Lesbians during the socialist government of Felipe González (1982 - 1996) experienced several legal and cultural developments that resulted in more rights and community awareness.
Background
During the transition period that preceded the González government, culturally and politically there was a hold over from the Franco regime in terms of the legal status and cultural attitudes towards gays and lesbians from the Franco period. Lesbians and gays were still legally prosecuted by the government in this period. The police also continued persecution of lesbian, gay and transsexual individuals. Lesbians escaped the worst of this though, as much of the focus of persecution continued to be on gay men. This led many lesbians and gays to not want to be politically engaged with the transition process. Movimiento Español de Liberación Homosexual (MELH) was the most important lesbian and gay political organization in the transition period.
In some cases, histories of homosexuality in the earlier period and during this period do not include lesbians because they treat them as if lesbians did not exist as homosexuals.
There is a lack of historic ethnographic data from this period to provide a comprehensive picture as to the characteristics of the lesbian community at during this period. No such investigation would be done until 1999.
Lesbians, as a group and a culture, continued to be largely ignored by Spanish society compared to gay men. They remained rather invisible. Knowledge about lesbians from this period does not come from the same sources about Spanish gay men of the period.
Lesbians in this period were often in feminist spaces. Later feminist and gay male focused research on this period ignored lesbian contributions to the feminist movement. The impact of this is research in this period on GLBT communities often is absent a gender perspective on the GLBT rights movement. Lesbian experiences disappear from both histories.
Spanish lesbianism differs from lesbianism in the United States in that lesbians retain a unique political and social identity. In the United States, lesbianism as an identity has largely been subsumed by a broader GLBT movement that removed gender and sex classifications, which then used a larger group identity with its own economic power employed to support their causes.
Masculine women in this period were often accused of being lesbians because of their subversion of traditional Spanish gender norms. This existed despite the fact that not all Spanish lesbians are masculine, nor were all masculine women lesbians.
Women in relationships with other women in this period did not always refer to themselves as lesbians.
One of the reasons that lesbians continued to be invisible in this period is that they are less easily recognizable than gay men as they are generally first identified as women.
The Women's Area of the Fundación Triángulo de Madrid has explained the invisibility of lesbians in this and other periods as, "A gay man has always been able to move to another place, seeking to live his identity in freedom. While a lesbian woman stayed near her house. There are always parents, brothers or children to take care of and those who do not disappoint ". Rocio Jimenez explained this further, saying, "And that's how lesbians have developed since invisibility, at the expense of that scarlet letter that a man has never had to deal with." According to Mexican feminist Gloria Careaga, feminism often "moves away from aspects such as sexuality and intimate life to focus on the social and the political." Rocío González of Fundación Triángulo said that feminists feared the "contagion of stigma" and disassociated themselves from lesbians.
Globally in this period, lesbians found themselves feeling doubly displaced; they often found the gay and trans liberation movement deeply misogynistic and patriarchal while at the same time feeling like the feminism was ignoring them and their needs as women. This situation led to the growth of lesbian feminism and lesbian separatist movements.