Smiling gaily

Let’s celebrate Netflix for making the show Smiley.

Set in Barcelona, it’s one of the best gay-scene series I’ve seen for a long time. At least, at the light-hearted end of that scene. At the darker end, It’s a sin is right up there with the best, a powerful story of young gays at the start of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. It has plenty of humour, but that highlights the tragedy far more than blunting it.

Smiley, on the other hand, had us laughing within a couple of minutes, and we kept on laughing right to the end. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t serious, even sad, moments. It’s just that it’s the other way around from It’s a sin: the sadness or tension only make the returns to humour all the more pleasing.

Smiley: quarrelling again

The protagonists are two men who have next to nothing in common. One is somewhat older and an architect, a man of culture, while the other is a bartender in a gay bar with everyday tastes. Whenever they meet, they quarrel. Can there ever be a link between them?

The relationship I find most intriguing is the lesbian one. What do they really feel about each other? Is their love uplifting or a constraint? A series of gloriously humorous situations that arise between them keeps us guessing.

There’s also a heterosexual couple and their story, though it interested me less, has its wonderful moments too. And there are others.

Finally, the drag singer – with a beard – is a wonderful creation, making the series worth watching just for the songs.

So, a glorious experience. It’s available in several languages (including Catalan, the official language in Barcelona). If you have Netflix, I’m sure you can get it and I recommend you do. 

What added to its attraction for me is that it’s set in Spain. 

It’s less than half a century since homosexuality was legalised again in the country. It had been legal during the short-lived Second Republic in the 1930s, but the Franco dictatorship that overthrew it made it unlawful. It was treated as a medical syndrome, and gays – mostly gay men – could be brutally treated in an attempt to ‘cure’ them, including long terms of imprisonment in gaols for ‘deviants’.

Funnily enough, it was in Barcelona and nearby that the first cracks began to appear. A handful of gay clubs began to operate, clandestinely, from the 1960s and up to Franco’s death in 1975. But freedom only fully came with legislation in 1979, after the return to democracy.

Thinking about all that reminded me of one gay artist, Jaime Gil de Biedma. 

Jaime Gil de Biedma: the businessman or the poet

He was born in 1929, so he was approaching seven years of age when the most infamous murder of a gay man by Spanish nationalists backing the Franco rebellion took place. That was the shooting of a poet outstanding not just in Spain but around the world, Federico García Lorca. His killers would certainly have regarded many of the things he did as offences, such as claiming that expelling the Muslim Arabs was the greatest disaster his native Granada had undergone. No doubt, however, his worst offence was simply being gay.

Gil de Biedma knew the risks a gay poet ran. Not that, in his view, it was ever he, a successful businessman in his family’s tobacco business, who wrote poetry. The way he presented things, the businessman had invented a fictional character, also called Jaime Gil de Biedma, and it was the character who was the poet. 

That fiction wrote poems about love including including its erotic manifestations. Today we can read them as gay, though he, the poet, always stayed neutral, and it’s striking that he carefully avoids ever making clear the gender of the figures he mentions. Well, whether he chose to write for gays or for everyone, he had in any case to be careful. To a friend, Juan Ferraté, he once wrote about “the suffocating system of moral inhibitions that for all these years one has had to use for everything other than relationships with personal friends”.

In the end, the businessman Gil de Biedma announced, ten years before his own death, that the fictional poet Gil de Biedma had nothing more to say. By then, Franco was dead and Spain was reverting to a more civilised state. But the poetry stopped.

The art of that fictional poet might have ended but, fortunately, the life of gays, the life of art, and specifically the life of gay art, had been given a new lease. Which adds to the pleasure of watching a series like Smiley. Its exuberance would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, and that gives us something to celebrate today.

To celebrate but also to defend. Sadly, there are far too many Spaniards who seem to hanker for a return to those days of suffocating moral inhibitions. Let’s hope there are enough of the other sort to resist them.

Let’s end with a couple of extracts from one of the poet’s pieces. This one’s called After the death of Jaime Gil de Biedma. It starts (in a poor translation of my own which I hope nonetheless gives you a flavour of the original):

In the garden, reading
the shadow of the house darkens my pages
and the sudden cold at the end of August
makes me think of you.

The garden and the house nearby
where the birds pipe on the vines,
on an August evening, when it's about to get dark
and you still have your book in your hand,
were, I remember, your symbol of death.
I only wish that in the hell
of your last days this vision could give you
a little sweetness, though I don't think it will.

At peace at last with myself,
I can now remember you
not in the dreadful hours, but here
in the summer of last year
when crowding in
- so many months erased -
happy images return
brought by your image of death...

August in the garden, in broad daylight.

And here’s the ending, with its ingenious reflection of the poem on itself and the ambiguity over who did the writing:

It was a happy summer.
... The last summer
of our youth, you told Juan
in Barcelona when we returned
loaded with nostalgia,
and you were right. Then came the winter,
the hell of months
and months of agony
and the final night of pills and booze
and vomit on the carpet.

I saved myself by writing
After the Death of Jaime Gil de Biedma.

Of the two of us, it was you who wrote better.
Now I know how much they were yours
the dreamy desire and the irony,
the romantic muffle that beats in those of my poems that I prefer
for example in Pandémica...
Sometimes I wonder
what my poetry will be like without you.

Though perhaps it was I who taught you.
Who taught you to take revenge on my dreams,
out of cowardice, by corrupting them.