In 1979, the year when Spain finally decriminalized homosexuality, a professor in Madrid rejected a doctoral thesis on a topic he had previously approved. On reading the finished dissertation, he decided that gay people's legal status in 1970s Spain was an unacceptable subject for a thesis after all and told the student to write about a completely different topic. Decades later, in the 2010s, Egales (Spain's leading publisher of LGBTQ books) published that old thesis in the original Spanish and invited me to translate it into English for this ebook release.