This chapter looks back through the earlier 1990s in Spain and the mini-boom of gay-themed films alluded to in the Introduction and Chapter 1, and beyond that into the past representations of lesbianism and male homosexuality on the Spanish screen. It does so in order to explore how film and cultural scholars have helped shape the question: what are the roots of Spanish queer cinema? A review of these studies and films will help establish which are the most significant precursors in Spain for a new period of queer film-making. I am also concerned to see to what extent this newer set of practices is embedded in compromises with the past (especially in commercial production) and to what extent pastness informs the production of new films and ideas as they, in turn, draw on the short history of Spanish queer film-making.

Pastness I understand to imply the use of heritage images, inherited ideas, a continuity of pride and indignation, an aesthetic and testimonial tradition, and a ‘correspondence with [and] disposition towards the past’ (Sargeant 2002: 203, 206). In the context of the pivotal, and monumental, documentation of LGTBQ cultures in Spain, Alberto Mira's Para entendernos. Diccionario de cultura homosexual, gay y lésbica (1999), the entry on Activism had made the polemical suggestion that nothing had yet been done to ‘apropriar la tradición cultural hispana para la causa gay’ (‘to appropriate Hispanic cultural tradition for the gay cause’) and to build a specifically Spanish agenda ‘basada en nuestra propia historia y en nuestra propia problemática’ (Mira and Vila 1999) (‘based on our own history and our own set of problems’).