Patricia Langa parades on to an invisible stage in a basement room of Instituto Cervantes in central London, locked into the character of Conchita, an eternally grieving Spanish widow loosely based on the sorrowful heroines of Federico García Lorca’s 1936 play, The House of Bernarda Alba. Combining flamenco, lip-sync and poetry, the show imagines a funeral for the poet and playwright, 90 years since he was killed by Franco’s nationalist regime. His body was never found.
The performance feeds into a growing embrace of Lorca among Spain’s LGBTQ+ community. From viral Booktoks, drag memorials, documentaries, book clubs and, most recently, the Oscar-tipped film La Bola Negra, the Andalucían poet has emerged as an increasingly important queer icon in Spain. For Langa, studying Lorca’s work through a queer lens has led to a deeper, more personal, connection with it.
His first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, about the forbidden love between a cockroach and a butterfly, serves as one example. There is something quite magical about understanding these little tricks that he used to share something that maybe he publicly didn’t feel he was able to.” Born near Granada in 1898, Lorca rose to be one of Spain’s greatest writers in his lifetime. Although there was speculation about his homosexuality, allegedly a factor in his murder, Lorca was never openly gay.
Homosexuality was violently oppressed during the Franco regime, and Spain was one of the last western countries to decriminalise same-sex relations – sentences for which were only cleared in 2001. In the decades after Lorca’s death, any mention of Lorca’s queerness was hushed by his family and Spain’s literary circles – academics and writers who feared being denied access to the family’s archives and university resources, would pussyfoot around the topic as a result. Gibson refers to a biography written by Lorca’s brother, Francisco, published posthumously in 1980, as an example.
There is no allusion to his sexuality.” Gibson’s own groundbreaking biography of Lorca came out in 1985 to critical acclaim. In Berkana, a queer bookshop in Madrid’s gay Chueca district, copies of a pink-tinted reissue of the book from 2026 line the window display. La Piedra Oscura, the play by Alberto Conejero on which the film is based, has become an unlikely bestseller.
An Irishman who moved to Spain in the 1960s in pursuit of studying Lorca – and subsequently became a citizen – Gibson is honoured in La Bola Negra through the character played by Glenn Close. True to accounts of the film, his interest in conveying the truth around Lorca’s sexuality stems from his own personal circumstance: his brother, Alan, was gay, and died in a psychiatric clinic after a lifetime of trauma growing up in a puritanical methodist family in a wider closeted Irish society. And they’ll tell you across the right that he’s apolitical, but that’s bullshit.” Recently, Lorca’s queerness has also entered the Spanish political arena.
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