This was the first book for another book club (a new, young LGBT book club) -- my first evening in a pub for a book club. Although my vision was more positive than the rest of my colleagues, I think that is rather because of them that I am staying with 3 stars and not 4.
This is a reasonable, yet irregular book, covering the history of LGBT people in the territory currently known as Spain, from prehistory until our days. The author is a YouTuber whose major is in prehistory. All these are quite the weaknesses of the book, but also the reason for the book to be published, this being perhaps more relevant than the content itself.
Is it possible to cover nearly three millennia in 400 pages and not focus more on some historical times than on others? So the first pages, about prehistorical societies and the bias of archaeological research, are probably the most brilliant ones. Classical antiquity is quite fine and easy to read, although I knew more about this period and this work didn't add much beyond a nice catch-up with ideas and concepts that I had read twenty years ago, maybe more.
But then, with nearly half the book gone, the history had to speed up. The author decided not to talk about the great LGBT men and women from history, and he explained why, and it made sense. But the result is a list of punishments and legal changes, with some scattered references to random people, that seems rather a horrour circus than something to be proud of, as a collective. I understand why is that, but the result is, I think, very biased. As the book approaches the end, the size of those absences also gets larger and deeper. AIDS and its impact on our people is mentioned in just one paragraph, without dwelling on the cultural, economic and social consequences of it, and yet a TV show receives two pages of attention. No one would be satisfied with any chapter on our living times, but this was one of the shabbiest, more biased approaches.
The biggest bias is, why not, against women. Yeap, obviously, there are fewer sources. But the imbalance is too remarkable, not just in the number of pages dedicated to men and women, but in the quality of the writing and the distribution of contents. Any chapter, any historical time starts by men, then talks about women, then trans.
And the style... it's like an addition of his YouTube videos, one after the other. That means that the book is very agile and easy to read. However, it also includes a collection of bad jokes that could be acceptable if presented in a short video, but the amount of them adds nothing to the reading and gets extremely annoying.