Nazario: Sex, humour and Barcelona underground

The previous article in this series followed Ocaña through Las Ramblas, where the street became a stage, and his body became part of the performance.

If Ocaña made the street into a stage, Nazario made the page into a place where the forbidden no longer needed permission to appear.

Like Ocaña, he arrived from Andalusia and found his place among Barcelona’s artists, performers, musicians and outsiders, who were testing how far freedom could go after decades of repression.

Spain was still living under a dictatorship when Nazario arrived in Barcelona. His work was shaped by the city, but also by the people who were rarely treated as worthy human beings: gay men, travestis, sex workers, people living in poverty, criminals, outsiders and those who moved through the city at night.

Nazario’s comics were explicit, irreverent and often deliberately excessive. He used humour, sexual imagery and exaggeration to enter places where polite representation could not take him. His characters did not appear as carefully presented examples of tolerance. They had sex, wanted things, made mistakes, fell in love, behaved badly, survived and contradicted themselves.

They were not there to reassure the reader.

• Queer life in all its mess

Nazario’s comics could be outrageous without treating queer people as outsiders. The drawings were exaggerated, explicit and sometimes chaotic, but the lives inside them were not presented as unreal.

What becomes possible when queer people are allowed to appear on the page as sexual, funny, poor, contradictory and fully involved in their own lives?

Many forms of LGBTQIA+ representation depend on proving that we are respectable enough to deserve acceptance. Nazario moved in the opposite direction.

He drew queer lives without removing the sex, poverty, danger, humour or discomfort. His characters could be rude, vulnerable, selfish, affectionate, violent or absurd. They did not need to become symbols of goodness before they were allowed to exist.

He was showing a whole social world that was already there, whether respectable culture wanted to see it or not.

• Anarcoma enters the city

Anarcoma is usually described in sources from the period and in Nazario’s own cultural context as a travesti or transvestite detective. Contemporary readers may also recognise her as a trans or transfeminine figure.

She moves through a recognisable but distorted Barcelona: Las Ramblas, alleyways, bars, criminal networks, police, machines, sex and danger.

She is not a tragic background character. She investigates, desires, fights, survives and becomes involved with XM2, a male robot whose exaggerated body is both lover and part of the strange machinery surrounding her.

The result is comic, erotic and uncomfortable all at once.

Humour has often been used against queer people, turning their bodies, voices and gender expression into entertainment for others. Nazario took many of those same ingredients (exaggeration, sex, camp and obscenity) and placed them inside a queer world.

The joke no longer came only from the outside.

• Why Nazario still matters

Today, LGBTQIA+ people are more visible in mainstream culture than they were when Nazario began drawing. But that visibility is still selective.

Some lives are easier to celebrate than others, and respectability continues to shape which queer people are welcomed, believed or protected.

Nazario’s comics do not offer a neat answer to this. They offer something more unruly: a world in which marginalised queer people already exist in full view and do not wait to become easier to understand.

That is why queer memory matters.

Nazario reminds us that representation is not only about being seen positively. It is also about being allowed complexity.

To be sexual without becoming a warning.

To be funny without becoming a joke.

To be vulnerable without being reduced to a victim.

To exist without first proving that we are respectable enough to deserve the page.