Here "couple" is plainly a heterosexual term since the homosexual, as usual, is isolated. Both in Crónica del desamor and in Montero's later novel, La función delta (The Delta Function [1981]), homosexuality--male in both cases--represents the ultimate impossibility of heterosexual relationships.

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Two additional Spanish novelists who take up the theme of homosexuality are Carmen Riera and Marta Portal.

Riera, like other writers who emerged in the post-Franco period, uses homosexuality as one tool among many to attack the repression of the former regime. Her Palabra de mujer (A Woman's Word [1980]) is a tale of love told through remembrances. The name of the remembered lover is withheld until the very end so that the reader is shocked to suddenly discover that she was a woman.

Portal turns to lesbianism in her 1983 novel, Un espacio erótico (An Erotic Space). The work revolves around Elvira, who has an erotic experience with her female cousin, Elena. This experience, like that of Tusquets's protagonist-narrator in El mismo mar, Martín in Laforet's Insolación, and Cernuda's poetic voice, has the effect of freeing the protagonist so that she can express herself as a writer.

Conclusion

Despite the liberalization of attitudes toward homosexuality that marks post-Franco Spain, gay men and lesbians are by no means fully accepted, either in real life or in literature.

It is important to emphasize that even in the works of recent gay or sympathetic authors, the homosexual is still rejected and marginalized by Spanish society. Complete, satisfactory integration remains an impossibility in both literature and life, but at least gay men and lesbians in these texts are given the option of change and growth.

The message seems to be that if redemption is to be found for the homosexual, it will come from within the self, and not from the surrounding community. The homosexual will be saved, not by being demarginalized and assimilated, but by consciously assuming his or her existence as outcast.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Inquisitions of Aragon and Portugal prosecuted almost 1500 trials for sodomy of various kinds.

Madrid, Spain's largest city, has a long history of official efforts to eradicate sexual and gender deviance, but has recently made great strides in the struggle for equality for its glbtq population.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church may be the institution most responsible for the suffering of individuals involved in same-sex sexual relationships.

From a particularly strong application of sodomy laws in the early modern period to a liberalization of sexual mores since the 1980s, Spanish society has displayed an ambivalent and complex relationship to sexual minorities.

Luis Cernuda, one of Spain's most important twentieth-century poets, expressed his homosexuality first indirectly and then explicitly in his poetry.

Catalina de Erauso, a seventeenth-century Basque woman who led the rough-and-ready life of a soldier, has been the subject of plays, novels, and films, some of which deny or obscure her lesbianism, others of which celebrate it.

The works of García Lorca, internationally recognized as Spain's most prominent lyric poet and dramatist of the twentieth century, are filled with thinly veiled homosexual motifs and themes.

The iconoclastic Juan Goytisolo, one of the most prominent literary figures in Spain, exalts homosexuality for rejecting repressive Hispanic social norms.

Spanish novelist Esther Tusquets brings a highly eroticized woman's voice to Spain's post-Civil War literature, employing lesbian characters to delineate the limits and possibilities of female sexual autonomy.