ABSTRACT
Chapter Four is entirely devoted to Luis Antonio de Villena, who reinvents the figure of the 19th-century dandy to offer contemporary readers his preferred model of sexual dissidence, which he regards as atemporal. Villena’s rewriting of homoerotic literary tradition involves a conscious recycling of obsolete motifs and codes in an attempt to write against the mainstream culture. Admittedly, Villena’s novels and short stories may resemble the production of Martínez’s artisan-scribes as he copies the same stock motifs of homoerotic literary tradition, apparently without any innovative alterations. However, when read as an ongoing deliberate project, Villena’s fiction reveals that its author is not a scribe but a sophisticated dandy whose studiously outmoded writing style is instrumental in his counter-cultural queer play with readers and their expectations. Concluding the chapter, a reading of Villena’s Huesos de Sodoma [The Bones of Sodom], a novel unlike his other works, indicates that it is a commentary on pressing queer issues of the day, such as the commercialisation and trivialisation of gay culture, the professionalisation of gay activism and the challenges of homonormativity, which are also addressed in Goytisolo’s and Mendicutti’s novels.
