Revered in his lifetime and remembered now as one of the greatest of all Spanish writers, Federico Garcia Lorca was cut down in his prime by fascist rebels—in part because of his left-wing politics, but also because of his homosexuality.

In 1898, Lorca was born into a wealthy family near Granada in southern Spain. He once summed up his childhood as “learning reading and music with my mother and being a rich and overbearing child in a small village.” His family moved to Granada in 1909 so young Federico and his siblings would get a better education.

Lorca was not a stellar student—during his studies at the University of Granada, for example, the future world-class poet even failed a literature course. He was, however, already writing prolifically during his university years, publishing a travel book in 1918 and a collection of poetry in 1921.

A transfer to the University of Madrid furthered Lorca’s development as a writer and intellectual. There he became friends with other young artists, including painter Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Lorca fell deeply in love with Dali; photographs of the two show them being suggestively physical with each other. Although some biographers believe Lorca and Dali sexually consummated their relationship, it is not known for certain. Eventually, Bunuel supplanted Lorca as Dali’s closest friend and sometime collaborator. Lorca then began an unsatisfying affair with Emilio Aladren, a sculptor. Aladren was ambivalent about his sexuality and eventually left Lorca to marry a woman.

At the same time, Lorca’s professional star was rising; he published two more works in the 1920s, with Gypsy Ballad-Book (1929) becoming a bestseller. Despite his literary success, Lorca still suffered from depression, brought on by the drama of his personal life and by internalized shame about being gay.

As a drastic change, Lorca took off for New York in 1929 (his father bankrolled the trip), enrolling in English classes at Columbia University and socializing with queer American writers like Hart Crane and Nella Larsen. The U.S. trip, which lasted eight months, inspired one of his best-known (and most openly gay) poetry collections, Poet in New York, published posthumously in 1940. The volume included “Ode to Walt Whitman,” in which Lorca sympathized with closeted gay men who must “love and burn their lips in silence.”

The following year, Lorca traveled to Cuba on a lecture tour. More than New York, Cuba—which at that time had a looser moral code than Spain—opened his eyes to the possibility of being more contentedly gay. There he pursued an active sexual life and composed a play called The Audience, which was so surreal and openly gay in its themes—the plot revolved around a queer production of Romeo and Juliet—that Lorca dubbed it “a poem for booing.” It was not produced in his lifetime, but he effectively outed himself when he allowed several scenes to be published in a Spanish literary journal in 1933.

Soon after Lorca returned to Spain, his country abolished the monarchy and established a republic. The new government advocated bringing cultural activities to rural areas, and from 1932 to 1935 Lorca served as artistic director of a government-sponsored traveling theater company called La Barraca (The Barn). Through La Barraca Lorca met Rafael Rodriguez Rapun, secretary of the troupe, who was the primary love of the last years of his life.

As Lorca traveled the country with La Barraca, he also gave lectures and poetry readings, thus establishing himself as one of Spain’s most popular writers. During that time, he penned some of his best-known plays, including Blood Wedding (1933), an appeal for sexual freedom. “To keep still when we’re on fire,” says one character, “is the worst punishment we can inflict on ourselves.” The play was so commercially successful that Lorca, at 35, became economically independent of his father for the first time.

Now more confident about his sexual orientation and his work, Lorca was often seen in public with gay friends and adoring male companions. In addition, he began to voice his political views, speaking up for socialism and against institutions like the Catholic Church; he also condemned the rise of Hitler. Both his homosexuality and his politics were duly noted by the far right in Spain, which was quickly gaining power.

In the summer of 1936, a right-wing movement headed by Francisco Franco staged an unsuccessful coup that resulted in the bloody Spanish Civil War. Concerned for the safety of his parents, Lorca returned to Granada. The city soon fell to the fascists, who began to round up their perceived enemies.

Lorca and other leftists were arrested in August 1936 and shot to death in an olive grove outside of town. According to one biographer, Lorca’s executioner later bragged that, after his victim fell, he fired two additional bullets “into his ass for being a queer.” Lorca’s body was dumped into a mass grave and never found. Spain’s fascist government, which remained in power until Franco died in 1975, never acknowledged its part in Lorca’s murder; in the 1950s, officials actually tried to frame his death as a gay crime of passion.

Fifty years after Lorca’s murder, the Spanish government finally erected a monument on the execution site “in memory of Federico Garcia Lorca and all the victims of the Civil War.”

For further reading:

Gibson, Ian. 1989. Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books.

Manrique, Jamie. 1999. Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press.