The illness that dare not speak its name: HIV/AIDS in Gil de Biedma’s diaries

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes the implications of illness and queerness for the identity Gil de Biedma constructs through his personal diary of 1985. This is a unique case of a Spanish author providing a complex picture of the effect of HIV/AIDS on his own life and work. In addition, the author’s diaries are a rare example of Spanish autobiographical writing on illness. Gil de Biedma kept several diaries throughout his life. The last diary, titled “Diario de 1985”, is an account of his stay at a French hospital while undergoing treatment for Kaposi’s sarcoma. This short diary offers crude yet insightful material on human illness, suffering and the stigma of HIV/AIDS in Spain during the 1980s. By close reading a selection of fragments of the author’s diary, utilizing an approach that combines psychoanalysis and social history, this paper exposes the connections between illness, sexuality and identity in Gil de Biedma’s autobiographical writing. This paper claims that Gil de Biedma (un)consciously represses naming the illness in his diaries while being very descriptive about the physical symptoms of AIDS and its treatment. This evidences the brutal social and familial pressure to conform to a certain identity, ultimately giving way to a very particular symbiosis between the author’s literary persona and his bourgeois self.

KEYWORDS:

• AIDS
• diary
• life-writing
• illness
• homosexuality

Introduction

Jaime Gil de Biedma’s diaries present an author’s struggle to define his identity through the writing of his own life. This paper will look at Gil de Biedma’s diary entries on illness, examining how the author conceptualizes his suffering from HIV/AIDS. It will also delve into the implications of illness and queerness in Gil de Biedma’s diaries and the impact of illness in the construction of the author’s identity. Illness in the works of Jaime Gil de Biedma, and its strong link with ageing and the passing of time, is connected to important themes throughout the author’s personal diaries. For example, I argue that his sexuality, social class and relationship to the colonial other are intertwined in his notions and feelings around his often-ill body and mind. By utilizing the author’s personal diaries, which have received little critical attention so far, this paper focuses on the personal narration of lived experiences of illness, providing insight into the author’s strategies to construct and project his authorial identity in light of his suffering from HIV/AIDS and within his historical and social context. Additionally, this article explains the interconnections between a number of discourses about AIDS and homosexuality that were operating in Spanish society during the 1980s and that appear either explicitly or implicitly in Gil de Biedma’s life-writing work.

Gil de Biedma’s “Diario de 1985” contains a scarce sixteen pages describing his first course of treatment at the Bichat-Claude Bernard hospital in Paris (Jaume 2017, 61). They are, unlike his other diaries, written in a somewhat formulaic chronological order, following on a day-by-day basis his activities, thoughts and treatment from 21 October until 1 November. Each entry starts with the date and sums up a recollection of the day’s activities, unlike previous diaries where the author chose to follow a free style. The content of this last diary is lean and monotonous, yet it still shows the poet’s characteristic use of irony. It is also very medically oriented, describing specific medication and treatment as well as his fears; there is a lack of poetic references (Jaume 2017, 62) and an abundance of anguish. This diary represents a unique testimony of a Spanish poet’s first encounter with treatment for AIDS.

This article explores the strategies of representation of AIDS in Gil de Biedma’s diary, linking them to the author’s life and thought, as well as to notions of social class, politics and literary aesthetics. The main methodological approach of this paper involves close reading of the “Diario de 1985” and establishing a dialogue with critical theory approaches to AIDS and with some contemporaries of Gil de Biedma who likewise explore their position as PWA (people with AIDS) in their works. There are a number of discourses related to homosexuality and AIDS that are imbricated in Gil de Biedma’s diary writing. These discourses were functioning in the public sphere and Gil de Biedma likely knew about them. On this topic, Dean Allbritton asserts:

AIDS wasn’t exactly invisible – as early as 1983, as we have seen, the general public knew precisely where it was, who had it, and, according to the logic of the time, who would suffer from it. (2016, 154)

From the idea of the seropositive male homosexual and the shame it brought, in relation to controversial cases such as Rock Hudson’s, through to a medical discourse revolving around heroin consumption in Spain in the 1980s and the exoticization of the disease enacted by the Spanish Government when it placed the blame on foreign – primarily American and African – countries (Allbritton 2016, 155), Gil de Biedma’s “Diario de 1985” evidences the complexity of living with HIV/AIDS during the Spanish transition to democracy.

Indeed, the 1980s were a time of rapid change for Spanish society. Duncan Wheeler posits that “in some but not all respects, Spain skipped modernity and went from being a premodern to a postmodern society” (2020, 70). Gil de Biedma’s role in this change was ambivalent: on the one hand, he was aligned with more traditional values, especially because of his upper-class background (to which he always remained firmly attached) and, consequently, his day job as a lawyer. At the same time, he engaged in the process of modernization of Spanish society in the late-twentieth century by way of his reflections on his own social class, the Catalan bourgeoisie. His ideas about the bourgeoisie were conflicting, ranging from acceptance to rejection, as Carme Riera explains (1988, 31). Gil de Biedma had sympathy for the Communist Party, which he tried to join in 1958, but he was not admitted because of his homosexuality, according to Juan Goytisolo (quoted in Riera 1988, 309). This link to left-wing politics indicated a clear rejection of the political inclinations of his family, who supported the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War and had monarchist tendencies (Riera 1988, 309). This explains why part of Gil de Biedma’s lyrical work deals with a critique of Spain’s social inequality. This thematic interest evolves over time in his poetry towards what Riera describes as the “sujeto poético adopta[ndo] siempre una actitud burguesa” (1998, 348). This bourgeois attitude is increasingly present in the author’s diaries as he becomes older; in the “Diario de 1985”, Gil de Biedma’s intellectual bourgeois character is evident in the description of the Bichat-Claude Bernard hospital in Paris, which starts with a walk to the hospital on a dark, windy October day when he is admitted under a pseudonym, Jaime Costos Sánchez (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 625). The secrecy, exemplified by his use of a pseudonym and his choice of admission in a foreign hospital, demonstrates his subjective response to the social scare worldwide towards HIV/AIDS; however, this social situation needs to be contextualized in the Spanish social and cultural context of the 1980s.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic can be considered a foundational crisis of the Spanish democratic system, as José Pablo Barragán signals (2017). Allbritton describes how the epidemic was “passed off as a niche illness, one that could only strike a certain subset of the non-normal, deviant, or hedonistic” (2016, 145). Despite the atrocious number of victims of the virus, the cultural response to it was scarce, with a few exceptions, mainly in poetry (Barragán 2017). These include Aníbal Núñez, who died in 1987 and wrote about his suffering from HIV/AIDS the year before his death; or Pepe Espaliú, who died in 1993 and whose diaries and works include references to his diagnosis and convalescence with HIV/AIDS. Gil de Biedma stopped publishing poetry a long time before the AIDS epidemic, in the late 1960s. In addition, in his lyrical work Gil de Biedma had never really addressed the topic of illness: instead, the passage of time, politics, ambiguous love and the city of Barcelona represent some of the main themes of his poetry. Gil de Biedma does, however, write at length about illness in his diaries: first about tuberculosis in his “Diario de 1956”, which Robert Richmond Ellis (2007), for example, interprets not so much as a prefiguration of AIDS but rather of the death of the author as poet, as represented by the title of his Poemas póstumos (first published in 1968, long before his death). Gil de Biedma’s diaries record nearly thirty years, from 1956 up to 1985, and thus include the author’s most prolific period of poetry writing as well as the time after his poetic “death”. Interestingly, from a stylistic point of view, Gil de Biedma’s life-writings on illness are aligned with his interest in the poetry of experience, with a thematic focus on everyday life and on “[tener] el mismo sentido que una carta comercial” in Ferrater’s words (quoted in Riera 1998, 60). This interest in the quotidian contrasts with the fact that most of the literature about HIV/AIDS in Spain, mainly poetry, shows neobaroque stylistic strategies. According to Barragán, this is because it deals with an epistemic crisis, with a crisis of knowledge about the illness itself (2017, 626). Barragán also identifies a decentring of the subject in Spanish poetry about AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Gil de Biedma’s “Diario de 1985” presents, however, a tension with regards to the subject: the narrative itself is centered around the ill subject in the first person, perhaps aligned with more classic, confessional modes of life-writing; yet the ending of this diary, as discussed below, rejects confessionalism and is written in the third person. This points to the constitution of the subject based on a range of positionalities: writer, self, author, intellectual, person with HIV/AIDS, patient, son. This subjective multiplicity can be traced in all of Gil de Biedma’s literary work, both lyrical and diaristic, as shown by his famous identities as Hijo de Dios and hijo de vecino: together they exemplify the range of his self-identification, with the former signalling a God-like self-importance and the latter an embodiment of the Spanish everyman. Gil de Biedma struggled throughout his life to reconcile all the different subjective positions that formed his identity. For instance, the author’s identity as a poet was at odds with his day job as a lawyer for Tabacos de Filipinas, yet his double nature was well integrated into his identity, as Quesada Sánchez highlights (2023).

Before concluding this introduction, it is important to highlight the choice of primary material for this research: a diary. David Vilaseca posits that autobiographical writings “[draw] our attention to the ‘crafted’, inevitably constructed and ‘performative’ nature of any notion of identity as ‘wholeness’, ‘truth’ and transparency to (One)self” (2003, 27). More recently, Rafael Mérida proposes that the study of personal diaries, from a gender studies approach, would reveal the (misogynist and homophobic, but also heteropatriarchal) reasons why diaries written by women and sexually dissident people take a long time to be published, if ever, and are often not given much attention (2022). Jaime Gil de Biedma’s diary writing veers between modernity and postmodernity, presenting a divided subject whose sexual life is analyzed in as much detail as his intellectual life, and whose ill self becomes as prominent as his bourgeois persona. A close examination of the diary entries, from the point of view of illness and sexual identity, allows us to tease out the different identitarian positions that are constitutive of Gil de Biedma’s life-writing subject. For that reason, life-writing can help deepen our understanding of the discourses that affect social understandings of illness and their consequences for individuals, as well as show how these individuals use autobiographical narratives as a way of processing their suffering and enduring the stigma related to illnesses such as HIV/AIDS.

The order of AIDS discourse

The “Diario de 1985” is a short, sober and laconic depiction of Gil de Biedma’s first month in a hospital in Paris receiving treatment for Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the main types of cancer affecting those who are HIV positive. Andreu Jaume in his introduction to the author’s diaries wonders whether Gil de Biedma might have intended to keep on writing this diary in the following years, although he eventually gave up (Jaume 2017, 62). What is clear is that the feeling that death is getting closer is apparent throughout this diary, despite the fact that it would not happen until five years later. It is a diary full of anguish.

As Ellis has argued, “AIDS is the overdetermining condition of the homo-act and of all homos, both sero-positive and sero-negative, precisely because the positive/negative binary has itself been collapsed through a social discourse that conflates the gay male and AIDS bodies” (1997, 15). In other words, AIDS and homosexuality, regardless of the true status of the person behind these terms, become part of the same discourse by virtue of their association. Indeed, some considered HIV/AIDS the rightful punishment for sinners, such as gay people and prostitutes. Indeed, homosexual identity was pathologized in medical terms in the nineteenth century, and the conflation of AIDS and homosexuality in the late-twentieth century echoed these well-rooted stereotypes of gay men as ill.

The aim of this section is to ascertain to what extent Gil de Biedma’s ideas and feelings about illness follow or reject the tight knot established between homosexuality and AIDS. It is essential to note that, in 1985, AIDS in Spain had only recently been publicly acknowledged: the first case, having appeared in 1981 in the hospital Vall d’Hebron in Barcelona, remained undiagnosed as such until March 1982 when “the physician’s report of this case was published in … The Lancet” (Allbritton 2023, 37) following that patient’s death (De Miguel 1991). In addition, in the 1980s up to 63 percent of Spanish cases were diagnosed in those identified as drug addicts, with only 17 percent being homosexuals and a tiny 3 percent being identified as both homosexual and drug addict (De Miguel 1991, 78). Of course, it would be interesting to know how those categories were assigned to people and what degree of privacy they had when reporting their sexuality and drug consumption habits. Nevertheless, it seems as if AIDS in Spain in the 1980s appeared more in connection with drug users, as the consumption of intravenous heroin was an issue throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Spain. Therefore, it is safe to assume that the discourse of AIDS in Spain, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, did not necessarily exhaust the reference to male homosexuality, in a similar way to what Lee Edelman already posited in the following excerpt:

“AIDS”, then, resists our attempts to inscribe it as a manageable subject of writing – exceeding and eluding the medical, sociological, political, or literary discourses that variously attempt to confront or engage it – to the extent that as an historical phenomenon in the so-called Western democracies it has itself taken shape – has been given shape – as that which writes or articulates another subject altogether: a subject whose content is suggested but not exhausted by reference to “male homosexuality”. (Edelman 1994, 94)

In other words, AIDS in Gil de Biedma’s “Diario de 1985” cannot be exclusively interpreted through the discourse of the seropositive male homosexual, for such a discourse was not the only one operating in Spanish society at this time. Moreover, AIDS was still at this time an unknown condition – both at a medical and popular level – whose prognosis, treatment, spread and origin were subject to the wildest speculations, from divine punishment to state-created biological weapon against homosexuals. Therefore, Gil de Biedma’s discourse (or perhaps the lack thereof) about AIDS has to be analyzed in the light of a more general discussion about identity, illness and social class. This is not to say that there is no connection between the treatment of homosexuality and AIDS in the writings of Gil de Biedma – secrecy being paramount for both – but rather that this section of the paper will look at the wider array of discourses that form the author’s ideas and experience of AIDS in the social, political and historical context of 1985. This approach is predicated on Lee Edelman’s notion that AIDS cannot “function as the subject of our writing since ‘AIDS’ is ideologically constructed as a form of writing itself: as an inscription of difference whose ‘subject’ is always the subject of ideology” (Edelman 1994, 93). At this point, it must be acknowledged that Edelman’s theoretical approach to AIDS was constructed in the 1990s in the United States, a time and place where there was more awareness, knowledge and activism about the virus and its consequences. Paul Julian Smith in his edited collection Vision Machines highlights the fact that Spain in the 1990s still had the “highest increase in rate of HIV transmission in Europe [and] the second highest incidence of HIV infection of any European Union country” (1997, 101). Despite the contextual differences between my choice of theory and primary material, I propose a discursive reading of the treatment of AIDS in Gil de Biedma’s diaries partly based on Edelman’s ideas, because they are useful to understand the development of the subject in the face of an illness that bears ineluctable marks of stigma and shame even to this day. Admittedly, there is a historical tension between Edelman’s theories and Gil de Biedma’s sociohistorical situation; this is acknowledged and analyzed so that both sides can be integrated. Ultimately, this psychoanalytical, rhetorical approach is put in conversation with some of the Spanish literary and theoretical approaches to AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s. The questions that I will subsequently answer are: of what ideology is Gil de Biedma the subject and how does this ideology inform his literary and existential engagement with AIDS.

The “Diario de 1985” starts in Paris on 21 October, the first night Gil de Biedma spends at the hospital Bichat-Claude Bernard. He is looking out of the window at a dark, grey and windy city. Far from his earlier, colourful descriptions of Manila or Barcelona, Paris remains in the rainy darkness of these autumnal days. Indeed, this diary will not look at city life at all, for the author was not able to enjoy it during his internment at the hospital. Once he is settled, he narrates an example of the feared “noria de médicos, enfermeras, radiografías y parientes” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 240), which he wrote about when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1956:

Entra [Jean-Pierre] Coulaud a saludarme un momento. Vuelve al cabo de un rato rodeado de ayudantes e internos. Habla del tratamiento a seguir aquí –diez o catorce días– y en Barcelona. … Sucesivamente van viniendo luego enfermeras e internos a tomarme sangre y a pincharme para hacer reacciones. (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 626)

Upon comparing those two quotes, one cannot help but notice the repetitious nature of human experience. There is a fatal quality to both quotes, whose connection points at a foreshadowing of destiny in life writing. The idea of time and destiny is central to Gil de Biedma’s process of creating his identity. In their respective studies of the poet’s subjectivity in his Diario del artista en 1956 (2017), Vilaseca (2003) and Ellis (1997) already highlighted the paradoxical nature of destiny with regards to the author’s status as a poet, the latter saying, “to be true to himself [Gil de Biedma] must become what he already is” (Ellis 1997, 58). In a similar vein, to stay true to his illness and ultimately to himself, Gil de Biedma had to go again through the monotonous, bureaucratic machine of the medical system. In this diary, the author experiments with the description of his medical environment, his treatment and their effects on his health and subjectivity, as opposed to the more literary inclination found in earlier diaries.

This crude vision of the experience of the ill body resonates with other artistic and philosophical works about AIDS at the time, such as Espaliú’s artistic work, or Alberto Cardín’s theoretical oeuvre. As to Espaliú, Smith remarks that his most mature sculptural work is very conceptual, “elusive and enigmatic” (1998, 114), and thus determining its value as divulgation or activism about AIDS can be problematic. However, Espaliú’s diaries on AIDS were recently edited by Jesús Alcaide and published by La Bella Varsovia, and in these writings the artist clearly and vibrantly analyzes the details of being a PWA and, moreover, an artist with HIV/AIDS. However, as a contrast to Gil de Biedma’s unnamed approach to AIDS, as I shall discuss below, Espaliú directly addresses homosexuality and AIDS from the start, saying soon after the beginning of the diary: “El sida es ese pozo por donde hoy escalo ladrillo a ladrillo, tiznando mi cuerpo al tocar sus negras paredes” (2018, 21). This is a much more poetic approach to AIDS, unlike Gil de Biedma’s, which is factual, medical and does not name the illness. Both accounts are similar in that they were private diaries that were not made public until many years after the death of their respective authors, and these diaries reflect their individual ways of communicating their diagnosis: Espaliú openly shared it in interviews and talks, whereas Gil de Biedma only confided it to his closest friends.

Cardín is an interesting figure at the time. In contrast with Gil de Biedma’s secretiveness, Cardín made public his HIV status in 1985 and lived openly with AIDS until 1991, when he died (Smith 1997, 473): a very similar timeframe to that of Gil de Biedma, who was diagnosed in 1985 and died in 1990. Given that Cardín was popular in the intellectual circles of Barcelona, where he was a lecturer in cultural anthropology, and considering that he was friends with prominent (if controversial) figures such as Federico Jiménez Losantos, it would be right to assume that Gil de Biedma must have known about Cardín. They belonged, however, to very different cultural milieus. Gil de Biedma was connected to La Gauche Divine and La escuela de Barcelona, both of which signify his adhesion to a respected, bourgeois environment. Cardín, who was twenty years younger than Gil de Biedma, was aligned with Lacanian psychoanalitic circles and, as Smith suggests, the anthropologist’s main quality was to “provoke embarrassment” (1997, 474). Cardín developed a theoretical framework about HIV/AIDS, which he developed in his two rather controversial collections: Sida: ¿Maldición bíblica o enfermedad letal? (1985) and Sida: Enfoques alternativos (1991). In those two works, according to Smith, Cardín “[proposes] an ethics of the subject in its deployment of the body, which sets the individual’s choice of self-destruction in the pursuit of private pleasure against the state’s putative right to intervene to preserve the life of its citizens” (Smith 1998, 110). The connection between Cardín’s idea of the body as central to the understanding of illness in general and of AIDS in particular is very suggestive when compared with Gil de Biedma’s insistence on giving the body, the symptoms and the medication center stage in his “Diario de 1985”. For Gil de Biedma, in a way that is similar to Cardín in this respect, the suffering body is essential to understand the suffering of AIDS and of illness, over and beyond any theoretical symbolization of the social and cultural context of the virus. However, Cardín’s work on HIV/AIDS is mainly theoretical and academic, as opposed to Gil de Biedma’s diaristic, literary approach.

Nevertheless, as important as the body is in Gil de Biedma’s narrative of AIDS, his mental health status is also key to understanding his identity in relation to the illness. As soon as Gil de Biedma settles down in the hospital, he writes about the fact that his anxiety has disappeared. He explains that being treated for his condition has an immediately calming effect (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 626). That relief he felt was connected to the anonymity he enjoyed during his stay in Paris. Gil de Biedma was very worried about the rumors going around in Barcelona about his health – he was adamant that he should keep his illness a secret (hence why, again, it was never named) – and his return to Barcelona would oblige him to confront this much-feared gossip. This was a delicate point for the author, as will be discussed in more detail in the next section. He had decided to keep his illness a secret under whatever circumstances, to the point that he establishes a comparison between his physical death and his death by the discovery of his secrets: “en lo uno y en lo otro, si salgo adelante será por el canto de un duro” (629). This conflation of the subject’s death and actual death can be interpreted in terms of Žižek’s Lacanian notion of the subject’s misrecognition, whereby “the self exists only on the basis of the misrecognition of its own conditions” (Žižek 2008, 73). In this case, Gil de Biedma’s sharp, reflective eye is quick to recognize that his public persona (in the guises of the gentleman, the businessman or the intellectual) is based on keeping a secret. On the one hand, his homosexuality was not that much of a secret, as the author himself admitted to Dionisio Cañas that two different, unscrupulous journalists had published on his homosexuality as if Gil de Biedma himself had brought up the topic (Gil de Biedma 2010, 446). There is a paradox here for, if the author’s word is to be believed, his homosexuality had already been made public twice. Therefore, why was he so worried about this topic becoming public? The answer to this question relies on the game of misrecognition that is at the core of the self. Only by playing the part and not admitting the real kernel of his sexuality publicly could Gil de Biedma’s self-created image continue existing. Indeed, his whole life and poetic work are based on an ambiguous take on sexuality and desire.

On the other hand, the author kept his illness secret as it was essential to keeping his homosexuality a secret too. By 1985 in Spain, HIV/AIDS was strongly connected by the media to homosexual sex (Allbritton 2023). Social stigma was a good reason not to divulge his condition. In 1985, suffering from AIDS, Gil de Biedma does not misrecognize the importance of the secret; instead, he is fully aware that behind the uncovering of the truth, there is nothing but the end of his intellectual, bourgeois self, as well as the end of his life. Additionally, and quite importantly for Gil de Biedma’s social context, Rock Hudson died of AIDS related causes earlier in the month of October 1985 in which he began this diary. While there are no specific mentions of this event in these writings, it is very likely that he was aware of this highly-publicized case: Hudson was the first major celebrity to die of AIDS-related causes. Gil de Biedma’s worry, thus, was likely connected to and exacerbated by this event.

The end is getting closer, although the impact of the medical treatment somewhat alleviates Gil de Biedma’s fear of death, which seems to let up temporarily in this first night at hospital. Gil de Biedma feels “sensualmente tan bien” (Gil de Biedma and Jaume 2017, 626), an interesting choice of words, for it would seem that there is a certain sexual attraction, perhaps a jouissance, to his slight recovery. This will, however, not last long. He describes his state soon after as “un estado de hiperestesia en cuanto asuntos de vida y muerte” (634). That state of hypersensitivity ranges from an occasional hopeful vision of his future (637) to the author’s wondering whether he will be able to carry on with his treatment in Barcelona (639). It is remarkable that the author starts to record different times throughout the day in this diary, often very precisely. For instance, “termino de escribir esto a las siete y media” (626), “son las siete y cuarto de la tarde” (627) or “a las tres de la madrugada” (635). Gil de Biedma is trying to squeeze time, because he is too aware that it is lacking. As the author himself wrote in his poem “De senectute”, the penultimate one in his last collection: “No es el mío, este tiempo” (Gil de Biedma 2017a, 197). Neither time, nor this time, belongs to the author anymore. Instead, what is left for Gil de Biedma is a constant worry that is directed in the first place towards his return to Barcelona.

At this point, Gil de Biedma construes Barcelona as a place of gossip and rumors. He was surprised to learn that his future treatment will remain the same when he returns home, rather than becoming easier (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 629). Such a realization fills Gil de Biedma with worry and concern to the extent that he feels in “un estado agudo de inquietud y tensión nerviosa” (2017, 629). In his diary entry on 23 October, the author shows a fear of death, which he masks by concerning himself with the logistical affairs of his return home. In Gil de Biedma’s words, “mis inmediatas obsesiones de orden práctico … no son sino modos de esquivar –desahogándola vicariamente– la otra obsesión y el otro miedo” (2017b, 630). This can be read again as a reference to the poem quoted above, its two last lines being: “Ya nada temo más que mis cuidados. / De la vida me acuerdo, pero dónde está” (Gil de Biedma 2017a, 197). Now, as in 1968 when that poem was published, Gil de Biedma’s fear is directed towards his treatment. There is a similarity between the dissolution of the secret analyzed above and this idea of treatment: both involve a change in the way the Other will relate to the author. By enduring the medical treatment, Gil de Biedma has to give up on his identity to become, as in 1956 with his tuberculosis, a mere eunuch (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 247). The connections between sexuality, body and illness in Gil de Biedma are complex and a source of preoccupation for the author during his entire life. Already in 1956, diagnosed with tuberculosis, Gil de Biedma explores his sexual appetite, as well as the opportunity to write that a long period provided him. Back in 1956, he was able to use the space opened up by illness to embrace literature and writing. That is, however, not possible anymore, for the writing self died with his Poemas póstumos (Gil de Biedma 2017a, 163). For that reason, his diary writing cannot hide behind the mask of the intellectual or the poet: it is a tool to work through his own approach to life. Yet the chasm of time opened by his hospital stay exposes more clearly the fact that life is escaping the author. It is as though he has forgotten where life is: his old self’s life being writing. Indeed, literary craft does not form part of this latest instance of Gil de Biedma’s diary.

The pages of this diary are full of everyday references to sleeping, reading and medication. Interspersed between numerous naps and sleepless nights, Gil de Biedma reads a selection of the novels of Henry James, one of his favourite authors, and the works of Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist who offered a vision of capitalist societies progressing towards socialism (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 631). The author does not hesitate to sing the praises of the socialist state, in a return to his beliefs of youth, and this time without a trace of irony. The tone of the author in this last instance of his writing does not show any traces of his characteristic camp perspective (González Montero 2022); quite the opposite, as there is a certain gravitas to the subject of the diary whose gaze turns to the daily bits of reading and offers some insights on time and death. However, despite the general lack of irony, Gil de Biedma is still a perceptive traveller with a flair for the analysis of cultural differences. Halfway through his stay, he compares the Spanish and French private healthcare systems; of course, for a cosmopolitan bourgeois man like him, there is a great deal of attraction to the foreign, to the difference offered by, in this case, France. In addition, the access to this type of healthcare is a sign of Gil de Biedma’s privilege. Curiously, the author remarks that the warmth and kindness of the nurses at the clinic may be due to the fact that they are from Martinique, an island in the Caribbean and one of France’s overseas departments. Here, one may see straight away the colonialist conceptions of Gil de Biedma coming to the fore, reminiscent of his time in Manila and his love for the exotic Other.¹ In his first diary titled Diario del artista en 1956, Gil de Biedma provides plenty of examples of a somewhat essentialist conception of the racialized Other, such as when he says that in the Philippines “not everybody is gay, but everybody is game” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 117; emphasis in the original). By including these exoticist mentions to Martiniquais nurses in this very short piece of life-writing, Gil de Biedma is, probably unconsciously, dealing with his different identities from throughout his life.

A mature writer, he is now paradoxically invested in his career at his family business, Tabacos de Filipinas: “todo esto me restará movilidad para mi trabajo en Tabacos” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 634), he writes regarding his future visits to Paris, clearly worried about the impact his treatment will have on his job. He does not pay any attention to his several previous identities, to his obsession with writing. Instead, his main preoccupations are recovering his health, his treatment, his reading and his job. In a November 1985 letter to Àlex Susanna, a young writer with whom he had a close relationship, penned upon his return to Barcelona, Gil de Biedma mentions his treatment, saying that it leaves him too tired, which makes it hard for him to do his usual job, but, “hay que aguantarse” (2010, 426). The author’s relationship to Josep Madern, his romantic partner at the time, is cold and monotonous: Madern, who was also HIV positive, calls and visits frequently. Yet, Gil de Biedma does not seem to give much importance to those visits, which are often described mostly with logistical details. The only moment when Madern’s care is acknowledged is on 23 October, when Gil de Biedma writes, “contar con una diaria conversación con Josep es una gran cosa” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 629). Still, the references to him are opaque and dull for most of the diary. While there is a feeling of solitude under the surface of a great intellectual, there also is a certain strength in the monotony of their relationship. For the lack of obvious passion in these descriptions, there is also a clear reliance on Madern’s visits: indeed, Madern was one of the few who fully knew about Gil de Biedma’s illness, treatment and the potential impact on their lives. Madern was a pillar in the author’s life and the tension that is present in Gil de Biedma’s text demonstrates how the author was processing the points of contact between his illness and his social life.

The diary finishes on a rather strange note that seals the end of the subject that has been explored in this section thus far. This is the only time in the whole collection of diaries that Gil de Biedma talks about himself in the third person, after describing some instructions for administering medication, the author writes:

JGB ha seguido un tratamiento de sarcoma cutáneo, tratado actualmente con inyección intramuscular diaria. Las precauciones a tomar en estas inyecciones son las mismas que se recomiendan para la prevención de la hepatitis B. (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 641)

Instead of using his full name, Gil de Biedma decides to write his initials, something he had only done in previous diaries when writing about his lovers, so that others could not recognize them. The use of the third person implies that the writing subject has finally dissolved, unable to reflect on himself anymore at this stage of his treatment. The medical structure has taken over, and now the author is but a body following treatment for a skin sarcoma. There is no AIDS discourse here, for the illness will not be named to keep the subject’s integrity. Indeed, as the author himself wrote in his poem “No volveré a ser joven”: “envejecer, morir, / es el único argumento de la obra” (Gil de Biedma 2017a, 177). The plot has just become older and moribund.

The illness that dare not speak its name

Let us go momentarily back in time, to the end of Gil de Biedma’s diary of 1978, which he finished with the following words: “Nada más triste que saber que uno sabe escribir, pero que no necesita decir nada de particular, nada en particular, ni a los demás ni a sí mismo” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 622). These self-pitying words portray a Gil de Biedma who was feeling hopeless about his own creations. He started his diary of 1978 wishing to get back to the art of literature. Soon after, he realizes that, no matter how hard he tries, he has changed: “yo no soy el de 1956” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 588). Such a change in identity, however, is not entirely completed, for the author adds: “mi identidad formal es todavía la de escritor –ante los demás y ante mí–, sin que haya sabido inventarme otra” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 588). It is in the context of this tension between his identities that the author’s disenchantment with life came about as a result of his illness. This leads Gil de Biedma to the conclusion that would put an end to his diary writing, at least for a few years: “escribir ya no me es necesario” (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 622). From this point on, it will take the author seven years to decide to write another diary: his very last one in 1985.

The onset of AIDS in Jaime Gil de Biedma is concealed in his written production. While the author (in)famously stopped writing poems at some point in the 1960s, he did, however, engage in new editions of his old poems and their publication in some journals and magazines throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The Barcelona author even agreed to some interviews, although his experience was not always positive, especially because of how the topic of his sexuality was broached in some of them (Gil de Biedma 2010). This process is fairly well recorded in the author’s correspondence (2010) with a plethora of writers and intellectuals with whom he regularly maintained contact. Even though his diary of 1978 shows a certain degree of apathy, of disappointment in the craft of writing, Gil de Biedma was still very engaged in the literary world of Spain. He kept an ongoing postal conversation with many friends such as Luis Antonio de Villena, María Zambrano, Luis García Montero, Jesús Aguirre, Dionisio Cañas, Àlex Susanna, James Valender and many more. The author was more than happy to be treated as an intellectual whom others admired, as he had done in the past with, for example, Jorge Guillén (Gil de Biedma 2010). For example, the Spanish journal Litoral published a special issue in 1985/1986 in homage to Gil de Biedma, in the role of “personaje literario” (García Montero, Jiménez Millán, and Salvador Jofre 1986, 7). Gil de Biedma actively participated in the edition of this journal, sending copies of his poems and accepting interviews such as the one with Susanna (1985), where the author discusses a range of literary topics. Susanna, writing from the point of view of Gil de Biedma, quotes the following lines of a poem called “De Vita Beata”:

No leer,

no sufrir, no escribir, no pagar cuentas,

y vivir como un noble arruinado

entre las ruinas de mi inteligencia.

(Gil de Biedma 2017a, 198)

This is one of the author’s last poems, included in his book Poemas póstumos, after whose publication in 1965, as he cleverly discussed in his interview with Susanna (1985), Gil de Biedma finished for good his poetic production (not so much his essays, which he carried on writing until well into the 1980s). In this poem, the poetic voice presents a dire landscape, a description of what Gil de Biedma himself had gone through during his previous convalescence in 1956: a life in the ruins of his own intelligence or, perhaps, because of his own intelligence. The title of the poem suggests that it is in this grim context that vita beata happens, a play on the Roman philosopher’s famous work: Seneca’s reflections in Vita Beata revolve around the refusal of wealth and the focus on the use of reason to achieve happiness. In an ironic view of the Stoic philosopher’s writings, Gil de Biedma addresses two themes that have been a constant throughout his life: social class and intellectuality. Indeed, as discussed in the first section of this paper, the author desired consciously to prioritize the latter, although social constraints often took precedence in his life. Therefore, the poem reaches its resolution with the poetic voice seeing himself as a ruined noble, surrounded by nothing but his intelligence.

Paradoxically, although this poem seems to idealize a solitary life, Gil de Biedma’s experience of AIDS is heavily (perhaps inexorably) intertwined with the author’s social surroundings. Social class will thus be central in the way Gil de Biedma explores AIDS in his very last diary. It is in June 1985, with his increased popularity among the younger Spanish poets, when Gil de Biedma first noticed symptoms of what was considered at the time a taboo disease (Dalmau 2004, 428–474). He developed Kaposi’s sarcoma, a type of skin cancer that is common in people with AIDS. It was diagnosed by his personal doctor, Jacint Reventós, who quickly referred the case to a famous dermatologist-venereologist – an example of the good contacts of the bourgeoisie – who, in turn, suggested the necessary tests (Dalmau 2004, 428). According to Dalmau, whose sources were people close to the Gil de Biedma family, his reaction was, at first, ironic and detached, a sort of a deadpan take on the situation. Later, it became more emotional, according to some witnesses, such as Susanna or the author’s brother-in-law (Dalmau 2004, 428–429). As for Gil de Biedma himself, he wrote very little at the time, only sending two letters that June. The first was to Jesús Aguirre – a writer, publisher and, by virtue of his marriage to Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, the Duquesa de Alba, a well-known socialite – about a soirée at their home, and the second one, dated 28 June, was slightly more telling with regards to his illness. In a laconic note to Luis García Montero, Gil de Biedma says: “mi humor estos días me inclina poco a la versificación” (2010, 418). The detail is scarce, though, and from that point onwards there are only two more references to his illness in his correspondence: a veiled one in a letter from November 1988 about his inability to attend his cousin’s wedding because of a trip to Paris (2010, 439); another one, in November 1989, to his cousin Santiago Gil de Biedma, head of Tabacos de Filipinas, in which Jaime tenders his resignation from the family company, two months before his death (2010, 451).

Throughout Gil de Biedma’s literary production, the reference to HIV/AIDS is, however, always secretive: nowhere is there an explicit mention of his disease. No name was ever given to it, not in his correspondence, his essays, his poetry or even his diaries. This silence is akin to Lord Alfred Douglas’s well-known line “the love that dare not speak its name”; AIDS is, for Gil de Biedma, the disease that dare not speak its name. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick remarks that “silence … performs the enforcing work of the status quo more predictably and inexorably than any attempt at analysis” (2008, 21). In Gil de Biedma’s published work at the time, silence was indeed performed. For example, homosexuality remained unmentioned in his poetry for, according to his own letter to Dionisio Cañas already in 1989 (J. Gil de Biedma 2010, 445), a public admission of his sexual orientation would leave him “inerme” (2010, 446) before his family.² The use of the word “inerme” is rather suggestive in this context for it equates secrecy with the power of weaponry. Publicly admitting what was well-known in intellectual and literary circles, as Gil de Biedma himself conceded in said letter, would leave the author, who at this point was nearing the end of his life and considerably ill from complications related to AIDS, at the mercy of his family. Thus, silence is both a tool of social oppression but also the act that allows Gil de Biedma to preserve his autonomy and his freedom amidst his conservative, traditional family surroundings. Silence was the general attitude in the Spanish cultural milieu towards the HIV/AIDS epidemic; a silence that was not denounced until 1993, when, for the first time, Juan Vicente Aliaga and José M. Cortés pointed out the lack of theoretical reflection about the illness in Spain during those first ten years of the epidemic (quoted in Barragán 2017, 622).

The parallels between Gil de Biedma’s silence about his HIV status and about his homosexuality are both obvious and understandable. Although he formed part of a Spanish cultural milieu in the 1980s that was fairly open to differences in sexual orientation (hence why his closest, intellectual friends were aware of most of the situation), it is significant to remember that the author’s family and work environment were very conservative. In addition, as mentioned above, HIV/AIDS was a very new and unknown disease at the time. The literary identity of the Barcelonan poet was considered just an oddity, a quirk for a man who was otherwise a “burgués convencido” in the words of his very own sister (I. Gil de Biedma 2010, 00:40:00–00:41:00). Gil de Biedma was adept at keeping the bourgeois mask on in front of his family, something that at first sight may be at odds with his less conservative ethical, aesthetic and political views, which were known in intellectual circles. I argue that Gil de Biedma’s discourse on HIV/AIDS and homosexuality is consciously repressed in the familial and work spheres. They were not topics for discussion: with HIV/AIDS in particular, which was not easily kept hidden given its physical consequences, the approach taken in this context was to inform everybody that it was some sort of tropical, rare disease contracted in Manila (Gil de Biedma 2017b, 625). The association between HIV/AIDS and the colonial Other is at the core of the theories about the origin of the virus. Indeed, for instance, it was thought at first that AIDS was reaching the U.S.A. “on the illegal bodies of Haitian migrants” (Meruane 2012, 159). In Gil de Biedma’s case, the author used the specter of the colonial Other to publicly repress the truth about AIDS. The trope of the mysterious, tropical disease worked well to conceal his HIV status within a Spanish bourgeois society that was not only capitalist, but also xenophobic.

In her study of AIDS in testimonial writing, Sarah Brophy (2004) points out that the construction of AIDS discourse around ideas of tropicalness is a common strategy of displacing illness narratives. While pointing the finger at the colonial Other, positions like Gil de Biedma’s aim “to locate safety here, at home, and disease as occurring ‘elsewhere’” (Brophy 2004, 6). Those narratives undergo a further metonymy, whereby “HIV infection and AIDS are repeatedly displaced from the home-space … and banished to the floating container of elsewhere” (Brophy 2004, 6). The myths involving AIDS and the Other have been countered by activism and criticism in various cultural spheres, thus providing much-needed visibility for people with AIDS. Nonetheless, Gil de Biedma did not participate in this type of activism: the author never engaged in the homophile movement (González Montero 2022). He did not use his voice to speak in defence of the gay community, unlike other writers such as Cernuda, Gide or Gil-Albert, for example. Similarly, he never engaged in AIDS activism, instead promoting, at least in the sphere of his public life, some of those damaging tropes Brophy discusses in her work (2004). Yet what makes Gil de Biedma’s “Diario de 1985” relevant to a history of AIDS in Spain is precisely his very personal, detached portrayal of the illness. The author did not theorize about AIDS; instead, what his testimony depicts is quite plainly the first month of a person receiving treatment for Kaposi’s sarcoma, a term that does not appear in the narrative either. It is possible to argue that Gil de Biedma’s fear of the potential backlash of his family was too overwhelming, hence his choice not to name his condition, thus repressing the naming of both his illness and his homosexuality to his family. However, Gil de Biedma did address the topic of homosexuality and illness at length in his diaries, in a seemingly comfortable manner, although always with ironic detachment. This cynicism can be interpreted in the light of camp attitudes towards life (González Montero 2022), but it is also connected with the tension, becoming more prominent in his more mature years, between his two famous literary identities: Hijo de Dios and hijo de vecino. For with the passing of time, it seems as though Gil de Biedma’s camp detachment transforms from a playful critique of social rules and imperatives into a more honest assumption of those very same rules and imperatives. The key to this matter is that Gil de Biedma’s familial and work image, being Hijo de Dios, is a mask that he dons in order to keep up bourgeois appearances. Thus, following Žižek’s conceptualization of identity, Gil de Biedma recognizes the distance between that “ideological mask and the reality [yet] still [finds] reasons to retain the mask” (Žižek 2008, 26). He is critical of the bourgeoisie and of the political and social establishment throughout his life, but when confronted with his own gay, HIV-positive identity, the author chooses to conform to the ideological apparatus of Spain in the 1980s, even in his personal diaries. Of course, it must be highlighted at this point that this cynical, bourgeois frame of mind stems from a profound fear of rejection by his family and lifelong colleagues: a clear example of this is the aforementioned letter sent to Dionisio Cañas to keep him from writing about Gil de Biedma’s sexual life (2010, 445).

Gil de Biedma, despite his interest in the exploration of sex and sexuality in his first diary, from 1956 (González Montero 2022), was adamant to keep a strict control on the making public of his sexual life. He wished for it to eventually become public, although not during his lifetime. Indeed, at different points throughout his life the author had worked on editing of his first diary, “Diario del artista en 1956” (enriching the former “Diario del artista enfermo” published in 1974 with a plethora of sexual detail) as well as the “Diario de 1978” with the intention of having them published after his death. Gil de Biedma’s “Diario de 1985” was, however, left unedited; it was prepared for publication posthumously by the editors Carmen Barcells and Andreu Jaume. Therefore, the author’s diary of 1985, lacking any formal editing by Gil de Biedma, can be deemed as being rather unadulterated. It provides, thus, a candid view of a gay man’s reflections on his identity as he lives through the first stage of AIDS during the 1980s in Spain, suffering not only the physical symptoms of the illness, but also the social, cultural and familial effects of AIDS.

Conclusions

This essay has analyzed Gil de Biedma’s representation of his suffering of HIV/AIDS in his “Diario de 1985”, using a combination of the methods of psychoanalysis and social history. Psychoanalytic notions about identity help us understand how different identitarian positions can be operating at the same time, and I have utilized them throughout this article to demonstrate how Gil de Biedma presents a stark vision of his suffering of AIDS while remaining attached to his intellectual, bourgeois identity. More comparative research about the impact of AIDS in life-writing in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s is needed to reach a thorough understanding of its impact on social understandings of HIV/AIDS, the impact of authors’ testimonies about the illness on Spanish communities and the international literary and political connections, especially to Anglophone and Francophone artistic production. Finally, a more thorough, comparative approach to the binary privacy/publicness, its effect on and the affect it produces in diary writing, will prove useful to our understanding of sexually dissident identities in Spain’s recent history.

The objective of this essay has been to reveal the specific insights that Gil de Biedma’s autobiographical craft provide for an understanding of suffering from HIV/AIDS at a very early stage of the epidemic in Spain. Additionally, I have explored the author’s (dis)engagement with a theorization of AIDS, which I have suggested is rooted in one of his multiple authorial identities: that of the intellectual bourgeois. In this paper, I have demonstrated how Gil de Biedma’s particular discourse about illness and, more specifically, AIDS is imbricated with other discourses operating at the time: the homosexual illness, the tropical illness, the ill bourgeois, amongst others. These discursive connections generate a tension between Gil de Biedma’s suffering of illness, his desire to express it through life-writing and his reticence to clearly name the ailment, in opposition to other artists and poets at the time, such as Espaliú³ or Cardín. This reticence stems from a profound fear of rejection, leading to a particular subjective position for Gil de Biedma. The author dons the mask of the intellectual bourgeois and stands by it when confronted with his own diagnosis of AIDS; Gil de Biedma ends up assuming his upper-class identity even more so as his fears about his own health become more serious.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge my PhD supervisors, Richard Cleminson and Duncan Wheeler, for their support during my Master’s dissertation, where I did the bulk of this research as I took my first steps into the research world. I would also like to thank the peer-reviewers and editors of this article, as their excellent comments and suggestions have made a very positive impact on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The completion of this work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.

Notes on contributors

Álvaro González Montero

Álvaro González Montero is a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, under the supervision of Prof. Richard Cleminson and Prof. Duncan Wheeler. His research interests include Hispanic life writing, especially Gil de Biedma’s diaristic production, queer theory, medical humanities, and psychoanalysis. His thesis is titled “Illness and queerness in Spain: Spanish life-writing from 1936 to the present” and is funded by the AHRC via the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 For an analysis of Gil de Biedma’s colonialist conceptions of Manila see González Montero (2022) and Vilaseca (2003).

2 See González Montero 2022 for more detail about sexuality in Gil de Biedma’s diaries

3 With regards to Pepe Espaliú’s work, see: Del Río Almagro, Alfonso. 2000. Nacimiento, cuerpo y muerte a través de la obra de Pepe Espaliú. Granada: Universidad de Granada; and Juan Vicente Aliaga, curator. 2002. Pepe Espaliú [exhibition]. Madrid: Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia.