Federico García Lorca was a depressed but successful young man of thirty-one when he arrived in New York on June 25, 1929. He was depressed because he considered himself a failure in love. The two men he had fallen in love with in Spain-Salvador Dalí and the sculptor Emilio Aladrén Perojo-had not reciprocated his feelings. Dalí, who was squeamish about sexual matters, was horrified by Federico's feelings for him. Aladrén Perojo was apparently bisexual and, after an intense two-year friendship with Lorca, became involved with the woman he would later marry.

But as a young turk in Spain's literary world, Lorca was already a star. Mariana Pineda, his first important play, had opened in Madrid in 1927 to favorable reviews. And soon after publication in 1928, his now legendary volume of poems, Gypsy Ballads, went through several printings, an unknown phenomenon in Spain. Although the reviews were glowing, two of Lorca's close friends had reservations. Dalí admired the poems, but he wrote a letter to Lorca encouraging him to give up folklore rhyme, predicting that the result would be an unequaled poetic intensity. The filmmaker Luis Buñuel commented that he found splendid images in Gypsy Ballads, but was appalled by its narrative nature.

Lorca had been talking for a while about his desire to leave Spain and travel in Europe. He may have thought that in London, Berlin or Paris-which had large homosexual populations-he could find sexual comradeship. Instead, he chose New York, where his old professor and friend Fernando de los Ríos was scheduled to give a series of lectures at Columbia University.

Lorca wrote to a friend that he was going to New York because it was the worst of all places he could think of visiting. Of all the reasons he could have given, that was among the least convincing.

Like many avant-garde young intellectuals of his generation, Lorca was fascinated by black culture and by the movies. He was particularly captivated with the American comedian Buster Keaton and had written a short experimental prose dialogue titled Buster Keaton's Stroll. (Unlike Charlie Chaplin, the other famous comedian of the time, Keaton eschewed sentimentality. Keaton's logic-defying physical comedy-escapes from boulders chasing him down rolling hills or buildings collapsing around him, leaving him unscathed-had an absurd quality that appealed to the surrealists.)

Black culture, on the other hand, represented the exotic, a potent sensuality, and jazz shared the improvisatory spirit of the automatic writing generated by some surrealists. The United States-where the cinema and jazz were born-represented the future.

Another lure of New York was that from there Lorca could travel to Cuba, which he had dreamed of visiting since his childhood. Whereas Lorca probably would not have gotten his parents to fund a trip to Cuba directly, he could travel to the island from New York, where he had the legitimate excuse of studying English at a prestigious American university.

It's also possible that Lorca chose New York because then, as now, it, too, was known as a mecca for homosexuals. Greenwich Village was already a gay neighborhood, and the speakeasies of Times Square were notorious hangouts for gays. Before traveling to New York, Lorca had read Walt Whitman's poetry in translation. "I will make divine magnetic lands, / With the love of comrades, / With the life-long love of comrades," Whitman wrote in " For You O Democracy." And, most boldly, in" I Dream'd in a Dream":

I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth, I dream'd that was the new city of Friends, Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest, It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, And in all their looks and words.

The American's poems of homosexual love had a profound impression on Lorca, who responded with the great "Ode to Walt Whitman", written during Lorca's months in the city:

Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies, nor your shoulders of corduroy worn out by the moon, nor your thighs of virginal Apollo, nor your voice like a pillar of ashes: ancient and beautiful as the mist, you moaned like a bird with the sex transfixed by a needle, enemy of the satyr, enemy of the vine, and lover of bodies under the rough cloth...

Lorca had arrived in New York as the Roaring Twenties were coming to an end. It was the age of jazz, the Harlem Renaissance, the first talkies and infamous gangsters. Prohibition was still in effect; the stock market crash of 1929 was imminent. Lorca enrolled at Columbia University and took up residence at Furnald Hall, then lost no time finding his way to Harlem, where he befriended the novelist Nella Larsen and attended church services and black music revues, including those at the Rockland Palace, Harlem's biggest dance hall, which hosted huge and lavish drag balls.

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