Love and Carnations: recordings of drag artists of Barcelona (1920s-1930s)

This blog post came about as the result of my interest in queer-themed recordings from the 78rpm era, an Australian example of which I have posted previously on this blog, along with other posts relating to researches into queerness and homosexuality in the Greek rebetiko genre.

In late-2019, while visiting Barcelona, I had the good fortune to meet the collector Sergio del Rio, who aware of my interest in queer recordings, told me about the rare 78rpm records in the collection of his friend Albert GC. They consisted of recordings (presumably all electric, recorded in the late-1920s and 1930s) of three drag artists who performed in theatres and music halls on the legendary “avenue of theatres” (l’avinguda dels teatres), on the Avinguda del Paral·lel in Bareclona.

Digital transfers of the recordings in Albert’s collection, as well as label scans, were made by Sergio del Rio and sent to me soon after our meeting, and are reproduced here for all who are interested.

The three drag artists singing on these recordings, under the performing names of Mirco, Derkas and Vianor were more recently profiled in the beautiful book “Carrer i Escena El Parallel 1892-1939” published in 2012 by the authors Eduard Molner and Xavier Albertí, on pages 147, 88 and 190 respectively. Only the birth and death dates of Derkas are known, having being born in Manila in 1889 and dying in Barcelona in 1948.

Although these performers cannot be considered completely unknown or obscure, this blog post represents the first presentation of their recordings made on any format, (at least to my knowledge). Having no knowledge of Spanish (or Catalan) and lacking the skills to properly research these performers myself, I am forced to reproduce the visual material circulating online as well as material provided to me by Sergio del Rio. Perhaps this post will motivate someone to embark on a proper physical-media reissue of these recordings accompanied by properly researched notes and high quality scans of original archival photographs.

-Michael Alexandratos,

November 17, 2022.