Six survivors remember Spain's brutal anti-LGBT laws

Forty years ago Spain repealed the homophobic laws that branded LGBT people a “social danger”. Photojournalist Luca Gaetano Pira marks the anniversary by sharing the portraits and memories of six survivors.

Four decades have passed since the abolition of Spain’s so-called “Social Danger Laws” (ley de peligrosidad social) in 1978.

At the time, under dictator Francisco Franco, homosexuality was considered a threat to the ideal of a “macho” Spanish male and an attack on the morals and integrity of the Spanish people.

See below the stories of six survivors including a transgender woman born to a Roma family, one of the organisers of Spain’s first LGBT pride parade and a gay Carmelite priest.

Silvia Reyes was born in Gran Canaria in 1953 and arrived in Barcelona when she was 20. During the 70s being a man who wanted to be woman had a price. She says: “I had finished military service and I had already started to take hormones bought at the chemist.” Silvia was arrested three times during her first month and has been imprisoned more than 50 times in total. For a transgender person, it wasn’t safe to be in public – in the streets, or in bars or cinemas. “There were many raids and we had more bad luck than homosexuals, as they could blend in more easily than we could,” she says. In 1974 Silvia was a victim of another raid. “They put me in the prison of La Modelo in Barcelona, accusing me of transvestism. There, I spent a very bad period. Afterwards I was moved to the prison of Carabanchel in Madrid along with 38 other transgender people. During the move, they put us in isolation. I spent six months in Badajoz and I was arrested two more times in Madrid,” she says. ”Even at the police station, we were beaten and insulted, told that we were queers and deviants. We were left with no food or water.”

As a teenager, Antonio came out to his mother. His Catholic mother then went to confess to a nun who in turn reported Antonio to the police. It was 1976, Franco was already dead and Antonio was only 17. At 6am, four police officers arrived at his home to arrest him. Antonio spent three months in Badajos, a prison created by the regime to “cure” homosexuality. Badajos was used for the so called “passive men” (those considered to be sexually inactive), while Huelva prison was used for “active men”. He says: “In that prison, I was raped by another prisoner encouraged by the guards. One of them said ‘He’s a homosexual, you can do whatever you want’”. Antonio was then forced into exile from his home town as gay men were banished to live in solitude and misery. He is now the president of the Association for Social Ex-Prisoners (Asociación Ex-Presos Sociales).

It was 1970 when La Rampova was first arrested for homosexuality. She was 14. The police arrested her on a beach in her home town, Valencia. The second time, in Barcelona, she was 15 when she was arrested in a cinema by an undercover police officer. The third and last time she was arrested she was just 17. She says: “In the prison of Barcelona, they sent me to the queer section, where regular prisoners were paying the guards to open our cells and rape us. Afterwards we were beaten to demonstrate that they were not gay. They were coming up to eight times a day. I have experienced more rape than sexual intercourse.”

Miryam Amaya, a transgender woman, was born in Logroño in 1959 to a Roma family. She considers herself lucky for the support she has always had from her family. Ever since she was a child she had the freedom as a boy to wear the clothes of her older sisters. Spending a lifetime in showbusinesses, cabaret and television, Miryam says her mother was her biggest fan. Miryam was taken to the police station hundreds of times, but never transferred to a prison. After police raids, the young trans people were locked up in small cells where they were subjected to insults, beatings and humiliations. Miryam was one of the organisers of Spain's first gay pride parade, held in Barcelona in 1977, when the Law of Social Danger was still in force.

Born in Ibiza in 1939, Antonio Roig Roselló (now 78) became a Carmelite (a Roman Catholic religious order) priest and went on to write books about his sexuality. In 1977, he published “Todos los parques no son un paraíso” (All parks are not paradise), writing about his sexual experiences with other men in London’s parks. In 1978 he was expelled from the religious order. They left scorched earth around him. He now considers the Catholic Church to be a driving force in the marginalisation of LGBT people.

Antonio Sanchez - born in Madrid, 1947. Antonio, the son of a general Francoist, was raised in an ultraconservative and Catholic family. At the age of 13, his father took him to a psychiatrist to try to "cure" his homosexuality with electro-shock treatment. After a few years, Antonio’s father forced him to join the army believing the discipline would turn him into a "man". He soon escaped the army and Spain, settling in Paris, where he remained until a few years before the end of Franco's dictatorship.

Franco’s regime represented a period of severe persecution and oppression of Spain’s LGBT community (as well as of women and of the working class).

After the end of the civil war, many LGBT people were punished by the state simply for being gay.

They were imprisoned and tortured along with tens of thousands of political dissenters, anarchists and leftists.

Franco pursued a social model consisting of a submissive and accommodating woman, a masculine and dominant man (with no feminine traits) and the ever-present Catholic morals, used as a means of repression against gay people.

The “Social Danger Laws”, approved on 4 August 1970, included a list of punishments against gay and transgender people including confinement to asylums and banishment from their home towns.

These laws remained in force after the dictator’s death in 1975, but in 1978 a provision was created for the abolition of some clauses, among them the punishments for homosexuality.

Despite amnesties in 1976 and 1977 to free political prisoners, LGBT people remained in prisons and continued to be arrested during police raids.

And the Vagrancy Act (ley de Vagos y Maleantes), another law used by Franco’s regime to control and torture, was repealed only in 1996.

These homophobic laws saw many people sent to “colonies”, a softer term for concentration camps for gay people.

La Modelo jail in Barcelona

These “re-educational camps” were located in Badajoz and Huelva in south west Spain, and in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, the latter managed by priests.

Thousands of people experienced these camps, suffering hunger, torture and hard labour.

More than 5,000 people – in particular transgender people and gay men – were imprisoned and accused of “scandalous public behaviour” (escándalo público), labelled a danger to society.

The ruling powers designed the camps to correct their behaviour and their “deviency”.

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Many LGBT people were mistreated, tortured and sexually abused by other prisoners, or even forced into prostitution by the guards.

Simultaneously, lesbians were alienated and forced to become invisible to society.

They were removed from historical memory as women were not considered to have any sexuality under Franco’s regime.

Many different scientific disciplines joined forces to develop a legal medical treatment to eradicate homosexuality, and electro-shock and aversion therapy was born.

Using a series of images of men and women, this so-called therapy would administer an electric discharge to the patient each time the image of a man appeared.

These events, in living memory, must not be forgotten.

See six survivors of Spain’s LGBT persecution share their stories in the gallery above.