from the past – and sometimes from oblivion – to characters from the twentieth century culture that had to hide their orientation and sexual identity to survive. He publishes it on his Instagram account and now also in Rebels of desire (Plaza & Janet), a collective memory exercise that aims to do justice to the intimacy of national characters such as the Nobel Prize Vicente Aleixandre, Luis Cernuda, Carmen Conde or Mari Trini, and foreigners such as Francis Bacon, Arthur Rimbaud or Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. “Existential activists”, as they call them Barea, who grew up in the Vega Granada de Zujaira, where Federico García Lorca long ago passed his summers.
Ask. The universal poet was the first of his discoveries …
Answer. I read Lorca countless times in childhood and adolescence. But I didn’t know that he was homosexual until he was 18. Reading from that other perspective was like an encounter with a lost ancestor. Suddenly, everything fit.
P. Because?
R. Because its story exemplifies very well how it has been intended to cover the life of important culture characters; their Sonnets of dark love They are clearly homoerotic and did not see the light until the eighties.
P. Do you like to investigate in the past?
R. It is a way of understanding who we are, to deepen our historical memory and impart justice, in a sense.
P. And his book baby of that justic spirit …
R. Yes, I try to put on the table everything they have hidden from us, the silenced part of these relevant figures and how they have hidden it.
P. As?
R. Through the invisibility, but also of a cultural representation of marked Francoist character in which the only way to see a homosexual character was that he was crazy, that he was a murderer or that he would end badly.
P. He also tells how repression led many of these characters into exile.
R. We have stories like Luis Cernuda, who left for the United Kingdom in 1939 supposedly for a few weeks and could never return to Spain due to his commitment to the Republican side, but also for his homosexuality.
P. What do you mean with existential activism?
R. In the way of resisting in spite of everything. We have to remember those people who have already started that fight that people in the LGTBIQ+collective inherit today. The dissent already existed before these acronyms, I did not use them in the book because it seemed an anachronism.
P. Do you think it is easier to investigate this past?
R. The memories of many of these protagonists have already come to light and have allowed us to know their history. Internet has also done its part: the elaboration of this book would have been much more complicated 30 years ago.
P. That those chosen for their book were dedicated to art and letters is not accidental.
R. Artistic creation is a desperate cry of dissent, a way of being able to tell things that you could not do face to face, to express identity fights that not only occurred abroad, but also inside. There is a chapter dedicated to children terrible literature that reflects that torment.
P. What is your favorite character?
R. Pasolini causes me a lot of admiration, but the story that surprised me most was that of Tortola Valencia, which has to do with his grave in the Cemetery of Poblenou, in Barcelona.
P. Will you publish another research on the past in the future?
R. I am putting the focus on the transition, a period with lights, but also with shadows that have not yet been spoken much, such as those of the thousands of jailed homosexuals that were not recognized as political prisoners and were not amnestized.