This text is an episode of the Queerletter, the LGTBIQ+ newsletter from EL PAÍS, coordinated by Pablo León. Sign up here to receive it.
The Egales publishing house, focused on publications weird, just turned 30. This publishing house was launched in 1995 and has since published more than 500 titles (around 300 fictions and 200 essays). “I was an editor out of necessity and not out of vocation,” explains Mili Hernández, founder of Egales with Connie Dagas and Helle Bruun. Shortly before, in 1993, Hernández had opened the Berkana bookstore in Madrid, which is still active in the Chueca district. The following year, Dagas and Bruun opened Complices in Barcelona (which closed in 2022). “Right away we realized that we were missing a catalog. People came and asked: ‘What do you have here?’. And it turned out that they already had most of what we exhibited. That’s when we realized that we had to start publishing,” continues Mili Hernández, born in Madrid and aged 66.
It tells the story of Equals in the back room of Berkana, while a stream of people visit the space, full of novels, essays, comics, magazines with signatures such as Judith Butler, James Baldwin, Natalie Barney, Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Mary Renault, Chi Ta-wei, Ramón Martínez, Óscar Hernández-Campano, Alberto Mira, Isabel Franc, Rosa Navarro, Paco Tomás or Mila. Martinez.
“At the beginning, customers who dared to come to the bookstore asked us for other types of LGTBIQ+ books among the few that were published: they wanted books about self-knowledge, with beautiful stories, with possible love stories… Books in which they could find the references they needed,” explains Hernández. Where to start? “Well, because of everything we had read. The first two we published were romance stories: one about girls and the other about boys. You should know that at the time, a lot of people hadn’t had any romances at all. Men could find someone to sleep with, but a lot of women came to the bookstore and told us that these publications were the closest thing they had to a romantic relationship. I knew immediately that I had to offer the books that saved my life, that of us.”
The three future editors met in London. Hernández moved to the British capital in the early 1980s. First to work au pair, “in a family of Hasidic Jews”, then as a receptionist in a hotel: “Many Spanish women still came to London to have abortions and they needed workers who spoke Spanish. » There, Hernández didn’t have much contact with LGBTQ+ activism, but he discovered Gay’s The Word, a bookstore weird pioneer in the United Kingdom, opened in 1979, next to Russell Square. “There I bought lesbian romantic novels which taught me two things: I learned English and also how to love women. Even though I already felt something, in Spain no one taught you to love women.”
After spending several years in London, Mili Hernández moved to New York. “I arrived on October 25, 1985. And that’s where another part of my life began, when I became aware of what it meant to be a lesbian, when I constructed myself as a feminist, free and fearless woman.” There, Hernandez frequented another bookstore: Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, opened in 1967 by Craig Rodwell in the Village.
“My English was already much better and at the Oscar Wilde I discovered all these essays that I had not been able to read in London because at the time I knew little. There, I got involved in activism. I started with very nice meetings with single lesbianwhere single lesbians met to chat. I then reproduced this initiative in Berkana”, summarizes Hernández. She also worked in a women’s newspaper, whose headquarters were on 14th Street, in Chelsea, near Meatpacking. “The offices were in a meat warehouse that they lent us on Sundays to work on the publication. Sometimes you had to pass between hanging cows. Plus, it was a neighborhood where a lot of trans prostitutes worked,” he recalls: “Now it’s a luxury street.” And he adds: “I owe my LGTBIQ+ construction to New York.”
When Mili returned to Madrid after her experience in New York, she made it clear that she wanted to become a bookseller; she dreamed of a queer bookstore in the capital. “What if it didn’t work? I came from New York feeling empowered, but I also wondered: how will an LGTBIQ+ bookstore work in Madrid?” The year is 1993. Two years later, with its partners Dagas and Bruun, Egales launches itself. “In the books we started publishing, we published LGTBIQ+ people who didn’t die, didn’t commit suicide, didn’t end up in asylums. These are books that empower you, that give you hope that you can have a life. I discovered that here in Spain there was still a lot of fear and I knew what it meant to open the world to a lot of people. So neither I nor anyone else could imagine that one day I could marry a woman, as I did later,” he explains.
Egales not only worked, but became an absolute reference in the Spanish-speaking world. “The Guadalajara Book Fair (in Mexico) gives us a lot of joy. Librarians all over America respect, love and admire our publishing house: almost all of our essays can be found in universities and in many public libraries,” he rejoices. “I must also say, with regret, the little interest I see in Spanish libraries towards our publishing house,” he says.
Less than a month ago, Egales published a book with which Mili considers her circle closed. It is about Its glare can destroy your worldby Ramon Martinez. “A thousand pages of history of LGTBIQ+ literature,” says Mili. In the book, Martínez traces all written literature – from jarchas to current children’s novels – in search of sexual and gender diversity: from The matchmaker, to Lazarillo de Tormes, through Don Quixote, the poems of Jacinto Benavente or the poetry written in different periods of Al-Andalus. A sexual and gender diversity which appears in the texts themselves (and which cannot be extracted from rereading), to highlight this part of literature that literary criticism has hidden in the closet, either because of censorship or because of LGBTbiphobia.
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