Learning to like and be LGTBIQ+ in books | Culture | EUROtoday

This textual content is an installment of the Queerletter, the LGTBIQ+ e-newsletter of EL PAÍS, coordinated by Pablo León. Sign up right here to obtain it.

The Egales publishing home, targeted on publications queer, simply turned 30 years previous. This imprint was launched in 1995 and since then it has printed greater than 500 titles (about 300 fiction and 200 essays). “I was an editor out of necessity, not by vocation,” explains Mili Hernández, founding father of Egales together with Connie Dagas and Helle Bruun. Shortly earlier than, in 1993, Hernández had opened the Berkana bookstore in Madrid, nonetheless lively within the Chueca neighborhood. The following yr, Dagas and Bruun opened Cómplices in Barcelona (which closed its doorways in 2022). “Right away, we realized that we were lacking a catalogue. People came and asked: ‘What do you have here?’. And it turns out that most of what we exhibited they already had. That’s when we realized that we had to start publishing,” continues Mili Hernández, who was born in Madrid and is 66 years previous.

It tells the story of Egales within the again room of Berkana, whereas a stream of individuals go to the area, filled with novels, essays, comics, magazines with signatures comparable to Judith Butler, James Baldwin, Natalie Barney, Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Mary Renault, Chi Ta-wei, Ramón Martínez, Óscar Hernández-Campano, Alberto Mira, Isabel Franc, Rosa Navarro, Paco Tomás or Mila Martínez.

“In the beginning, the clients who dared to come to the bookstore asked us for other types of LGTBIQ+ books from the few that were published: they wanted books of self-knowledge, with beautiful stories, with possible love stories… Books in which they could find the references they needed,” Hernández particulars. Where to start out? “Well, because of everything we had read. The first two we published were love stories: one about girls and the other about boys. Realize that back then many people had not had any stories at all. Guys could find someone to have sex with, but many women came to the bookstore and told us that those publications were the closest thing they had had to a romantic relationship. I immediately realized that I had to offer the books that had saved my life—that of us.”

The three future editors met in London. Hernández moved to the British capital within the early eighties. First to work au pair, “with a family of Hasidic Jews,” and later as a receptionist in a resort: “Many Spanish women still came to London to have abortions and they needed workers who spoke Spanish.” There, Hernández didn’t have a lot contact with LGTBIQ+ activism, however he did uncover Gay’s The Word, a bookstore queer pioneer within the United Kingdom, opened in 1979, subsequent to Russel Square. “There I bought lesbian romantic novels that taught me two things: I learned English and also how to love women. Although I already felt something, in Spain no one taught you how to love women.”

After spending a number of years in London, Mili Hernández moved to New York. “I arrived on October 25, 1985. And that’s where another part of my life began, when I became aware of what being a lesbian meant, when I built myself as a feminist woman, free and without fear.” There, Hernandez frequented one other bookstore: Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, opened in 1967 by Craig Rodwell within the Village.

“My English was already much better and at the Oscar Wilde I found all those essays that I had not been able to read in London because then I knew little. There I did get involved in activism. I started with some very nice meetings of single lesbianswhere single lesbians met to talk. I later replicated that initiative in Berkana,” summarizes Hernández. She additionally labored at a ladies’s newspaper, whose headquarters have been on 14th Street, in Chelsea, close to Meatpacking. “The offices were in a meat warehouse that they lent us on Sundays to work on the publication. Sometimes we had to pass between the hanging cows. Furthermore, it was an area where many trans prostitutes worked,” he remembers: “Now it is a luxury street.” And he provides: “I owe my LGTBIQ+ construction to New York.”

When Mili returned to Madrid from her New York expertise, she was clear that she wished to be a bookseller; she dreamed of a queer bookstore within the capital. “What if it didn’t work? I came from New York empowered, but I also wondered: how is an LGTBIQ+ bookstore going to work in Madrid?” It was 1993. Two years later, along with his companions Dagas and Bruun, Egales began. “In the books that we began to publish, we published LGTBIQ+ people who did not die, did not commit suicide, did not end up in asylums. They are books that empower you, that give you hope that you could have a life. I found that here in Spain there was still a lot of fear and I knew what it meant to open the world to many people. So, neither I nor anyone else could imagine that one day I could marry a woman, as I later did,” he explains.

Egales not solely labored, however has turn into an absolute reference within the Spanish-speaking world. “The Guadalajara Book Fair [en México] It gives us a lot of joy. Librarians from all over America respect our publishing house, love it and admire it: almost all of our essays are in university and many public libraries,” he celebrates. “I also have to say, with regret, the little interest I see in the libraries of Spain towards our publishing house,” he says.

Less than a month ago, Egales published a book with which Mili considers his circle closed. It is about Its glare can destroy your worldby Ramón Martínez. “A thousand pages of the history of LGTBIQ+ literature,” says Mili. In the e book, Martínez traces all written literature—from jarchas to present youth novels—searching for sexual and gender variety: from The matchmaker, to Lazarillo de Tormes, passing via Don Quixote, the poems of Jacinto Benavente, or the poetry written in the course of the completely different durations of Al-Andalus. A sexual and gender variety that seems within the texts themselves (which isn’t extracted from rereading), to convey to gentle that a part of literature that literary criticism has hidden within the closet, both attributable to censorship or attributable to lgtbiphobia.​​