One of the greatest honors since the opening of this blog:
ground-breaking LGBT artist Nazario
(Castilleja del Campo, Seville, 1944) has discussed with us his comic book Alí Babá y los 40 maricones, as well as his long lasting career, unforgettable friends such as one-of-a-kind
Ocaña, sexual behavior, open relationships, censorship at present and in the
Franco regime, other experiences in the world of art. . .Extremely touching is
his remembrance of the love of his life: late artist Alejandro Molina.
Definitely not for prudes. . .Do not hesitate and enjoy the speech of this contumaciously bold, hopelessly
square peg and terribly cuddly human being.
SPANISH GAY FICTION: Do you remember your early years in the comic tagged
as underground? How was the comic
book universe when you began? How different was your style from the type of
Spanish mainstream comic then?
NAZARIO: In the 60’s/70’s the
trend was sci-fi comic for adults, and adventure stories by French authors were
translated. In Italy they were interested in Crepax’s Valentina or Hugo Pratt’s Corto
Maltese, though I preferred comics such as Lucifera or Belzeba.
Anyway, my biggest interest was French comics (e.g., Barbarella, Jodelle.)
When I discovered American magazine MAD,
I found a wide field of possibilities which would have influence in my
dedication to comic. Then Zap Comix
showed up, and everything changed. Crumb’s sassy scripts, and Clay Wilson’s
messy, baroque drawings, plenty of sex and violence, started to define the way
that I was going to lead as an illustrator.
The press started to use the
term underground to classify us in
the American trend, though our situation was a way really different under the
strict censorship of the Franco regime. This censorship rules were applied to
our comics, so I had to publish my most salacious stories in France; and in
Spain I had to publish my own editing La
Piraña Divina (“The Divine Piranha”) secretly.
SGF: You are usually considered the father of the Spanish underground
comic in general terms, and the Spanish gay comic in particular. What do you
feel about these labels? Do you think that they are fair, or excessive? Were
there no Spanish underground or gay comic authors before you started to work in
comics?
N: When I met the young
illustrators in Barcelona, people who would take part in our publications
later, I was coming from Seville with a portfolio full of drawings. I was a bit
elder than my colleagues, and a kind of mature artist. From the very beginning
I got interested in comics as an instrument to denounce the repression that
women were suffering first, and later the repression that gays had suffered and
were still suffering due to the religious, patriarchal education.
By those days, the only openly
gay illustrations that I knew were by Tom of Finland.
SGF: Do you feel recognized in Spain? If not, which do you think the
reasons are?
N: My work as an illustrator
committed to freedom of speech and homosexual liberation, as well as the usual
scandals with my publications and exhibitions, make average educated people
know my work. Curiously, it may be the comic world—an atmosphere where I never
felt fully identified with—where my work is not very much appreciated. I have
never received an invitation to give a lecture about my work in any of the
hundreds of comic book conventions held throughout the country. However, universities
and museums have really got interested in my work.[1]
SGF: And beyond the Spanish boundaries? Are you a renowned author
abroad?
N: Just Anarcoma was edited in English (in USA it was sold in sex shops
only), French, Italian, German and Swedish. The rest of my work has not packed
quite a punch internationally at all—except for the serial publication of Alí Babá y los 40 maricones in France.
SGF: The concept of Alí Babá y los
40 maricones reminds of Francisco Ibáñez’s 13, Rue del Percebe. Curiously, though you and Ibáñez are two legends
in Spanish comic, your styles are really different. Ibáñez is a mainstream
author for all audiences, while you are a cult author for a much more specific reader.
Did you conceive Alí Babá y los 40
maricones as a way to deprave
Ibáñez’s work? Did you get the inspiration from a real neighborhood—yours, for
instance?
N: In 1977 I published three
series of two pages each in Por Favor
magazine[2]
under the name Sábado, sabadete en los
Apartamentos La Nave (“La Nave Apartments when Saturday”.)[3]
It was the first time that I used the room
scheme created by Ibáñez. It consisted of eight rooms where I portrayed the
ordinary life of different groups: lefties, gays, lesbians, dopers, a young
married couple, a traditional family, a young loner and a boarding house room.
Years went by, and in 1990 I got around to repeating the room scheme to represent
a variety of gay types: the young student in the attic who still has not accepted
his homosexuality; the usual couple in which the one is promiscuous and the
other is faithful; three friends sharing a room: the swishy, the Tom of Finland-type,
and the office boy; and besides, the
pub run by a kind of madam, where some neighbors meet a motley group.
SGF: Lola, the Alí Babá pub owner, is surrounded by gay men that she
wants and tries to seduce, but they obviously reject her for being a woman. Is
she inspired in anyone that you have ever known?
N: She works as a counterpoint
among so much campy. If I had chosen a man, he would have been a problem in the
relationships issue; a woman avoided problems for me instead, as there would be
no rivalry with other fags to see who scores a misled good-looking man, or a
hunky drunk.
SGF: What happened in 2007 when a government website considered Alí Babá y los 40 maricones as a
recommended reading? Could you please explain it to the current reader? What
did you feel about it?
N: One day someone suggested
me to search on the web Alí Babá y los 40
maricones. I was not aware at all, and I just could not believe what I was
reading. The socialist administration recommended the teachers to read it and
keep up to date about what homosexual relationships are, and the Right Wing
distorted it all, accusing the Ministry of Culture of corrupting school boys
when making them read it. Bishops, journalists, radio stations and the whole
right-winged mass media, from Castile to the Argentinean Pampas, asked for
excommunicating each and every single member of the depraved socialist administration. I was all confused, as nobody
from any of the two sides got in touch with me to ask my opinion.
SGF: Alí Babá y los 40 maricones
is dedicated to Ocaña. Could you please explain the reader who Ocaña was and
what he meant in the society of that time?
N: Ocaña meant a wake-up call
in Barcelona 1970s. He was a stirrer and a revolutionist who, endowed with
superb dramatic qualities, knew how to connect with his audience, striking a
chord with them. Wherever he was (Las Ramblas,[4]
a political meeting, the premiere of his films, a party or La Modelo),[5]
Ocaña was never gone unnoticed; as striking as provoking, he proclaimed boisterously
his sexual orientation and everybody’s right to live their lives freely and
enjoy their own bodies as the most beautiful gift that Nature has given to us.[6]
SGF: Do you miss Ocaña? Do you think that we are in a time of political
correctness that shouts out loud the need of many other Ocañas?
N: My life consists in giving
up, healing my wounds and burying friends. With every dead friend, some places
in my memory and irretrievable feelings are cut off inside me. Fortunately, I
am easy going and try to accept getting older—something that never worried me
much—and loneliness, a new situation in my life, something that I always tried
to avoid by living with friends, in communes or as a couple. Today censorship
is something unavoidable; repression wears new masks and crouches on the net or
social networks, or is disguised as counter-terrorism. Today Ocaña would hold
parties campaigning for revolutionary political groups, asking out loud through
Las Ramblas for the support of immigrants, street vendors, neglected elderly,
alcoholics frozen to death on the streets, or prostitutes’ free use right of
their own bodies. . .Gays have been discriminated for centuries, and now we
need to support every weak, vulnerable minor group.
SGF: Continuing with the political correctness issue, in Alí Babá y los 40 maricones you quote
Kavafis, Mario Mieli and Marquis de Sade, three authors related to
homosexuality, and (especially the latter two) polemical and controversial. Why
did you choose these authors? Do you feel somehow identified with them, beyond
the homosexuality topic?
N: Since its appearance in
1973, I treasure Recherches magazine
number 12, “Trois Milliards de Pervers: Grande Encyclopédie des Homosexualités,”
on which Deleuze, Foucault, Genet or Guattari collaborated, among others. Since
it was published in 1979 in Spanish, Mario Mieli’s Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique (original title:
Elementi di critica omosessuale)
shines close to Tom of Finland’s complete works in my library; and, since my
tender years, the books by Marquis de Sade has given pleasure to both my
imagination and my cock. Kavafis, who is not my favorite poet, has been lying
on my bedside table for long. As my creations are somehow a part of me, the
logical thing is that they read and discuss authors closer to me.
SGF: I deduce from your description of Ernesto, the college boy in the
attic, a certain criticism on the romantic, chaste homo saving himself for Prince Charming. Is he a type of homosexual that
you dislike? Do you defend promiscuity against this attitude?
N: I had a friend who was the
victim of a terrible disquisition: he could never have sex with someone he was
not deeply in love with, since sex and love are two separate things for him.
The boy in the attic suffers from immaturity, and a terrible repression above
all. He refuses to have sex with a man that he likes, but he later masturbates
while thinking of this man. As far as I have named my autobiography Un pacto con el placer (“An Agreement
with Pleasure”), you can easily understand that, in the question of men, I
consider myself greatly fond of at least—if not addicted to.
SGF: Tom and Tito are portrayed as an open relationship, whether Tito
likes it or not. Tom cheats on him whenever he can, and Tito finally finds out
and accepts it, though not his pleasure. Do you think that every homosexual
couple will always fail in monogamy? According to you, is Tito submissive or
permissive? Is Tom a morally guilty man, or just hopeless?
N: I fell in love with
Alejandro[7]
the very moment I met him, and, after a 36-year-long relationship, and more
than a year since he died, I am still in love with him. I found too hard to
overcome jealousy, dependence and exclusiveness. He was even more sexually
active than me, and, if we had sex three times a day and later I discovered him
having sex with another guy, then I pondered, if he was able to fuck for a
fourth time, why should I stop him? Little by little we were meeting other men
who occasionally came home to fuck with us both. We had sex with the same
boyfriends for 15 or 20 years. We had an open relationship and, after some
years, when any of these men finally chose me or Alejandro, we both still
welcomed them home without incident. With the couple Tom and Tito I somehow
tried to mock the concept of ordinary
couple as a copy of the straight marriage.
SGF: To what extent do you think that the gay universe portrayed in Alí Babá y los 40 maricones is still
present? Do you think that some changes have happened, and for better?
N: After the big shake-up
which the discovery of AIDS meant, the increase in the rate of homosexual
couples and the legalization of same sex marriage and adoption, I feel that the
gays portrayed in this book are still archetypes and have not evolved at all. Today
I should increase the number of apartments to try to picture other types who push
the boundaries somehow: activists, agitators, crusaders committed to breaking
the rules imposed and copied from stereotyped heterosexual relationships.
SGF: There is a noteworthy evolution in the comic; in the first strips
you depict bareback sex, though in
the last ones you highlight the use of condom in order to prevent sexually
transmitted diseases. Was it an imposition by the publishing house? Was it a
personal choice in regards to raise awareness among your readers?
N: I always tried to leave my
creations free to fuck the way they wished. But there was a time in which I
collaborated in “Póntelo, pónselo”[8]
campaign first, and the campaign for HIV positive gays later, and it made sense
to me that I could use my creations to support. There is a chapter in which La
Borrega discovers that he is HIV positive, and I made the other characters show
support for him.
SGF: What is your opinion on the current Spanish gay comic? Would you
highlight any author or work in particular? Do you know any author who
considers Nazario as an example?
N: Since I stopped illustrating
comics to work in painting, I left the comic book world. I got interested in
just a few graphic novels, and
critics announced that these have made comic books achieve artistic maturity
(putting comic on the same level than literature, just to depreciate the
artistic interest of comic itself); they seem to me short-sighted and vague.
SGF: What are you working on now? What are your next projects?
N: I spent more than a year building
my website, and three years writing my autobiography—one of its chapters, La vida cotidiana del dibujante underground
(“The Ordinary Life of an Underground Illustrator”), will be published in May—;
I have spent a lot of time scanning most of my comics to share freely on a
hosting service, but I have eventually got censored. (Later, I created the blog
nazariocanalla.blogspot.com, where I host them now.) I finished the 3rd
part of Anarcoma, whose script I had
sketched for years—1st and 2nd part had been summed up to
be published in one book; La Cúpula publishing house is prolonging the project
to edit both parts together—. I dream of being able to post in a blog the book La Barcelona de los 70 vista por Nazario y
sus amigos (“Barcelona in the 70’s Seen by Nazario & Friends”), adding
more pics and videos. After last year’s exhibitions of Turandot in the University of Seville, and another one about Censorship in Bilbao, a photography
exhibition about Plaza Real,[9]
and another one of works by me and Alejandro, I am preparing an audiovisual event
about my pictures, photomontages and videos on Plaza Real through the years. I
also need time to work on a script for a film on the atmosphere of Plaza Real
and surrounding areas in the 70’s/80’s. This continuous frenzy lightens the
grieving, traumatic absence of Alejandro, my boyfriend for 36 years and husband for five days.
[1] Nowadays Nazario’s
work is exhibited in several Spanish museums, such as Reina Sofía in Madrid, or
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville. He has also been awarded with Pablo
Picasso Prize or Ministry of Culture’s Medalla de Oro de las Bellas Artes (“Fine
Arts Golden Medal”), high honors in the Spanish cultural world.
[2] A humor magazine published from 1974 to 1978. It was considered a
politically committed publication during the last period of the Franco dictatorship
and the early years of the Transición
Española.
[5] Penitentiary
center located in Barcelona.
[6] In addition to Nazario’s brilliant description, you can also see Spanish
filmmaker Ventura Pons’s extraordinary documentary Ocaña, retrato intermitente (1978)—highly praised by Academy Award
winner Fernando Trueba—for further information on José Pérez Ocaña (Cantillana,
Seville, 1947 – 1983).
[7] Alejandro
Molina (1951 – 2014). He was an artist, particularly devoted to sculpture. Although
he was from Andalucía, his work is much more related to the city of Barcelona,
where he designed the festivities decoration in Plaza Real for several years. Nazario
and Alejandro met in 1978, and from that moment on they lived a beautiful
story, unusual according to the traditional love relationship pattern, such as
Nazario pictures it in this interview.
[8] Use it, make your partner
use it: Motto of a popular media campaign for the
use of condom to prevent sexual transmitted diseases among teenagers in Spain
in the early 1990s, quite controversial due to the Catholic Church protest.
[9] An outstanding square in Barcelona, adjoining Las Ramblas, located in
the tourist Gothic Quarter.
