August 19, 1936, 90 years ago: Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet, playwright and theater director, is assassinated near Alfacar, Granada, in the southern region of Spain, known as Andalusia. He was 38 years old.
Born on on June 5, 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, outside Granada, García Lorca gained fame as a member of "The Generation of '27," a group of Spanish poets that tapped into the European literary movements of symbolism, futurism and surrealism. In 1928, he published Romancero Gitano (which was translated into English with what would now be considered a slur, Gypsy Ballads). He published the plays Blood Wedding in 1932, Yerma in 1934, and The House of Bernarda Alba in 1936.
But success did not fulfill him. He was gay, and suffered from depression after the end of a relationship with a sculptor. The coming of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 weighed heavily on him. He was a Socialist, like the prevailing government, the Second Republic that first won election in 1931. But the Nationalists, fascists, led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, were unfavorable to socialism due to its criticism of religion, and, with its strong Catholic base, unfavorable to homosexuals.
His hometown of Granada had gone without a Mayor for several months, because all possible candidates feared for their lives. García Lorca's brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, agreed to accept the position, but he was assassinated within a week. On the same day he was shot, August 18, García Lorca was arrested.
The circumstances of his death are in dispute, partly because his remains have never been found. In his book The Assassination of García Lorca, author Ian Gibson wrote that he was shot -- with 3 others: Joaquín Arcollas Cabezas, Francisco Galadí Melgar and Dióscoro Galindo González -- by Nationalist militia at the Fuente Grande (the Great Spring), on the road between Viznar and Alfacar.
Police reports released by radio station Cadena SER in April 2015, concluded that he was executed by fascist forces. A Franco-era report, dated July 9, 1965, describes the writer as a "socialist" and "freemason belonging to the Alhambra lodge," who engaged in "homosexual and abnormal practices."
Most biographers seem to agree that his death had political overtones. But Leslie Stainton, who wrote the 1999 biography Lorca: A Dream of Life, suggested that he was killed specifically because he was gay -- a murder, and a hate crime, but not an assassination.
He has been honored with statues in his hometown of Granada, and the national capital of Madrid; with a garden on the River Seine in Paris; in a hotel room where he once stayed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kept as a museum; and on the Rainbow Honor Walk, in the gay-friendly Castro District of San Francisco.
He once said, "I will always be on the side of those who have nothing, and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace." Sounds like my kind of guy.
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