The sexual upheaval of the Spanish sixties: gender and sexual-affective diversities under Franco’s authoritarian regime

ABSTRACT Variation and diversity played a dynamic role in creating social heterogeneity in the Spanish 1960s and resisting the homogenizing purposes of an authoritarian moral project. Inspired by Eve K. Sedgwick, my study goes beyond presentist genealogies of identity and vindication of variation in sexual orientation. I assemble an archive of diversities to explore this sexual heterogeneity of the Spanish sixties. I show the “Kinsey effect”, or the influence of Alfred Kinsey’s (1894–1956) matter-of-fact studies on sexual variation in Spain, through Spanish medical literature written by doctors, and a number of Spanish surveys on sexuality. I also show how incipient consumerism destabilized the sex/gender system and diversified masculinity. I contend that audiences may interpret certain representations of ambivalent masculinities, shaped by modern femininities, as transgressing gender codes. Finally, I rely on the Spanish poet Jaime Gil de Biedma (1929–1990) to argue that Sedgwick’s criticism of a simplistic understanding of sexuality highlights the poet’s difference in transgressing normative masculinity and living out the traditional sex/love binary. My archive of diversities helps to connect biological ideas of sexual variation to political notions of diversity and difference in the Spanish sixties.