"Homophobia in 1970s Spain: Psychiatry, Fascism and the Transition to Democracy" by Manuel Ángel Soriano-Gil, translated by Steven Capsuto - Ebook
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.
Four decades after Spain began its transition to democracy, homophobia is still thriving in some conservative parts of Spanish society. LGBTQ Spaniards have, of course, made great legal strides: Parliament decriminalized homosexuality in 1979, passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2005, and approved the Gender Identity Act in 2007. Even so, a great many Spaniards—especially ones who had strict religious upbringings during the forty-year dictatorship—still hold fast to prejudices and misconceptions that their collective unconscious cannot give up, which keeps them from adjusting to a new social reality.
This 21st-century paradox is what led the author to publish his doctoral thesis about antigay prejudice, written in the 1970s, during Spain’s transition from the Franco regime to democracy. At the time, his “freethinking” thesis advisor at Complutense University of Madrid agreed to defend the thesis to the doctoral panel, but in 1980, he suddenly rejected it as “unconvincing.” Instead of suggesting ways to write a better thesis on this subject, he told the author to write a new one on an unrelated topic.
Still, bad news is often good news in disguise: only a handful of scholars ever see a doctoral thesis, while a published book enjoys wide distribution and can make the unknown known to a wide audience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Manuel Ángel Soriano-Gil was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1948. He holds an undergraduate degree in Psychology and a professional diploma in Clinical Psychology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Since 1972, when he began his career in this field, he has worked as a psychotherapist and in human resource management companies. In 1978, Zero-ZYX published his first book: Homosexualidad y represión (Homosexuality and repression). Egales has published his LGBT self-help volumes Tal como somos (As we are – 2007) and La juventud homosexual (Gay youth – 2012). Throughout his career, he has written articles on social exclusion and on topics related to human resources.
