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. 

A watercourse, a poet and a lot of persecution

There’s a piece of doggerel most schoolkids learn by heart:

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

Rather fewer people, outside Spain anyway, know that 1492 was also the year that the last Moorish – Arab and Muslim – part of Spain fell to the Christian reconquest of the country. Ferdinand and Isabella, the ‘Catholic Monarchs’, captured the Emirate of Granada that year, making the entire Iberian Peninsula Christian once more.

The Alhambra in Granada
Fell to Ferdinand and Isabella when they defeated the Moors
And gave its name to their decree against the Jews

It was barely two months later that they issued the Alhambra decree, named for the great Moorish palace in Granada, expelling all practising Jews from Spain.

One of Spain’s, and indeed the world’s, greatest poets was Federico García Lorca. He was gay, in the early part of the twentieth century, when that was hardly a safe thing to be. He was also from Granada, and replying to a reporter in 1931, he said:

I think being from Granada gives me an inclination towards sympathetic understanding of the persecuted: the Gipsy, the Black, the Jew…, the Moor, that we all have within us.

He might have added “the homosexual” but that might have been dangerous.

Lorca. Outstanding poet. Champion of the oppressed

By the summer of 1936, it had become dangerous simply to be Lorca. That was when the military uprising, against the Republic that then ruled Spain, began.

The rebel leader was Francisco Franco, who would hold Spain in a rigid dictatorship for nearly four decades. His regime had no time for a gay champion of underprivileged minorities.

The Nationalists Franco led also believed that the revolt was a crusade for Christian values. So they were particularly ill-disposed towards Lorca for the comments he made during an interview in June 1936, just weeks before the military rebellion started. Asked for his view of the Christian reconquest of Granada, he replied:

It was a very bad moment, though they say the opposite in the schools. We lost an admirable civilisation, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a delicacy unique to the world, and replaced them with a poor, cowardly city, a land of piety in which the worst of the Spanish bourgeoisie operates today.

Unforgivable words for the Nationalists who, just two months later, caught up with Lorca and murdered him.

All this came to back to me while walking in the hills above Valencia the other day.

This region is remarkably fertile. Far more so than the relatively poor country around Granada. It doesn’t rain often, but when it does, the rain comes down like a waterfall, in storms that usually last three or four days.

That means there’s all the water agriculture around here needs. The trick is to manage it well, so that it doesn’t all seep away to the sea in between the storms. And, to this day, the locals are happy to acknowledge that the irrigation systems they use are based on techniques their ancestors learned from the Arabs.

Irrigation water flowing in the Sierra above Valencia

That made it poignant to walk along watercourses guiding irrigation water from the mountains to the fields and orchards. Every few metres there’s a side channel, with a small sluice to let water into the adjoining fields or keep it out. These structures are modern, not Moorish, but they use the same principles.

My mother had a refrain when talking about Spain. The two great errors of that nation’s history, she maintained, errors which ensured its long-term decline, were defeating the Moors and kicking out the Jews. With them, they lost their best agriculturalists (to say nothing of the cultural wealth Lorca listed) and their most skilled financiers and traders.

So walking along a watercourse in the hills above Valencia isn’t a simple, innocent exercise. It’s redolent with historical meaning. In the Moors, Spain had an outstanding civilisation, which it defeated and overthrew, to its own lasting harm.

In the Jews, it had another great minority with much to contribute, persecuted for merely being other.

And centuries later, Spain produced a magnificent poet, who understood and empathised. Who knew what it was to be oppressed. Who, finally, fell to that very oppression at the hands of a dictator certain he was acting for his white, Christian and Spanish nation.

And who, by doing so, inflicted further damage on that nation, just as the earlier persecutors had.

The saddest aspect of all these memories? The descendants of those self-harming oppressors are ready to do it all again. The Trumps, the Johnsons, the Leaders of the Italian League or of Spanish Vox. They learn nothing and keep making the mistake of thinking that homogeneity is the way to greatness.

Whereas, as Lorca knew, it’s stultifying and ultimately fatal.

Water, water everywhere. All for the land to drink