Retratos ‘impertinentes’: Homosexualidad, transexualidad y travestismo en el cine español de la Transición

Many Spanish film-makers who began their careers in the years immediately following the death of Franco felt the urgency to recover through their works all the freedoms that the repression and censorship of the forty years of the Franco regime had disrupted in such violent and radical ways. This was a moment of transition, in which some films emerged that finally dared to question the prevailing public opinion and proposed approaches to reality and national history that were decidedly unorthodox and polemical. Among this group of films, which included both documentary and fictional works, a number approached the hitherto interdicted themes of homosexuality, transsexuality and transvestism.

This article proposes to investigate how and why titles such as Cambio de sexo/Change of Sex (Aranda, 1976), El transexual/The Transsexual (Jara, 1977), Ocaña, retrat intermitent/Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait (Pons, 1978) and Un hombre llamado Flor de Otoño/A Man Called Autumn Flower (Olea, 1978) came to stand as sites of transgression – that is, as ‘impertinent’ portraits – in a libertarian Spain. The eagerness of this transitional generation to make films based on previously prohibited themes was inevitably bound to face resistance from various quarters.