El resplandor del mechero en el cuarto oscuro

The stories included in this book take place at a time when Chueca, Madrid's gay neighborhood, instead of being a cool, expensive neighborhood full of rainbow flags, was a maze of rundown and dirty streets, populated by camels that dealt with all kinds of substances, in whose dark bars men who were looking for other men hid and who came to them, many times, trying not to be seen when they entered. In the 1980s and 1990s, when AIDS was still terrifying due to its ravages, many gays sought sexual relations by inserting anonymous contacts in certain magazines and there were still large neighborhood cinemas with double bills, in whose back rows they concentrated solitary men who looked for other similar ones with the same longing. Those were other times -a time very different from this one in which the internet and its applications allow remote flirting without leaving home-, and in them, in that environment, when the fear of rejection made most of the gays try keeping their sexual difference hidden, many of the stories included in this book are located. They all tell us short stories - some shocking, disturbing; others sensitive and tender-, which will not leave the reader indifferent. But they are not only stories about a world that may have disappeared, but also constitute a hymn to youthful beauty and the inexorable tragedy that its loss means, a feeling that throughout the book weaves all the stories together.