By Javier Fernández-Galeano
In 1963, police officers in Torremolinos received a torn pile of photographs from a Moroccan man under arrest. He had ripped them apart trying to destroy the evidence. The officers carefully reassembled the pieces with adhesive tape, like detectives reconstructing a puzzle, except that the pieces were explicit images of an interracial gay orgy. The reassembled photographs were then filed into a judicial dossier, where they have remained ever since. This strange scene — agents of a repressive Catholic dictatorship patiently reconstructing pornography with sticky tape — captures the central paradox at the heart of my book, Queer Obscenity: Erotic Archives in Dictatorial Spain (Stanford University Press, 2025). The Spanish state, in its zealous effort to suppress queer and non-normative sexuality, inadvertently created fascinating archives of dissident desire.
Researching the judicial records of Francoist Spain, I noticed something puzzling. The courts that enforced the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes (Law of Vagrants and Thugs, 1933, tightened to explicitly include homosexuality since 1954) had carefully preserved intimate photographs, love letters, and descriptions of non-normative sexual practices, all confiscated as evidence of “dangerousness”. But when I moved into records from the Ley de Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social (Law of Social Dangerousness and Rehabilitation, 1970), something was missing: mainstream pornography had been systematically destroyed, including heterosexual magazines, nude pin-ups, the equivalent of a Playboy stashed in a nightstand.
Why preserve queer erotica while destroying straight pornography? The answer reveals the inner logic of the Francoist repressive apparatus. Mainstream heterosexual pornography was compatible with normative masculinity: a married man who occasionally glanced at a dirty magazine could still act as a disciplined father and citizen. His transgression was forgettable, disposable. Queer desire, by contrast, was understood as an indelible mark, a permanent stain that needed to be documented, catalogued, and displayed before judges and prosecutors as proof of a contagious abject condition. The archive was a technology of power that paradoxically ended up preserving the very traces of queer life it set out to eradicate.
The Voyeur State and Queer Archives
The Primo de River and Franco regimes operated as involuntary pornographers. Courts required that erotic literature be read aloud in courtrooms and transcribed into judicial files, even as the original books were destroyed. A 1961 Supreme Court ruling determined that self-portrait photographs taken by two men with a camera’s self-timer and kept under lock and key were equivalent to having a scandalized witness in the room: the image itself prolonged the transgression. In 1962, a Madrid judge physically climbed onto a table to peer through a crack in a boarding-house wall to verify what sexual acts might be visible to an informant. While the state imposed invisibility on queer subjects, it simultaneously invested public resources in observing, recording, and filing their most intimate moments. Following Linda Williams’s foundational work on pornography and visibility, Hard Core (1989), I argue that Francoist authorities functioned as compulsive documentarians of the very sexuality they condemned.
The archive does not speak only through documents. It speaks through texture and materiality. Police reports describing confiscated dildos, rendered in bureaucratic prose as “plastic objects of obscene configuration”, betray an intimate, unsettling proximity to the objects of transgression. The officers who examined these items handled them, described them, and filed them away. The body hair found on confiscated sex toys, dutifully noted in reports, becomes a kind of abject trace, a remnant that collapses the distance between repressor and repressed.
The accidental dimension of these archives is equally important. The Biblioteca Arús in Barcelona, a historic anarchist and Masonic library shuttered to the public for nearly three decades after 1939, preserved in its locked collections the photographic albums of the intellectual Celso Gomis, featuring nude studies of men and women that blur into homoerotic scenes. The closure that was meant to suppress these images instead kept them safe. Similarly, a corpus of letters exchanged among a circle of queer friends in Granada was confiscated in 1966 following the suicide of a young woman in Barcelona, and thus entered the judicial record, where they survive today as a rich document of camp humour, sexual desire, and collective vulnerability. These letters, as Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of the “archive of feelings” invites us to understand them, register queer experience and collective trauma that official narratives systematically suppress.
Reading Against the Grain
Torremolinos, then as now a hub of international tourism on the Costa del Sol, appears throughout these archives as a space of particular interest to the morality police. The city’s foreign visitors introduced what local police reports nervously described as “exotic lubrications” that were seeping through Spain’s moral armour, carried by foreign currency and tourist bodies. Confiscated from international visitors were technologies of pleasure –dildos, condoms, magazines– that contrasted sharply with the sexual education promoted by National Catholicism. The queer Granadans who traveled to Torremolinos to enjoy greater sexual freedom left traces in these same police files.
Queer Obscenity proposes a method of reading these archives against their punitive grain, recovering not only evidence of repression, but also the affects, pleasures, and subjectivities that survived, residually, within judicial files. Following Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the collector, I suggest that erotic objects torn from their intimate contexts and scattered across judicial dossiers now form a constellation that enables new identifications across time.
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