Cruz de navajas. Alianzas maricas en el Madrid franquista

Abstract

This article explores the affective, sexual, and survival-based bonds forged among “invertidos” in Francoist Madrid, drawing on judicial records from the Vagrancy and Delinquency archive. Through the presentation of several archival cases, it reconstructs a cartography of dissident everyday life, shaped by the entanglement of desire, necessity, and violence. Two main dimensions are addressed: on the one hand, the formation of communities of familiarity emerging from fleeting encounters or sustained relationships among young, working-class rural migrants; on the other, the ways in which these networks were structured around factors such as economic inequality, age, and social privilege. Madrid thus appears as a city under constant surveillance, yet also as a space of possibility for those able to read and navigate certain codes. Far from exceptional, these experiences delineate alternative spatialities and temporalities, where the boundaries between the intimate and the public blur. Adopting a microhistorical and situated perspective, the article contributes to rethinking concepts such as sexilio, homosociability, and dissident masculinity, and demonstrates how these ambivalent and contradictory bonds enabled many dissident subjects to endure, recognize one another, and construct alternative forms of community under the Franco regime.