Ocaña’s Queer Customs
You could see Ocaña on Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s main thoroughfare, any day weather permitted, perhaps taking a stroll in women’s clothing with his boyfriend or gathering a crowd as he rolled along in a celebratory mock-up of Catholic Holy Week processions. A fixture of Barcelona’s counterculture scene, first under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco after moving to Catalunya from Andalusia in 1971, later, after Franco’s death in 1975, under a still-repressive transitional regime, Ocaña was best known for his routine public appearances.
He was a drag artist, an actor, an activist, and a visual artist — and as Ocaña practiced his art, these were never really distinct. He was interested in religion, custom, and folk art, in the communal pageantry each practice furnished, but explored these in a way that upended the presumed normativity of ‘tradition.’
In the preface to an interview with the artist, Toni Puig suggests there is no way to comprehend José Pérez Ocaña without first getting a sense of his presence, the way he took up space. In Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, Puig calls him “an Andalusian fountain that sprinkles bewilderment all around… you have to listen to his frenetic spouting, with all his shouting, exclamations and gesticulation (38).”
The fountain analogy might not be too far off. Ocaña was a gathering place in his own right, creating with his spontaneous parades a kind of mobile sociality that celebrated Catalan and Andalusian cultural inheritance even as it opened space for queer expression. One of his most famous costumes has Ocaña as the sun, festooned in multicolored streamers and holding a big, winking, papier-mâché orb.
Ocaña’s curiosity with tradition is evident in his dress and visual art. Ocaña practiced a sort of naïve or outsider art, adhering to an ethics and style that incorporated religious iconography, traditional and especially rural customs, and evocations of community sociality, all with disregard for adherence to (and this is a tricky classification) orthodox technique or presentation.
In this piece from 1982, oil on canvas depicting the resurrected Christ, Jesus’ long black hair is adorned with a bouquet of red roses tucked behind the ear; his death shroud becomes a lace veil. The red of his stigmata is almost aesthetic in the way it matches his traditional women’s shawl. His position is familiar, appearing open and welcoming. Ocaña does not seem to be mocking Catholic tradition (though perhaps he is mocking the Church), yet here is Jesus in drag.
The public gatherings and processions he led continued in this vein of disidentificatory referencing. Ocaña wanted to document — or more than that, recreate, in queer and nonnormative ways, with carnival spirit — the burials, flower-gatherings, home lives, and public events that comprised the same tradition claimed by Franco as basis for fascist rule.
Ocaña was an anarchist and was active in Barcelona’s gay scene in the 70s, overlapping in his activism with various leftists, feminists, gay, lesbian, and trans groups, and Catalan nationalists. Even after the end of Franco’s fascist dictatorship, which had emphasized through discourse and institution traditional gender roles and nuclear family structure, Spain’s transitional government maintained restrictive laws pertaining to gender and sexuality. In one famous scene of the documentary Ocaña: retrat intermitent, the artist strips off his clothes and dances naked in front of a crowd save a pair of heels and the flower in his hair.
Ocaña died in 1983 at age 36 of AIDS-related hepatitis.
Sources
Ocaña: Retrat Intermitent, documentary by Ventura Pons (1978)
Linda Rapp’s “Ocaña, José Pérez (1947–1983)” in GLBTQ
Interview by Toni Puig in Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art
The José Pérez Ocaña collection of Presente Continuo: Arte Contemporánea, Dia a Dia
