For decades, José Luis Pérez Ocaña has been completely ignored by historians of Spanish art. Featured more in newspapers in his day than in art galleries and journals, Ocaña is today being revived as a queer artist, though this might be regarded as an act that dislocates him from his own times, imposing on him genealogies and notions that do not reveal but rather mask the contexts in which thinking, art and politics developed in the post-Franco years, as well as the counterculture of this period.

When Andy Warhol was elevated in 1989, two years after his death, to the status of one of the most iconic artists of American art by the Museum of Modern Art, Douglas Crimp forced art historians to consider cultural and queer studies by pondering on the issue of “Getting the Warhol We Deserve”. Today we might ask: who is the Ocaña we deserve?

This monograph is the first ever comprehensive study on Ocaña. As pointed out by Pedro G. Romero, who is responsible for the publication, it is also an attempt to “resituate some behavior that is all too often excluded from the realm of art, appearing as a mere fact of society and culture.”