The Society of San Guiñolé: Pederasty and Prostitution in La chula by Francisco de Sales Mayo

Abstract:Male prostitution figures as a topic of anxiety and consternation throughout European cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Spain, medico-legal specialists, social commentators, and fiction writers evinced this preoccupation mostly in their written works. The author Francisco de Sales Mayo includes a secret society of pederasts in the plot of his novel La chula, which is ostensibly about female sex work and its regulation in 1850s–60s Madrid. Building on previous scholarship on Sales Mayo, this study is the first that foregrounds male homosexuality in La chula due to its fundamental role in understanding the novel. It interrogates the work’s construction of the trope of the Society of San Guiñolé, a secret organization rife with sexual inverts, as a critique of proponents of the regulation of sex work. Relying on recent scholarship regarding female prostitution, masculinities, and male homosexuality, the study argues that the author associates San Guiñolé’s secretive sexual practices with Spain’s political and religious (ultra)conservatives in order to show what he believes is their deviant mission to allow sex work to flourish in Madrid, corrupt the bourgeois male model of heteronormativity, and prevent a secular, republican government from taking power.