‘Let's get laid because it's the end of the world!’: sexuality, gender and the Spanish Left in late Francoism and the Transición.

This article sets out to look at the ways in which gender relations and sexuality became politicised over time and especially during the ‘long 1960s’ in Spain during what is often called ‘late Francoism’. It analyses the gradual change to more liberal mores that coincided with the so-calledapertura, or opening-up of the regime, that began in the early 1960s and was intensified by the 1970s. The way in which progressive students – the so-calledprogre– experimented with sexuality and the ways in which their alternative aesthetics were used as codified elements of a rebelling identity marked the limits of the anti-regime community. The article ends with the final period of theTransiciónand the emergence of a new kind of sexual explicitness which started being promoted through alternative channels, coinciding, however, with a growing disenchantment from politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]