ABSTRACT
Poet Luis Cernuda was born in Seville some time between 1902 and 1904. The uncertainty is possibly due to Cernuda himself, who, like Federico García Lorca, tended to understate his age. About 1924, he read André Gide, who made him conscious of his own homosexuality and reconciled him to it. In 1927, he met Lorca, later his close friend. Cernuda remembered that, when they met, “Something that I scarcely knew or that I didn’t want to recognize began to draw us together.” In 1931, he published Los placeres prohibidos (The Forbidden Pleasures), a book unprecedented in Spanish literature because of its openness about the poet’s homosexuality.
