Those of us who have worked on history from below know that no social change is brought about by a single person. But it is also true that sometimes there are people who, along with many others, play a very important role. Armand de Fluvià, who died early this Friday at the age of 92, is known by some as the father of the gay movement in Spain, and he did not lack merit for that title.
His name appears as a reference in the stories of many people who began their LGTBI activism in the underground. In a recent conversation, Lluís Rambla recalled that he came to the Spanish Gay Liberation Movement (MELH) because, in the midst of the dictatorship, he heard two people talking about demonstrations and conferences in a friendly bar. They were Armand de Fluvià and Germà Pedra who were discussing the consequences of the Stonewall riots in New York and opened the doors to political activism for him.
The president of the Trans Platform Federation, Mar Cambrollé, says that shortly after the creation of the Front d’Alliberament Gai de Catalunya (FAGC), she read an interview with Armand, under the pseudonym Roger de Gaimon, in the review The old moleand called the editorial office desperate to speak to her. He received her in Barcelona and on her return she was one of the founders of the Andalusian Homosexual Movement of Revolutionary Action.
In an interview with Vilaweb on the occasion of his 90th birthday, recalling the influence of the FAGC in the creation of other fronts in the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and the Basque Country, De Fluvià compared himself to Saint Teresa of Jesus: “She founded gay convents there “where I went”.
Armand de Fluvià was born in 1931 into a wealthy family. On his father’s side, he came from a heritage of artists, on his mother’s side, from a family of the Catalan metal industry. He studied law, but devoted himself to genealogy and heraldry, a field in which he was the great reference in Catalonia and in which he also achieved international recognition. His first political activism had little to do with LGBTI rights. He was imprisoned twice under the Franco regime, but never for homosexuality. The first was because he was a monarchist; His anti-Francoism included defending Juan de Borbón as head of state, although with gay activism he also changed his political positions. The second took place during the student revolt of 1957 in the auditorium of the University of Barcelona.
In 1969, the Francoist Cortes began to debate the draft law on dangerousness and social rehabilitation, which was to replace the law on vagrants and criminals of the Republic, to which the regime had incorporated homosexuality in 1954. At that time, De Fluvià recalled, homosexuality was “the condition that disgusted and repelled everyone.” In February 1970, together with Francesc Francino, he sent an anonymous letter to all the bishops, lawyers in the Cortes, signed by “a group of Spanish homophiles,” against the criminalization of “a large number of Spanish men and women, whose only defect is to have been born with or possess a sexual characteristic whose antiquity dates back to the origins of humanity.
They also collaborate with André Baudry, director of the French homophile magazine Arcadiato send documents on homosexuality to all the lawyers of the Cortes. Thanks to this first activism, and although today we know little about it, Armand de Fluvià celebrated what was, at the age of 38, a first victory in the fight for LGBTI rights in the State: the finally approved version of the law. It was not about the simple fact of being homosexual, but rather the commission of acts – plural – of homosexuality.
That same year they founded the Spanish Homosexual Liberation Movement, “to proselytize among friends and acquaintances,” which met clandestinely in different groups, one of them in the apartment on Rambla Catalunya where Armand had lived all his life. In January 1972 they began publishing a newsletter, Aghoisthat they printed with a multicopier that he had installed in the coal cellar of his house and sent from France. “I will always remember the first turns of the crank, my legs were shaking and I said to Francesc: the risk is“Do you realize that from now on we are criminals?” he recalled in a 2017 interview for the project. The pink thread.
From the Aghois 18 issues were published and it had 209 subscribers, whom Armand de Fluvià wanted to call heroes. One of his friends, who was about 70 years old at the time, refused to subscribe and told him: “Please don’t send me anything, because I live with my sister and if she finds out…”. “I feel powerless to express the atmosphere of panic that reigned at that time,” Armand stressed during the interview. “It is impossible that today your generation can understand the climate in which we homosexuals lived, we lived in panic and self-hatred.”
A revolutionary movement
It was also at MELH that Armand made a political shift, largely influenced by the lesbian activist Amanda Klein, then a member of the PSUC. “He started coming to MELH meetings and told us that there was a dominant ideology in the world, both capitalist and socialist, which was sexist, sexist and heterosexist,” he recalls. He made them start reading something else, starting with Engels, and for Armand this represented a radical change: “I came from a conservative world, and my homosexuality radically changed my way of thinking; I was Catholic and now I’m an atheist, I was very Spanish and now I’m a pro-independence activist, I was very modest and now I’m a nudist, I’m also a vegetarian… everything that makes you a weirdo,” he noted in the conversation.
This change was not only experienced by Armand, but by the entire movement, and with the death of the dictator the MELH gave way to the Front d’Alliberament Gai de Catalunya, an organization of a revolutionary nature, which no longer sought only the acceptance of homosexuality but also to overthrow the established order. The examination of the minutes of the first meetings of the FAGC, carefully preserved by Armand and deposited in the National Archive of Catalonia, shows a generation of committed activists who dedicated hours and hours of their weeks to the clandestine – since the FAGC was not legalized until 1980 – to build a revolutionary homosexual organization. On January 26, 1977, they called the first demonstration of homosexual liberation in the Spanish state. Armand de Fluvià was present at the New York demonstration, representing the FAGC with a senyera, and was able to see the success of his colleagues through the American press.
Alongside the FAGC, Armand de Fluvià was also the founder of the Lambda Institute, now Casal Lambda, to create a safe space also for homosexuals who had no interest in activism. Years later, in 2008, he was one of the promoters of the Enllaç Foundation, which defends the rights of LGTBI elderly people.
A preserved memory
The last time I had the opportunity to interview Armand de Fluvià, last year, his memory was already fragile. However, he continues to recite the great stages of the homosexual liberation movement like an epic. In the conversation recorded for the Historical Archive of the City of Barcelona, he regretted not remembering certain things. “My memory is already failing me, fortunately I have a diary that goes from the first things I know since I was born, from what they told me, until today, which I continue.” I was digitizing them and they will be deposited, with all their archives and library, in the National Archive of Catalonia. “I will be 92 years old and I have to prepare these things, because if not, later, those who live will do what they want, although I know that my husband will take care of it.”
Consulting the collection of the gay movement deposited by Armand in the archives is an exciting experience. The letter sent to the bishops in 1970, the first AGHOIS bulletin of 1972, the minutes of the FAGC meetings, publications with homosexual themes from all over the world… “I do not like to destroy, I like to conserve, and thanks to the conservation of “these things, we can write history”, he said. His interest in this history was not limited to his personal archives and those of the organizations in which he participated. A few weeks ago, I discovered that when Patricio Peñalver, a gay activist and activist from the Ca n’Oriach neighborhood of Sabadell, died, Armand was in charge of collecting his papers to also deposit them in the archives. He insisted that we have a very complete baggage so that no one can deny our history.
In a movement marked from its beginnings by divergences and by the challenge of recognizing the different axes of inequality within sexual and gender diversity, Armand has been, beyond the differences, an indisputable reference. In a conversation last year, he said that in 1970 they could not imagine what had been achieved until today, “but that’s what we wanted.” Regarding the future, he was optimistic: “I think the world always takes two steps forward and one step back, but in the end, it always moves forward.” And on his career? “We did what we had to do, of course, we could have done more, but we did everything we could.”
