First representations of ''queer culture'' in Spanish Francoist period.
Born in 1950, in Asturias, Tino, from a very young age started manifesting his enormous passion for art and performance, exploring a wide variety of disciplines in an attempt to express and create his ideas. He started painting in his first years, and was taught by a local painter who was eventually beaten by Tino’s fast learning abilities; after that he started exploring other art forms like fashion and theater, styling his siblings with his mother’s clothes and creating small performances in which he loved to be on the front. Following a casual habit in his humble family, he began to develop a big passion for singing and for music in general, joining his first bands like ‘’Los Zafiros Negros’’ and later on ‘’Los Archiduques’’, the band that pushed his solo career forward.
Tino’s importance to Spanish Queer Culture was crucial as without his artistic works, movements like ‘’La movida madrileña’’, would have not taken the shape they did.
In one of his journeys, he discovered the British Glam-Pop scene, coming across artists like David Bowie, a tremendous influence for queer representation. Tino, after being enlightened by this subcultures and after watching the futuristic movie ‘’Blade Runner’’ (1982), brought totally renewed aesthetics to the Spanish music industry with the ideas of ‘’art-pop’’, being able to mix the values of ‘’high culture’’ and ‘’low culture’’ through his own popular music.
It was through his extremely eccentric attitudes and performatic appearances that he established himself as one of the first preachers of ‘’Camp’’ aesthetics as a way of giving a voice to the queer movement. He created a performance from his own persona, which was described by interviewers as a costume, something insulting to Tino, as he took this way of expression as something totally serious and as another valid form of human expression. His look could be described as baroque, dressing with self made, colorful and well decorated garments, combined with a very masculine beard that contrasted with his meticulously applied makeup. A really modern sense of fashion, feminenie poses, his nails over his gloves, his attitude; every aspect of him contributed to a desire for experimenting with gender traditions in order to break out of them, a perspective very ahead of the hard times in which he lived.
His contribution to Spanish music was an act that helped the country catch up with the current cultural trends and innovations after the artistic repression that the Francoist regime meant for the nation. His ambitions for experimentation, manifested through his music with the introduction of techniques from several musical subgenres, for example the use of sampling taken from techno music and hip-hop, which he once used it to say the word ‘’maricón’’ by reversing it and placing it into one of his songs called ‘’Lágrimas de Cocodrilo’’; another example would be his use of singing growls taken from Metal music.
His involvement with Spanish art does not just end here, if we want to talk about his importance to Spanish art, we must necessarily talk about the ‘’Costus group’’ (Juan Carrero and Enrique Naya), a gay couple of painters which were very close friends of Tino. They where the ones who interpreted pop-art from a Spanish point of view with the use of very camp-like ''fluor'' colors and representations. The residence of this couple located in the Malasaña neighborhood, served as the scenery for one of the most influential Spanish film directors, Pedro Almodovar, in his movie ‘’Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón’’ (1980).
The importance of Tino in this artistic wave is crucial when we take into consideration that he decided to be a patron of Almodovar, helping him to contribute to Spanish art from another discipline.
Tino’s role for the development of the movements that followed the ending of the Francoist regime was crucial, and it is heartbreaking to see that artists of such big cultural impact like him or Juan Carrero and Enrique Naya, have been made invisible for the popular public in the contemporary era, showing that, even with the impact this artists had, they are usually placed in the ‘’queer art’’ category and are unrecognized for the enormous efforts they had to make during those impossible times in order to create the foundations for the culture we now live in.
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